Fluxblog

Posts Tagged ‘oldsongs’

7/15/18

We Had To Prove Them Wrong

Janet Jackson “Love Would Never Do (Without You)”

Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ songs are typically highly dynamic, with mostly percussive elements shifting around to give the melody maximum emotional impact. In the case of their work on Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, it’s like drawing several underlines beneath the hooks. There’s a softness in Janet’s voice, but the music explodes with great force. As expressive as her voice is, she’s always understating the feeling relative to the intensity of the keyboards and drum hits.

“Love Will Never Do (Without You)” is even more dynamic than usual because it was initially written as a duet with a man – they wanted Prince, then thought maybe they could get Ralph Tresvant, but nothing really worked out. So Jackson sings the first verse in a much lower register than usual, which greatly exaggerates her range within the track. This works to the advantage of the song, which starts out rather joyful but keeps escalating into dizzying ecstasy as it moves along.

The lyrics follow the sound of it, with the lowest vocal part at the start approaching the love between Janet and her partner in analytical terms but by the time she’s up in the giddy stratospheres, she’s nearly at a loss for words. (“No other love around has quite the same…ooh ooh!”) But as extraordinarily joyous as this song gets, the words are grounded and reasonable. The love in “Love Would Never Do” is not unrealistic – there’s work to be done, there’s conflicts and temptations, there’s a need to prove the doubters wrong. The loveliest and most romantic line in the song is so simple and direct: “I feel better when I have you near me.” If this song is doing anything, it’s just trying to capture that specific everyday happiness.

Buy it from Amazon.

7/14/18

From The Mess To The Masses

Phoenix “Lisztomania”

Not long after this song came out nearly a decade ago, some brilliant person made a video for it cutting together scenes from John Hughes movies from the 1980s. Maybe you remember it! The “Brat pack mashup” video is a joy to watch, partly for obviously nostalgic reasons, but mostly because it connected the essence of the song – and Phoenix’s overall aesthetic – to this kindred spirit from the past. The editor of the video recognized what was happening in “Lisztomania” from the start: The boppy rhythm that invites you to swivel your hips and lighten your shoulders, the vocal that expresses a pure-hearted desire with a small dash of neurosis.

Thomas Mars’ lyrics are on the cryptic side, but it’s clear what this is all about. It’s about needing the thrill of romance, and cherishing the rush of raw, undiluted emotion. It’s about fetishizing the obstacles in the way of love, because they make everything more exciting. It’s about epiphanies and desire and dancing. It’s about wanting to feel fully alive.

Hughes movies are so resonant because the emotions and desires of the characters are amplified by youthful hormones, but have incredible clarity because they don’t have much more to think about aside from social status. This is true of a lot of fiction about teenagers, but what makes this all so seductive is that Hughes knows this is all great FUN. The creation of identity, the pursuit of connection, the ecstatic angst of a crush, the burning need to rise above your circumstances to something more glamorous and beautiful and exciting. You watch these films, and listen to the sort of pop songs that evoke the same feeling, because you yearn to feel like these kids. It’s all very instructive and aspirational. There’s a power in wanting things very badly.

Phoenix’s music comes from an adult perspective, but makes a case that this sort of feeling is not a thing you grow out of: It comes, it comes, it comes, it comes, it comes and goes! Mars sounds like he’s talking himself out of his feelings at first – “so sentimental, not sentimental, no / romantic, not disgusting yet” – but the music makes him succumb to it. It starts with the hip swivel and the lightness in the shoulders, and it quickly moves to your heart.

Buy it from Amazon.

2/22/18

We Dive Into Devotion

Marit Larsen “The Sinking Game”

Marit Larsen’s solo debut Under the Surface was released in her native Norway in March of 2006, nearly eight months before Taylor Swift released her own debut in late October. Larsen and Swift’s aesthetics overlap a lot, particularly as Swift phased out the more overtly country rock elements of her debut in favor of the sort of hyper romantic, vaguely twee princess-y vibe Larsen was chasing from the start. I wonder if Swift ever actually encountered this music. It seems possible, but who knows. It’s just clear to me that on all the levels that truly matter – approach to melody and arrangement, lyrical fixations, an apparent fascination with fairy tale aesthetics – they are kindred spirits. But, like, Taylor Swift is one of the most famous pop stars in history, and Larsen is virtually unknown in the United States outside of being a member of the short-lived early ’00s teen pop duo M2M.

