Archive for 2003

Scott Thompson – Dear Eminem

I’m not sure exactly why I like this bit so much. I think it has to do with the fact that I do really like Eminem, and the song seems to have a certain genuine affection for him, as well–it just looks to sort of take him down a peg. It’s not the kind of strict, blind hataz stuff you find on morning DJ show parodies, which this superficially resembles. Instead, it’s gentler, more persuasive, a nice character piece; even the jabs at him having a pseudo-gay relationship with Dre feel light-hearted and subtle. (Though they’re not subtle at all.) Maybe it’s something about a faggot calling someone straight a faggot, and in that this resembles the best of Scott’s fabulous “Buddy” monologues from The Kids In The Hall. He’s giving himself a boyfriend, which is nicely ambivalent but also honest, and he doens’t get too campy about it. There’s just something charming about someone making fun of someone else and then threatening to kill their boyfriend with a juicer. It’s nicely self-aware.

Of course, the line, “If we ever adopt a special needs mixed-race child, we’re gonna name him Eminem!” is lovely, as is “It’s so rare to find a black man that sticks around. Believe me–I know!” (The latter is classic Buddy.) The way he delivers the first few lines of the third verse are awesome, too.

Best of all, though, is the chorus, which while horrendously sung, makes fun of Eminem not for being white or dumb or whatever–it makes fun of him for being grumpy. Man, how great is that, huh?

Note: sorry for the lack of critical essays in the last two days, but they’ve been busy ones. I had a few planned out that I didn’t get to, so I’ll probably end up posting ’em next week over at my blog, which is called clap clap blog. (Knew I’d get a plug in there at some point, right?)

the mass psychology of pop

More pop and psychoanalysis! Following on from something I wrote yesterday in my own blog, I’ve been thinking about Allison Anders’ film God Give Me Strength, and her assertion that poised pop is often capable of more emotional depth than the literalism of emo, etc, precisely because its sleek surfaces can call a kind of aural unconscious into being. Interesting. (But depth isn’t always interesting, anyway. Heh.) Kristen Vigard’s rendition of Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello’s “God Give Me Strength” is the centrepiece of Anders’ film, and it’s so fucking beautiful that it makes me cry. Apparently Bacharach and Costello’s demo made Anders cry, too, but Vigard’s dignified performance for the film is far superior to Costello’s own histrionic attempt on Painted From Memory. Vigard’s voicing is just so. She has it down. And this is what opens up a space for our own projections. In the film, Illeana Douglas’ songwriting character is at her wits’ end, having been fucked over again, and pours everything into a bittersweet lament, “God Give Me Strength”, to open her career as a performer. She sings it plaintively for a genius producer of the Brian Wilson mould — Matt Dillon’s character. He paces around her as she sings, and her voice only really cracks at the climatic line, “I want him to hurt”. His eyes widen. Later, after an awkward silence, he can only manage, “Wow. What a sad song”. It is.

“I still deam of Organon.” Many people know that Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” is based on the life of the Wilhelm Reich, a scientist who thought he could control the weather by harnessing “orgone energy”, and who was hounded to death by the US Government for peddling his “orgone accumulators”. But what’s usually glossed over is that Reich was a member of the German Communist Party and the author of the “seminal” book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was the most notable attempt to synthesise Marxism and the psychoanalytic realm up till Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. His troubling, radical thesis: that people’s willing participation in fascism is connected to forms of repression that are at once more general and yet also intimate, e.g. sexual repression. (Here’s a very funny distillation in a few words.)

Hey, what’s this got to do with Kate Bush? Oh well. Ummm… Anyway, note Bush’s traditionally “musical” approach to sampling, in which samples are put to service as simulated instruments — it’s all Fairlights, Linn drums, etc. standing for a string orchestra. Incidentally, I bought the album on which this track appears, The Hounds of Love, on the same fateful day as getting Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, whose approach to samples couldn’t be any more radically different. I recently had an interesting conversation with a hip-hop historian who told me that the rise of hip-hop coincided with the US Government abrogating its responsibilities to fund the teaching of music in public schools. Of course, that had been the teaching of the Western classical musical tradition, in which Kate Bush is so steeped. So in the ambivalent absence of such a framework in the consciousness of kids in the ’70s, the sounds of the street — unlike the African American pop of previous decades — embraced forms that broke wildly from Western musicology. Interesting!

Flux = great, for letting me rant again.