This is a shame, as I am certain that there are literally millions of people who would love her solo work – but especially Under the Surface – if they ever had the chance to hear it. “The Sinking Game” is a big favorite for me, and it’s a great example of the sort of earnestly romantic quasi-country rock she excels at making. It’s a very graceful piece of music, particularly during its instrumental bridge section, but it’s really a song about abandoning poise and allowing yourself to open yourself up to big, messy emotions. A lot of Larsen’s early songs describe love in somewhat passive terms, but this song is about willfully leaping into it. It sounds scary and joyful at the same time, and every breaking into the chorus feels like a dive into the unknown.

Buy it from Amazon.

2/21/18

BORN TO HANG AND PROUD OF IT

McLusky “That Man Will Not Hang”

The clever thing about McLusky is that they knew how to express anger, bile, cynicism, and bitterness in vivid and visceral ways, but also knew how to make that genuine feeling also come off as dumb and funny. The best McLusky songs allow you to connect with the guy who is in a sputtering rage on a cathartic level, but also someone pointing and laughing at that guy on an intellectual level. As great and wonderfully specific as Andy Falkous’ lyrics could be, it’s sorta like he was singing in an entire language made up of different inflections of “fuck you.”

“That Man Will Not Hang” is the platonic ideal of a McLusky song – a pummeling bass line, a vicious vocal, and a heavy final sequence that intensifies an already intense song. Falkous starts the song off with a fanciful image – “there’s a story on a thimble on a dimple on a pea” – and proceeds from there to paint a portrait of some pathetic asshole whose greatest crime seems to be that he “introduced me to the joys of doubt” and “gave away his heart like it was his to give away.” Falkous sings about this guy in a way that makes you want to hate him too, but if you listen a bit closer, he seems more like a dumb chump who’s been taken for a ride.

Buy it from Amazon.

2/20/18

They’re Swallowing Me Whole

The Silures “21 Ghosts (Part 1)”

At the time “21 Ghosts” was released in 2003, a techno approximation of a glam rock shuffle was very on-trend in electronic music. Goldfrapp released their signature hit “Strict Machine” around the same time, and artists on Michael Mayer’s Kompakt label were rapidly iterating on the “schaffel” sound. I love this aesthetic – sleek, sexy, intimidating – and wish it would come back in style. In context, this sound came out near the end of the electroclash phase and pushed that sort of cheeky hedonism into a more severe, aggressive, and kinky place. (Not for nothing, but “21 Ghosts” is a song that casually mentions watersports.)

“21 Ghosts” was the result of a collaboration between the French producer Vitalic and the American punk singer Linda Lamb, and appears on a one-off EP called All You Can Eat. There’s two versions of the song, but I strongly prefer this one, which has this violent, urgent feeling to it. I like the way Lamb’s nasal NYC accent contrasts with the harsh, grinding tone of the music – it’s like she’s trapped inside this machine. The lyrics flip between evocative nonsense – “lady fancy knickers likes watersports,” “look out, Argentina just scored another goal!” – and a creepy account of being haunted by precisely 21 ghosts. It’s a horror song, but it’s not necessarily the supernatural element that makes it scary. It’s more about feeling like you have no agency, and that you have no choice but to be passive as outside forces dominate you.

But really, if you wanna TL;DR this, let me just say this: This is one of the greatest bangers to ever be featured on this site. It is one of the best songs of the entire 2000s.

Buy it from Amazon.