{insert indecipherable vocalisation here}

“PYT (Pretty Young Thing)“, Michael Jackson. There was a time, not long ago, when I used to listen to this song over and over again on the train, to the exclusion of most others. Lots of other songs from Thriller are overplayed, so I’m making up for it with this one. Dunno if I could ever wear this one out, though; it’s real neat. Justin Timberlake wishes he were this neat. Also: for something so crisp and crunchy, it’s not as ferocious as the bigger songs from Thriller, in which Michael started his descent into a strangely muted, almost autistic kind of fury.

I’ll throw in a little bonus here: Michael’s excellent home demo of “Billie Jean“, included on the Special Edition of Thriller. A couple of weeks ago I was at an academic conference about popular music, and one of the hottest papers was called “Saying the Unsayable: the non-verbal vocalisations of Michael Jackson”, in which the presenter argued that Jackson’s yelps and grunts channel those non-conforming layers of his persona — those apparent “crises” of race, gender and sexuality — that are constantly glossed over in the more readily identifiable aspects of his artistry. In this light, it’s really interesting to hear Michael’s moments of glossolalia in those bits of the song where he hasn’t yet written the lyrics. They fit completely with the sighs and screams that remain in the final version of the song. But because the song hasn’t fully cohered in the demo, Michael’s voice seems even more permeable, crawling from a place before words. This would be a good time to go over the definition of the psychoanalytic term, chora:

The earliest stage in your psychosexual development (0-6 months), according to Julia Kristeva. In this pre-lingual stage of development, you were dominated by a chaotic mix of perceptions, feelings, and needs. You did not distinguish your own self from that of your mother or even the world around you. Rather, you spent your time taking into yourself everything that you experienced as pleasurable without any acknowledgment of boundaries.

Be careful what you do. This is Ben from Antipopper, signing off.

Downloadin’ pictures of Sarah Michelle Gella

I can’t really seem to get past the similarities between a Fountains of Wayne album and a Weird Al Yankovic album — the genre-hopping, the references to very time-specific pop culture, the “oh my god I can’t believe he rhymed that with that” lyrics. I’m not saying that makes Fountains of Wayne bad — I’ve always had a fondness for the Yankovic oeuvre (his masterpiece was “Yoda,” but “All About the Pentiums” is a close second).

Anyway, “Hey Julie” does all the right things by taking the awkward, goofy lyrics about office work and mean bosses and sales figures and turning them into a love song. I can’t help but be charmed. It’s my little pop gem gift to you on this, my last Fluxblog post.

Please come visit me anytime over at Waking Ear. I’ve enjoyed getting to meet some new people, and my comments links are always aching to be mouse-clicked. That sounded weird. But you know what I mean.

Oh, and thanks to Matthew for inviting me to be a part of this week.

The Afghan Whigs – When We Two Parted

It’s a grave misfortune of musical fate that the Afghan Whigs ever had anything to do with Sub Pop. Branded for a crime they didn’t commit, the Whigs never quite escaped the yoke of a half-baked musical revolution that had nothing to do with the earnest, near-pretentious white-boy soul and scalding emotional howl that carpets every shaggy inch of Gentlemen.

The cover artwork alone is incredible. Children locked in uncomfortable adult poses are cast in sepia, like a forward thinking memory. Looking at it now, I can’t resist a comparison to the faux-Kevin Smith approaches to sexual politics that have soiled the mainstream in the past decade. I picture Ben and Jen, costumed from Gigli, in the same positions and have to run off for a change of trousers because I’ve pissed myself laughing.

But let’s focus down to the centerpiece, the Columbine Roller-Rink anthem When We Two Parted. I picture Dulli singing this to an anonymous party girl he’s brought home, over whose face hovers a projected image of his One True Love, while disaffected youth skate slowly in orbit around the bed. His arrogance is diminished here, the first place on the record where perhaps he’s not quite so proud to have fucked up. Like the Moebius-strip memory of the cover image, this song is tied to the electro-Stax final admission of ‘I Keep Coming Back’. I wish I could say that this sort of self-awareness is what kept me off the slow-dance floors of my childhood. In fact, as Greg Dulli well knows when he’s drunk enough, it was simple cowardice.

(Brought to you by the folks at The Pork Store.)

Songs By People I Know (Kinda).

These tracks are by musicians who I think are better than most performers you’re likely to hear out there. They’re not on major labels, and as well as making top notch songs, they’re all very approachable, nice people. You should get to know them, too. Me, I’m putting them in order of familiarity, from “lifelong pal” to “traded a couple emails once.”

Squeaky

Birdy and #1 For Takeoff

The very first time I ever stood up on stage and sang, Harry was playing bass. It was at a coffeehouse at New College. We were in a bunch of bands together and he’s one of my bestest friends in the whole wide world. He wrote a thesis on Sonic Youth, and loves nothing more than whacking his guitar into some weird-ass tunings and serving people a steaming dish of melodic rock. Which is what he’s been doing in Gainesville since 1995, as part of Squeaky. They played their last show at Harry’s wedding earlier this year, which is a great sadness. Before that, they opened for pretty much every indie band worth listening to who ever hit G’ville. You can get more of their melodic crunch over here, at Nook and Cranny Records. I’d love this band even if Harry wasn’t in it, because they make my feet move, my head nod, and my stomach tie itself in little knots.

Actionslacks

Close to Tears

Actionslacks is a band from California. (Well, now it’s California and Maine. They get around.) Anyway, Marty and I were both in a few different bands at New College, but never the same ones at the same time. He’s the smartest drummer I know – not just smart as a person, but smart as a drummer. His band’s pretty smart overall, too… smart enough to know that music should be fun. Their slick power pop reminds me of Cheap Trick in the best possible way. This track is from their upcoming album, which promises to be lots of fun. It’s on The Self-Starter Foundation Records, and J. Robbins produced it. There are more mp3s at their site. Check ’em out.

Burnside Project

He Never Knew The Benefits of Caffeine.

Burnside Project was one of the bands I found on mp3.com back when I first started putting my own music on the internet. Those were the boom days, when any new technology would get money thrown at it by ravenous packs of venture capitalists. Sebadoh was still relevant, people were still going to raves, and a bunch of us home recordists were getting to hear each other over our 56k connections. Burnside Project (at the time, Rich called it “Beacon”) had a sound I was sort of striving for… that earnest, anguished vocal over simple guitar lines. Only Rich was also really into dance music – breakbeat, acid hop, whatever. His was the first band I heard that put the two styles together: indie lo-fi over techno. I loved it. And the great thing about mp3.com was that I could tell him so. He liked what I was doing, too, and wound up recording most of my new album. (I had to plug myself somewhere, right?) But his new album is so much better. It’s out on BarNone Records, and there are more mp3s and a video at his site. So follow the link.

Krista Detor

Blue Sky Fallen

I met Krista when I was doing some other recording down in Key Largo. She’s the long-lost biological sister of my friend Erynn. (Odd story: Krista was adopted as a baby, grew up other side of the country, but she and kid sister Erynn are eerily alike – same likes, same affinity for music and musicians…). Anyway, her husband (now ex) played bass on a song I was recording. Turns out, I should have got her to sing a few tracks, too. Maybe even co-written a couple … cuz she’s got that modern folk-pop thing that makes me go all goofy inside down pat. She’s got a self-released CD she’s selling through her site. Buy one. G’wan. You’ll like it, too.

Rebecca Hall

Come Around

I found Rebecca Hall mostly at random, cruising around mp3.com at work, looking for something not too objectionable to put in the headphones while I type. And I found Ms Hall. She’s seriously ginchy. Her voice reminds me of Jacqui McShee, the singer of the 60s folk-jazz group Pentangle. And, as it turns out, she’s done some singing for Pentangle’s guitarist John Renbourn. Her voice has the kind of beauty that should be on the radio all the time, but just isn’t, which is proof that there’s something deeply wrong with the Way Things Are. Songs like this, though, give me some kind of hope. (If the above link to the song doesn’t work, blame mp3.com’s new corporate overlords, and click here instead.) We swapped exactly three emails each, then I started ranting about marmalade and she never wrote back. Which is actually pretty reasonable.

princess against the classes

“I Don’t Need Anyone“, Kylie Minogue (with the Manic Street Preachers). Why don’t the Manics write songs like this for themselves? Fools. I was working for a somewhat indie-centric music magazine when Impossible Princess / Kylie Minogue came out, and we ran our review of the album under the headline “KYLIE IS GOD”. Fuck their stupid indie death threats (oh yes). In hindsight the album isn’t actually that good, but perfect pop gems like this remain suspended in time. As for the mystery of the Manics (yeah, they’re a masochistic guilty pleasure), next time a song of theirs is annoying you with its pomposity, just close your eyes, imagine it’s a Queen song and smile. All better.