2/19/18

Oh My God Let’s Dance Forever

Spektrum “Don’t Be Shy”

Spektrum’s songs have a dominating, forceful quality – heavy electro-funk so strong that it overrides all physical inhibitions. The boldness doesn’t end at the groove, either. Lola Olafisoye’s vocals and lyrics get absolutely filthy, and at times it seems as though she’s trying to make you blush. “Don’t Be Shy” is an industrial-strength banger on par with the wildest Basement Jaxx tracks and features a particularly sassy and seductive performance by Olafisoye, who spends the entire track enticing you to drop all your reservations and surrender to the music and to do… well, she has some very specific instructions for you. You can just listen to the song to find out.

Buy it from Amazon.

2/16/18

My High Hopes And Deep Despair

Maxi Geil & Playcolt “A Message To My Audience”

In the mid-2000s I saw Maxi Geil & Playcolt play several shows to incredibly enthusiastic audiences, one of them a sold out show at the big theater at the Museum of Modern Art. When I think of this today, it’s like having memories from some parallel world – this band barely existed to anyone besides the readers of this site or people in the art world. And while it was kinda cool to have this world class glam band all to myself and a few hundred other people, it’s sad to think about how many people would have loved Maxi Geil and never got to know about it. This is a band that should have had a level of success at least on par with contemporaries like Bloc Party and TV on the Radio, but they never left their art world bubble. I don’t think they ever really wanted to.

Let me backtrack a bit for you, since the odds are good that you’ve never heard of this band. Maxi Geil was the alter ego of Guy Richards Smit, an artist who has worked in a wide variety of media – short films, comics, stand-up comedy, painting, motivational speaking, internet video, and, of course, rock music. The music that would eventually become Maxi Geil’s debut album A Message To My Audience was originally developed for Smit’s short film Nausea 2, a rock opera about porn stars. The songs were about a lot of things – sex, drugs, commerce, ego – but above all other things, they were about the experience of being an artist.

“A Message to My Audience” is a literal title. This is Smit-as-Maxi singing about the gnawing insecurities and raging egomania that drive his creativity, and his fraught relationship with an audience who approval he craves despite his lack of trust in them or their taste. Smit’s wife Rebecca Chamberlain sings a back up part that responds to Maxi’s melodramatic angst on behalf of the audience, heckling him in some moments and supporting him in others. (“Maxi, stay on message!”) The song sounds absolutely huge, as though they’re trying to play a room about twice the size of a stadium. Anything less wouldn’t be true to the scale of this character’s ego or self-loathing.

There’s a line in this song I think about all the time: “I want the world and I want it now / can’t that be arranged for me somehow?” It’s so profoundly arrogant and impatient, but who can’t relate to that sentiment? Never mind working hard and earning things, just give me everything I want right now! I don’t think there’s any creative person who hasn’t experienced this sort of ridiculous exasperation.

All of Maxi Geil & Playcolt’s music is now out of print and unavailable on the major streaming platforms, though you can find many of their songs on Soundcloud.

2/15/18

Rearrange Your Mind

I was going to write a new entry about Marnie Stern as part of this month-long retrospective, but upon re-reading some of my old posts about her I realize that I can’t really improve upon what I wrote about her back then. Anything I could say now would just be reiterating the old stuff in a less inspired way. So here’s two old family favorites from Marnie Stern.

Marnie Stern “The Package Is Wrapped”

One of my favorite things about Marnie Stern’s music is that her lyrics very often express this unshakable certainty that we have the power to change our habits, rework our minds, and improve ourselves. It’s not hippy-dippy babble, either. When she sings about rearranging her mind or grabbing victory from the jaws of defeat, it comes from a place of knowing how hard it is to do just that, and the intense focus and discipline required to fundamentally shift one’s way of thinking and living. This subject matter is an inspired and appropriate match for her music, which overflows not only with excitement and energy, but this feeling of anxiety and impatience. That’s part of why her sentiment feels so true — she’s psyching herself up, grappling with neuroses, pushing herself to the limit, and all the while there is this powerful yearning for the end result that comes through in every note. Ultimately, the desire to triumph drowns out every other feeling and thought, and it’s just amazing. I don’t know how anyone could hear this without getting a jolt of adrenaline, or feeling overcome with ambition. (Originally posted 4/28/09)