yes can do

I am totally in love with Hall & Oates’ “Kiss On My List” and “Private Eyes“. Okay, so I made this reappraisal based on a recent vogue amongst the type of people who wear very expensive ripped denim, but fuck, they’re right for once: Hall & Oates peddle a version of white rock’n’soul that’s actually good. Well, at least sometimes. I’m a sucker any old shifting set of endlessly chiming chords on a keyboard. I’m a chiming keyboard slut. And the middle-eight in “Private Eyes” is one of the best middle-eights, uh, ever, turning the song inside out for a moment, like the best ones do. With these songs, H&O manage to make good on The Beach Boys’ somewhat yelpy and claustrophobic attempts at rock-pop in the ’70s, which never seemed to gel. We have the technology. We can rebuild. When he strains for the notes in whiteboy soul mode, Daryl Hall channels a slicker version of Carl Wilson’s “choirboy-gone-gruff-troubador” act, and it works. Thankyou Lord. And thankyou, Flux.

The Beatles – A Hard Day’s Night

The Stooges – TV Eye

Geraldine Fibbers – Get Thee Gone

Price – Kiss

First things first: go listen to “A Hard Day’s Night” and get about 1:18 into the song, and notice the scream. It comes right before they launch into the solo, and oh, it’s a thing of beauty. But it’s also a weird bit, from today’s perspective. For one thing, it reminds you that the Beatles, for all their seeming bubblegumness, were regarded as reckless musical troublemakers at the time, because they did things like scream in the middle of songs, even if that had been a rock ‘n’ roll staple for 6 or 7 years. But this just doesn’t usually strike us as a scream, partially because it’s being used as a transition (as opposed to your traditional drum fill or scratchy-move on the low E string or melodic pickup transition), and partially–and this is the important bit–because it’s a happy scream. And oh dear me, isn’t it? It’s an absolute whoop, a yawp, a yell of joy, of oh-man-I-just-got-to-the-end-of-the-chorus-and-what-a-fucking-chorus-it-is-holy-shit-I-just-have-to-yell! And it’s (I think) Paul and John screaming at the same time, as they’re backing away from the mic into that great, tumbling solo. But it doesn’t sound like a scream to us anymore, because screams aren’t supposed to be happy.

Viz: “TV Eye,” the opening scream of which does the descending “into the abyss!” thing that psychadelia likes, this from the Stooges’ most psychadelic album, Fun House. Don’t get me wrong–it’s a great scream, and a great song. But it’s a long way removed from the Beatles’ scream. And at the time, that was probably good; the dark turn pop took after the sixties was a useful thing. But the problem is, it’s never gone back. The Iggy-scream is still the scream of choice for most of your discerning lead vocalists in the last twenty years, as are the little yelps that the big opener leads into.

A slightly different variation can be found in one of the best songs from one of my favorite bands, the Geraldine Fibbers. The scream here is not placed at the forefront, but rather under a song, much like how feedback went from “whoa that’s a cool squeal, let’s mic it real loud” to “hey, that would be a neat drone to put behind a song.” Carla can often be found bansheeing away behind a particularly good section of vocals (“Dragon Lady”) or instrumentals (“Get Thee Gone”), presaging and, if you ask me, beating the whole screamo thing to the punch by quite a few years. One article (which I can’t seem to find) even focused in a pretty convincing way on the scream Carla lays over the 2nd-half instrumental break of “Get Thee Gone,” which is a wonderful piece of ecstacy-rock, but here’s it’s scream-as-epiphany or response to the power of the music, rather than the exuberance and joy of the performer, like you might find in a soul or early R&B record. (There’s not a whole lot of happy Geraldine Fibbers songs anyway, but that’s OK.)

I won’t even dignify scream-as-expression-of-pain by classifying it, but suffice to say that unless you’ve got a gaping bullet wound at the time you’re recording your vocals, it’s probably a bit too literalized.

The garage-rock revivalists do a half-hearted version of the Beatle-yawp, but it comes out “Ow!” which is half-cribbed from Axl Rose anyway (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and misses the full-throated exuberance of the “AAAAAAHHHHHH!” you hear at 1:18 in “Hard Day’s Night.” It’s not cuttin’ it, fellers.

Maybe the closest thing we have in modern times to that yell is Prince, whose myriad Tourettic outbursts seem of a one with the exuberant music, and seem drawn out of him in much the same way the Beatles’ were. And there’s that same sense of joy mixed with being a little at the end of your rope–the Beatles with exhaustion, Prince with horniness (Prince seems like he’s been through some hard day’s nights himself, if you know what I mean). But especially you hear this in “Kiss,” at 3:28, where after tensing and building and stroking for a good amount of time he just utterly loses control of his voice as it screeches to the absolute top of his range to yell something like “AIN’T NO PARRAAGHHHUURRAL RRRRAG, grr-AM grr-AGATA WITH!!!” because the music’s just that goddamn good, that exuberant and joyful, that there was no other choice at that moment than to have a verbal fit and yell it like someone who just doesn’t give a shit about being composed or cool anymore. And then, beautifully, it comes all the way back down. Now that’s a joycore yell.

Rack and ‘Pinion

I just thought that everybody should hear this if they haven’t already. It’s TV on the Radio’s “Mr. Grieves” cover.

Let’s all drop our jadedness for a split-second and recognize when somebody’s done something really cool. This the ultimate cover — a twist, a wink and a faithful homage.

Ain’t it shocking what love can do?

Morris Day, “Fishnet”

“Fishnet” is the great lost coulda-woulda-shoulda single by the Time. Bitch, please: listen to the guitar solo, totally Jesse Johnson. Listen to the party feel of the track, especially on the full-length version (not the single edit, only half the fun in less time), the Jam-and-Lewis crowd factor (cf. Alexander O’Neal’s Hearsay and the Time’s 1990 reunion album, Pandemonium). Lyrically, the only diff between this and a Time single is a switch from an obsession with camisoles (included in at least three separate Time singles I’m aware of, likely a myriad more I’ve somehow missed) to fishnet pantyhose. The clever wordplay – comparing a woman’s fishnet hose to getting caught in a fishnet like little Nemo. And for the love of God, do you hear those high, whining keyboards? That’s so Time you’d think you were listening to What Time Is It? instead of a not-entirely-successful Morris Day solo album. I know your shoulders are rocking – and I know ya bobbin’ ya head. ‘Cause I can see ya. Morris would deserve fame and fortune and obscene riches just for this one song, even if he’d never fronted the Time. But he did, and I’m glad, and you should be, too.

western civilization’s last sigh

“Columnated ruins domino.” Even if you factor in Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ “Surf’s Up” — written just a few months later for the Smile sessions — is still a revelation. Brian Wilson singing about an inner emotional world is one thing, but a wistful/bitter, apocalyptic lullaby to bourgeois decadance is another entirely.

A blind class aristocracy

Back through the opera glass you see

The pit and the pendulum drawn

Columnated ruins domino

Decline and Fall, indeed. Wilson’s partnership with Van Dyke Parks was inspired, and this song is the shit. Even after the rest of the Boys ghoulishly resurrected Brian’s original, ghostly demo and spliced various arrangements and overdubs over it for this “official” version (the title track of the 1971 Surf’s Up album), the result is still the shit. That said, it’s Brian’s original and slightly off-tune double-tracked vocal in the second half that’s the true killer, and it’s one of those rare Beach Boys moments that benefits from brother Carl shutting up. I can just feel our folly of a civilization sliding into the sea. If the surf is up, it’s the tsunami that smashes everything. You want more surf songs, Mike Love? ‘Ere you go. Magnificent. This is Ben from Antipopper, signing off.

PJ Harvey – Rid of Me

PJ Harvey was responsible for something in my musical education; I just can’t remember exactly what anymore. Maybe it was the experience of turning on music and that gets your friends yell at you to turn it off, damnit, a life-lessons checkbox which Four-Track Demos helpfully blacked in. At any rate, the point is that when Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” hit big on MTV and everyone was talking about how empowering and strong it was, I could yawn with a jaded assurance. All Alanis wanted to do was make the ex feeeeel bad, whereas Polly wanted to tie hers to a chair so he would never ever leave. And how empowering is that, right?

But it wasn’t the dumb kind of empowerment, either, not simple or straightforward. (Polly has said she isn’t a feminist, and while I disagree, I can understand the sentiment–who wants to be a feminist when Sarah McLachlan is a feminist?) This was ambivalent and nuanced. It wasn’t just “I am woman, hear me roar!” breast-beating–even in her most female-power anthem, “50 Foot Queenie,” she’s not going on about the hard work women have to do and the godess and etc., she’s saying “tell you my name F U and C K!” And the fact that all this is elevated to a comedic degree should be clear in the final runup, where she repeats “You come on and measure me / I’m X inches long” and X keeps getting bigger and bigger. (Hahaha.)