For about two hours after the show in Brooklyn, I couldn’t get the main hook from “Transformer” out of my head: “I cannot be all these things to you, it’s true.” The lyric is terrific in print, but as with any good song, the music adds a meaning words alone could never convey. It’s all in the way “iiiiit’s truuue!” extends out slightly, as if climbing a steep incline and dropping like a roller coaster. There is anticipation and thrill, but also this maybe-unintentional nod to Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill, and having it roll right back down. The thing is, “Transformer” is a song that confronts futility and limitation head-on, and in doing so, sorta games the system, and finds a way toward triumph. In other words, when she sings “it’s true!,” you kinda get the sense that this time, against all odds, Sisyphus wins, and the boulder doesn’t just stay in place at the top of the hill, but instead rolls down the other side and becomes someone else’s problem. (Originally posted 12/1/08)

Buy it from Amazon.

Bonus: Here’s a feature-length interview with Marnie Stern that I did for Pitchfork back in 2008. She’s one of the best interview subjects I’ve ever had in my career.

2/15/18

Staring Back At Me

Bossanova “Rare Brazil”

“Rare Brazil” is, in my mind, a classic Fluxblog song. It’s the sort of the song I would use an example of what this site champions, particularly in the ’00s. So it comes as something of a surprise to me that I never actually wrote about it on this site, and featured a different Bossanova song here back in 2006. Huh! Well, here it is now, 12 years later. It certainly still sounds fresh.

There’s about a minute’s worth of singing in this song, but it’s really more of an instrumental. It starts out with a simple bass groove, but it gradually builds into this glorious disco track complete with a Nile Rodgers-esque guitar part, a synth solo that sounds like neon, and an absolutely sublime breakdown. This song sounds incredibly romantic to me, like some incredible night in a place so perfect it can’t possibly be real. I can’t say much more about this, really – it’s too abstract, and very much the kind of music that’s spoiled by words.

Buy it from Amazon.

2/13/18

Underneath The Autumn Star

A Sunny Day in Glasgow “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons”

By the time A Sunny Day In Glasgow arrived in the mid 2000s, shoegaze had become a nostalgic style tied to a particular time and place. There were still some shoegaze bands around, but they were mostly dismissed as derivative and inessential. A Sunny Day In Glasgow’s Ben Daniels approached the genre from a skewed angle – he embraced the possibilities of digital technology in shaping the sound of live instruments and vocals, and leaned into the nostalgia by making songs sound like vintage mid ’80s to early ’90s college rock played on warped cassettes. The music on their debut Scribble Mural Comic Journal plays on the tension between familiar and alien sounds, and has a collage-like approach to the juxtaposition of timbres and textures. The sound is always shifting, with some elements having a rough physicality, and others feeling more dazed and ethereal. These extremes overlap in the best songs, as in the instrumental refrains of “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons.”

Jack Parsons is one of the more fascinating characters in mid-20th century American history – a pioneering rocket scientist who was also an occultist and adherent of Aleister Crowley’s new religious movement Thelema. His life was, to put it mildly, completely bizarre. “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons” imagines trying to have a dull conversation with the man – “no more of this Jack, for God’s sake, you’re not the devil” – and “concentrating on the mundane” as a sort of meditative practice. Or wait, is this more an act of self-nullification? It’s hard to say. I like the ambiguity.

Buy it from Amazon.

2/12/18

Christmas Jumpers Lovely Noise

Fight Like Apes “Tie Me Up With Jackets”

Fight Like Apes were a silly and light-hearted band for the most part, but they had a way of sneaking moments of raw emotion into their hyperactive, shouty songs full of references to trash culture. It’s quite a trick, and it works mostly because MayKay Geraghty sang everything with a sort of radical vulnerability whether she was shouting about meatballs or karate or Beverly Hills 90210 or desperately needing to feel loved. I quite like how she uses lines about food and junk and bad smells and weird jokes as a way of grounding big emotions. It kills the idealized romance of it all, and places the feelings in a more down to earth setting – messy rooms, awkward poses, nervous conversation. In “Tie Me Up With Jackets,” she’s circling around a feeling a few times before shouting out the thing that’s really on her mind: “Lovely noise! Lovely noise that makes you love me!” It feels like she’s saying a lot more than she is. You know this is just the tip of the emotional iceberg.