Same thing in “Rid of Me”: it actually starts from a position of traditional weakness, with the woman desperate and clinging to a man who is going to leave her. It’s a torch song, in a way (something she’d get much more involved with in later albums), but with a clear twist: instead of letting him go and bemoaning her fate, she is clinging in this very literal way to the person who should have the power. And so she’s taking on this powerful position, but whereas the Lifetime version would be to get together with her girlfriends and drink margaritas and talk about how men suck and they’re not going to compromise and are going to stand strong, the narrator here is saying no, I am not going to wait; I am going to get what I want now. It’s a crazy act, an irrational one, but it’s one of passion and control. It’s a scenario that isn’t reductionary about human nature–it admits our weaknesses when it comes to the opposite sex, but it also finds a way to work with that directly.

But it gets better. The Hollywood version of “Rid of Me” would doubtless end with the woman either subdued by the man or dragged off by the authorities, and someone would probably mutter, “Crazy bitch.” But this is being told from her perspective, and it doesn’t end; the man is not released, but held captive for the song’s duration, and we don’t really know what ends up happening to him. Instead, we first get the narrator taunting him (“I beg you my darling, don’t leave me, I’m hurting”–remember he’s tied up at this point) and then taking sexual pleasure, both from the situation and from the lover in question. There’s no question in my mind that the moment when the slightly off-tune guitar combines with Polly’s ready-to-snap keening of “Lick my legs and I’m on fire, lick my legs and I’m desire,” totally out of context at first, but then repeated until it makes sense–to say nothing of the desperate, a capella howl it becomes at the very end–there’s no question that it’s a key component of what I think of as rock ‘n’ roll.

As cool as it is to hear the Albini-miked drums crashing in on the first version of “Rid of Me,” I’ve always preferred the take that leads off Four Track Demos for its sheer power and intimacy; without the other instruments, it’s like you’re the one she’s got tied up in the chair (or so I’d like to think!). But even this didn’t prepare me for seeing her do it live. This was two years ago, at the Hammerstein Ballroom, a venue that holds a few thousand people. She’d already done one encore with the full band and she came out with just this open-body electric guitar and a mic and a spotlight. And as soon as she launched into “Rid of Me,” there was not another noise in the house for the duration of the song. She had those 3000 people absolutely, perfectly transfixed. And it was beautiful, and quiet, and wonderful–and then she turned on the distortion. Now, I knew, as an experienced guitarist, that that noise just shouldn’t sound very good without drums and bass behind it; much of the power of turning on the distortion comes with having the low-end and sharp-attack beats to back it up. But when Polly hit that pedal and started yelling, more than any noise-rock I’ve ever heard, it felt like my skull was being pried open with a flathead screwdriver.

It wasn’t until some time later, though, that I realized what she was at that moment: a chick with a guitar. In that sense she was no different from Ani or Sarah or Dar or whoever. But at the same time, she wasn’t. After all, when you say “girl with a guitar,” you do think folk. You don’t think Polly Jean playing as loud as she can and yelling, “I’ll make you lick my injuries!” And that’s too bad. Not because folk, or even McLachlan-esque empowerment, is bad per se, just because “girl with a guitar” shouldn’t just mean that; it should mean so much more. PJ’s been around for a good ten years now, but still most women in bands are singers or not-very-proficient instrumentalists there to provide “stage presence,” i.e. titties. There are many great female musicians, and thank Christ–I’d hate to think what modern music would sound like with the kind of sausage-fest we’re used to. But there should be more. There should be more women like PJ, or Linda Perry, or Georgia from Yo La Tengo. Women who are great musicians first, and not pretty faces or pretty voices. No offense to the pretty voices–I know singing’s hard–but I just wish more parents would give their girls guitars, that’s all. Give ’em guitars or drums or bass or sax and tell ’em to listen to “Rid of Me,” goddamn it.

The Raveonettes – ‘Little Animal’

Ninety per cent of the time I use the word ‘retro’ as an insult. Now and again, however, a band manages to evoke a period of pop history (or just history) without being enslaved by the sound of the day. The most successful approach seems to be to embrace the very mythological nature of pop history, adding your own little twist of interpretation or perhaps mis-remembering, so that the picture being painted is of an era that never quite existed. This is what The Raveonettes do beautifully here: I here echoes of ‘Be My Baby’ and ‘Leader Of The Pack’, but they’re wrapped in fuzz reminiscent of the Jesus & Mary Chain. It’s not just mythic, it’s cinematic: we find our hero leaving his baby asleep in bed and heading out into the dark, deserted center of a godforsaken town to meet the Devil at a crossroads – heading out, no doubt, on a motorcycle, wearing a leather jacket with the collar turned up, hair slicked back with too much gel, and definitely no helmet.

‘Little Animal’ has mud on its shoes and a dirty mouth, and so paradoxically, what might be thought of as the ‘modern’ touches serve to remind you of the truth about the past: that people were fucking and fighting to ‘Leader Of The Pack’ – of course they were, of course. The polite sanitization, the cheerfully deadening respectability that sets in whenever rock’n’roll is sealed in amber by canonists and nostalgia, is stripped away to reveal the vitality that made it endure in the first place (see also: The Detroit Cobras, The Dirtbombs, maybe even Jonathan Richman). This is the good kind of retro.

And “My girl is a little animal, she always wants to fuck” is surely a contender for opening couplet of the year…

Sheena Easton, “Sugar Walls”

No, frankly, this Scottish lass has never been that talented. But she’s got just enough personality (and not an iota more) to pull off a record as delectably smutty as “Sugar Walls,” written for her by Mr. 1984, Prince. Really, the success of this record comes down to three things:

1. It’s dirty without being dirrty.

2. It, surprisingly, doesn’t sound like a Prince record.

Hell, I forgot the third thing, because I started listening to Sheila E.’s “The Glamorous Life” – a far more interesting record, one of the finest singles put forth in the ‘80s – and stopped caring about Sheena’s vagina.

[I’m on an ’80s R&B/pop kick today, or can you tell?]

Stevie Wonder, “Skeletons”

“Skeletons” is Stevie’s last truly great single, combining all of his strengths – astutely topical lyrics (regarding our scandal-plagued society, particularly prescient in 1987, when the song came out), his great voice, and hard synth-funk. I’ve always heard this song as an unwitting analogue to Prince’s classic single from the same year, “Sign ‘O’ the Times.” Not only does it cover similar subject matter, it’s also a surprisingly sparely-arranged record, stripped down (largely) to its essentials. In direct opposition to much of his work of the last two decades (especially the florid, overbaked, and overproduced balladry he’s unfortunately become so fond of), this is Stevie harkening back to his ‘70s heyday of “Living for the City” and “Higher Ground,” revamped and retooled for the late ‘80s; it really was a sign o’ the times. Also of note: listen to how much of this single presages some of the techno which was to come, especially in the random blips and wooshes half-buried throughout the mix. Wonder was from Detroit, after all. “Skeletons” still sounds shockingly contemporary; in some ways what higher compliment is there, musically speaking?

I am submeat, hear me roar.

Jennifer Warnes, “Song of Bernadette”

Written by Leonard Cohen with his former backup singer Jennifer Warnes (yes, the one who had the time of her life with that guy from the Righteous Brothers; the one who was lifted up where she belonged by the love of Joe Cocker), “Song of Bernadette” originally appeared on Warnes’ criminally underavailable 1986 collection of Cohen songs, Famous Blue Raincoat. There have been a number of subsequent covers, but this remains the standard by which all others are judged. I’m not as technically adept as everyone else here so I haven’t the faintest clue as to how to put up an MP3, but here’s a link to the lyrics, and here’s an extract from an interview with Cohen where he discusses the song (search for “Bernadette of Lourdes”).

As the lyrics and the interview both show, this is a song about failure and forgiveness. (And also, of course, some crazy French chick who had visions of the Virgin Mary.) What makes Warnes’ version especially vital is the spare arrangement behind it, the piano in the empty hall accompanying the singer’s voice. Warnes takes the song and soars, letting loose a mouthful of grace notes in every chorus.

“Song of Bernadette” is, obviously, meant to be uplifting and comforting. I, for one, find it terribly sad, concentrating as I do more on the former part of the chorus than the latter, but this says more about my failures as a person than any possible failure of the song (in fact, my only quibble comes at the end of the track, when Warnes swoops far above register in the third repeat of the final line; it overeggs the pudding). Any song that can be equally appreciated for both its sorrow and its compassion is probably a work for the ages; however you choose to hear it, I’d be very surprised if you aren’t moved.

(I can usually be found here, by the way.)

Out on bail, fresh outta jail, California dreamin’

I’ve made some thematically Californian mix CDs for my girlfriend, a native of the Golden State. Each song has “California” or a California city in the title. I like to make mixes this way because it sends me to the file-swapping dungeon to find hidden gems, based only on a word in a song title. (I’ve done this with seasons, too — “Autumn” is particularly weird.)