Buy it from Amazon.

2/9/18

Intricate Patterns Of Light Dictate The Tone

Max Tundra “Glycaemic Index Blues”

It’s been a decade since Max Tundra released a record, which I suppose makes him the My Bloody Valentine of glitchy quirky English electronic pop music. There was a time when I would have said “ah, a genre of one,” but in recent years A.G. Cook, Sophie, and the PC Music crew have pushed the Tundra aesthetic into more contemporary and postmodern directions. Max’s music isn’t for everyone – it’s incredibly hyperactive and bouncy, like vintage video game music played at double or triple speed. The vocals keep up with the tempo by densely packing the lyrics with witty jokes, mundane observations, and profound thoughts that all somehow fit into intricate rhyme schemes. It’s a lot to take in, but it’s not hard to surrender to the energy of it, or just be in awe of Tundra’s relentless joyful creativity. And despite how self-consciously clever the music can be, it’s also remarkably vulnerable and sincere, particularly when he’s singing about having crushes and wanting to be loved.

Buy it from Amazon.

Note: Here’s a post I wrote about Max Tundra’s song “Number Our Days” that I like a lot, and another reviewing I concert I saw him perform in 2009. I have very little recollection of this show today, but it sounds like I had a very good time.

2/8/18

Civilization Was A Hoax

A Frames “Black Forest II”

A Frames’ Black Forest was largely ignored at the time of its release in 2005 and has only become more obscure as the years go by, but it’s one of the great punk masterpieces of the 2000s. The sound is sharp and sterile, brutal yet elegantly composed. The tone is relentlessly bleak, and obsessed with societal collapse, nuclear annihilation, and the darkest periods of human history with a particular focus on World War II. This music suited the George W. Bush era, but seemed a bit hyperbolic at the time. Thirteen years later, it exactly sounds like the prevailing mood – anxious, furious, and hopeless. Erin Sullivan’s lyrics are blunt and impressionistic, sketching out a loose history of evil and catastrophe going all the way back to the Sumerians of the Fertile Crescent. “Black Forest” appears in three forms at the beginning, middle, and end of the record, and its spiky sound and apocalyptic lyrics suggest the notion that in Sullivan’s mind, every society is doomed to collapse. We’re all killing ourselves over and over and over again, and everything that we build is destined to burn. Maybe that’s why the record opens with the most bombed-out and desolate version of the musical theme, and ends with the most agitated and harsh version – the record begins with the nuked remains of one world, and ends with another entirely inevitable doomsday.

Buy it from Amazon.

2/7/18

Youth Culture Costs Too Much For The Youth

The Rogers Sisters “Money Matters”

The best songs by The Rogers Sisters offer moments of ecstatic catharsis but never let go of a central tension. Their records came out during the middle of the George W. Bush era, and reflect an anxiety and hopelessness particular to that period – offended and angry, but also resigned and powerless. It’s the sound of getting worked up about something, but then realizing you’ve achieved nothing at all.

Most artists who made anti-Bush music in the ‘00s were roundly mocked for it. Not by right wingers, but by left-leaning indie music critics who felt like any statement made in a song was ham-fisted and gauche. So even The Rogers Sisters, whose lyrics fell in an odd place between direct statement and cryptic suggestion, were criticized at length in the Pitchfork review of their best record The Invisible Deck for being too strident and pedantic. (Brian Howe is a good writer, but the tone of that review is extremely unfair.) I remember feeling this peculiar anxiety too, and thinking that nearly any “political” sentiment in art was awkward, and that somehow any statement of dissent needed to be extensively vetted or something. Everyone was so embarrassed to be caught being anti-Bush or left wing in public, even if that’s exactly what they were. Doesn’t this all seem quaint now? These days you’d be more likely to be dragged for being apolitical.