So in my searches for “California” songs, I inevitably cross quite a bit of that old Eagles standard. You know the one. I refuse to put it on a mix for my girlfriend, because, well, I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man. But in the spirit of The Big Lebowski, I have used that Gipsy Kings cover of the song, performed almost entirely in Spanish.

The Al B. Sure and Edi Fitzroy versions never made it onto a mix, because, well, they’re pretty long and repetitive and just not that good. But as curiosities, they’re pretty amusing, especially Mr. Sure’s dramatic reading. The links in this paragraph go to em-pee-threes — I don’t think I was clear on that in my last post. So, enjoy, and pop by my site sometime if you get a chance.

News on the Radio: Happy Birthday

Morning y’all. My name is Emily and I’m seriously honored to get to do this. I’m going through ideas of more stuff to post later – about my favorite band, Game Theory, and possibly about punishing myself with severe Cub inundation, and some other stuff – but before all that I had one song I wanted to post in honor of our fearless leader.

When I was a kid my parents would call the college radio station and request this song on my birthday for me, and I guess I’m still fond of it for that reason. I totally felt like I controlled the airwaves when it came on, and it made me really happy, so I’d like to dedicate it today to the owner of Fluxblog, with a superabundance of joycore birthday wishes.

“Happy Birthday” by Concrete Blonde.

Nick Drake – River Man

As is well-documented on my blog, I invariably find myself reverting back from many musical phases back to quiet, introspective art. Nick Drake is one of my favorite discoveries.

Nick Drake’s career only spanned six years and three albums worth of music. He was said to be a painfully shy performer and an artist that was crippled by depression for the duration of his life. In 1976, Drake was found dead of an overdose of prescribed anti-depressants. The coroner ruled it suicide.

I bought Five Leaves Left on a whim one day, after having Drake recommended to me as some forefather muse to Elliott Smith. I was instantly blown away by this song: the simplicity of the guitar, the beauty of the strings, the timeless lyrics. Since, I have done all I can to get anything and everything by and about Nick Drake.

download song

Related Artists: Tim Buckley, Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith

[you can find me at feministe]

Mclusky—‘Gareth Brown Says’

Mclusky are a fairly unknown Welsh band that has put out a couple of very good albums in the last couple of years. They sound like pretty much every good noisy rock to come out of America in the late 80’s/early 90’s, and this song comes from their second album, Mclusky Do Dallas. I guess it would be pretty easy to dismiss them as derivative no hopers: there’s little new to their sound, but there’s a sense of twisted fun going on in all of their songs, both musically and lyrically; a blurring of the line between high silliness and catharsis that really makes them stand out from the crowd. Their influences are all glaringly obvious, but Mclusky are one of those bands who have a larger than life personality all of their own despite that sort of thing.

And man are they writing some of the maddest lyrics out there at the moment. ‘Gareth Brown Says’, for example, jerks into existence with the following beauty of an opener:

“All of your friends are cunts/ And you’re mother is a ballpoint pen thief

Notoriety follows you/ Like beatings follow rain”

To which the only sane response is surely: “Yes. Quite.”

There’s an element of the schoolyard taunt in these lyrics. They’re really petty in a wonderfully barmy and sarcastic way that Mclusky seem to be reallyfond of. Check out the second verse of this tune, (“All of your tales are lies/ You’ve never been to Alton Towers”) or any given line from ‘To Hell With Good Intentions’ (“My dad is bigger than your dad/ He’s got eight cars and a house in Ireland, sing it!” ) for other examples of this—it’s everywhere in their music. Which isn’t to say that their lyrics are dumb—quite the opposite in fact. There’s a sort of warped, imaginative wit at play here, but it’s a wit that draws on a kind of childishness that matches the trashy kick of their music perfectly.

The vocals in this particular song serve as a particularly neat example of this interplay between temper tantrum and pisstake, with the deadpan sneer of the verses butting up nicely against the bloodied wailing of the choruses. Except that it’s not that simple—there’s a hint of hysteria in the deadpan bits (the choppy guitars and rumbling bass have a lot of urgency to them, and there’s always something nasty going on in Andy Falkous’ voice) and the screaming in the chorus has an oddly sarcastic ring to it. So there you have it then: it’s a song that is at once frantic and detached, and while this may not sound like this should work on paper, it’s a combination that Mclusky pull off with alarming regularity.

Oh, and by the way—I’m David Allison (Big Sunny D), and I’m glad I could join ya’ll at the weeklong Fluxblog house party.