“Money Matters” is hardly a pedantic song. It’s actually rather oblique in structure and hard to parse beyond its skepticism of the way “youth culture” and indeed most other forms of counterculture require the purchase of goods and services as a form of gatekeeping. Jennifer Rogers sings the song with the bitter pithiness of an outsider looking in – observant and wise, but removed and alienated. It’s not necessarily an anti-capitalist song, at least in as much as Rogers doesn’t see capitalism as anything she can escape, but it’s definitely about the way money and class permeates and corrupts everything, even opposition to such things.

Buy it from Amazon.

2/6/18

The Beat Gets Closer

Girls Aloud “Biology”

The British girl group Girls Aloud were essentially a front for the songwriting and production team Xenomania, who created nearly all of the groups tracks. Xenomania, led by the producer Brian Higgins, specialize in super-charged pop that’s precisely engineered to deliver as many strong hooks as possible at a relentless pace. Their songs are pure sensation, calculated by expert writers to be melodically dazzling, structurally dynamic, and extraordinarily energetic. There’s a ruthlessness to Xenomania’s approach that carries over to the lyrics, which tend to be either misanthropic caricatures of the lives of rich assholes or what amounts to a sort of “chick-lit” lorem impsum. Girls Aloud had some ballads, but even in those, the emotional content of lyrics seem entirely besides the point. You get the sense that Higgins would wonder why someone would bother to write something emotional or sentimental when you could have a more musically interesting turn of phrase that didn’t mean much but stood out a bit more, like, I dunno, “we’re gift-wrapped kitty cats” or “there’s black jacks running down my back and I say STOP!”

“Biology” is one of Girls Aloud and Xenomania’s finest songs, and it’s a great example of their aesthetic. The song starts off with a stomping blues riff played about three times faster than you’d expect, but then shifts on a dime into a more straight forward up-tempo pop track that just gets faster and more emphatic as it goes along. It’s never quite dance music – there’s rarely elements of house or disco in Xenomania tracks, it’s always more like an extremely glossy and hyperactive sort of rock music. That’s part of why the blues intro and interlude here fit so well, and why the emphasis is played on the loudness of the chorus rather than the sway of a groove.

Buy it from Amazon.

2/5/18

Feeling A Feeling Because It’s A Feeling

Britta Persson “Cliffhanger”

The word “cliffhanger” is never sung in this song, but it’s an appropriate title for a song that’s so ambivalent and unresolved. Britta Persson is singing from the perspective of someone in a relationship that’s seemingly stuck in a pleasant rut and is wondering if there’s a direction and purpose to it, or if they’re just passively following the path of least resistance. It’s hard to say which option she’d prefer, particularly as she seems to distrust her own emotions. She asks herself if she’s “feeling a feeling because it’s a feeling,” and is dismissive of some woman she read about in free magazine, saying she “doesn’t want to be a teenager forever.” But her feelings do get quite strong – she’s rather emphatic when she sings that she’s ready to move on. But after that, the song reverts to the vague emotional space it starts out in.

This is such a vivid portrayal of a state of indecision, and the anguish that comes from fearing that you could be settling for less than what would make you truly happy. And then, the added anxiety of not even knowing what would make you happy in the first place. And of course, a third layer of feeling guilty for wanting more when things are basically fine and you don’t want to hurt your partner. Maybe “cliffhanger” isn’t quite the right word for this. It’s more of a stalemate.

Buy it from Amazon.

Note: I wrote about three songs from Britta Persson’s Kill Hollywood Me when it came out 10 years ago. The first post was about “At 7,” the second was about the title track, and the third was my first shot at writing about “Cliffhanger.” I strongly recommend the album, but especially these three magnificent songs.

1/10/18

I Could Not Tell You

Electrelane “Enter Laughing”

The main guitar part in “Enter Laughing” moves in circular pattern at a relaxed pace, but the mood is more pensive than chill. Despite the clear patterns, there’s never a feeling of resolution, so the music seems to drift along. It’s a bit like convincing yourself that you’re wandering aimlessly while actually pacing in circles. The lyrics follow the form, with Verity Susman singing about wanting to break out of patterns and feeling for not committing to someone or be able to be emotionally available to them. Susman’s voice has an ambiguous quality – she conveys regret and tenderness in some moments, but also an odd neutrality and distance. It’s hard to place this song on an emotional timeline. Is she in the moment, and the opportunity to follow through on this relationship still there? Or is she looking back on something that’s too far back in time to recover? It’s such a wonderfully ambiguous piece of music.

Buy it from Amazon.

12/28/17

Right Where You Always Wanted To Be

Veruca Salt “Shutterbug”

It took me about 20 years to realize that this song is probably called “Shutterbug” because it’s a series of snapshots of people in small, pivotal moments. The chorus changes perspective with each iteration – “it’s her thrill” when it’s about a girl on tv who’s “a fool for the last living rock king;” it’s about “your thrill” when she’s addressing her power over a lover; it’s “my thrill” when she flips it to focus on the power they have over her. I love the way the verses build a tension that switches to euphoria at the start of the chorus, but then reverts back to a grinding tension: She can’t change. You can’t change. I can’t change. CHANGE! CHANGE! That last repetition sounds different depending on my mood – sometimes it’s like begging for change, sometimes it’s like cheering it on. Today it just sounds like slamming into a wall, over and over, and hoping each impact breaks through it somehow.

Buy the vinyl reissue of Eight Arms to Hold You from Amazon.

12/22/17

A Bandit And A Heartbreaker

Judee Sill “Jesus Was A Cross Maker”

“Jesus Was A Cross Maker” is an incredibly elegant bit of songwriting, with a gorgeous melody that rolls out gently over an arrangement that borrows from folk, gospel, and classical music without neatly fitting into any of those categories. The song has been covered many times over, and it’s funny to me how the most notable versions I’ve heard have trouble capturing the simple grace of Judee Sill’s original – Cass Elliot, The Hollies, and Warren Zevon all mess with the structure and lightly mangle the melody to highlight their particular vocal styles, while Frida Hyvönen‘s is faithful to the melody but pushes into a softer, sentimental tone that sacrifices the sober, clear-eyed quality that makes the Sill recordings so compelling.

There’s a lot of emotion in the song, but it’s presented in hindsight, with Sill reflecting on depression and an abusive relationship. The key feeling here is regret, but it’s more about a larger self-destructive tendency than anything in particular – she seems to be putting less blame on this guy, and more on herself for being so easily seduced. The “Jesus was a cross maker” line is brilliant, particularly in how she draws a comparison from this irony to her complicity in her own misery. Was Christ aware that he was building the very thing that would be used to execute him? Did it ever cross his mind that he could end up on one of these things as he made them? Sill has said that she wrote this song while entertaining thoughts of suicide, and died of a drug overdose eight years later. She seemed very aware of the cross she was making for herself.

Buy it from Amazon.

12/21/17

To Vision The Future

Sun Ra and His Astro Infinity Arkestra “Somebody Else’s World”

“Somebody Else’s World” is a message of hope and defiance written and recorded in 1969, a time as chaotic and scary as the one we’re living in right now. The lyrics, penned by Sun Ra and sung by June Tyson, are a refusal to believe in either a pessimistic outlook on the future or a vision of reality created by oppressive forces.

“Somebody else’s idea of somebody else’s world is not my idea of things as they are / somebody else’s idea of things to come need not be the only way to vision the future”

This song has been on my mind for over a year now, since after the election. The message of the song is incredibly resonant for me, and I believe this idea is important to hold on to when so many people on either side of the political divide seem incredibly invested in a bleak narrative that assumes the worst of the future. And of course, it’s easier to believe that the future’s been canceled, and we’re all powerless. It’s easier to buy into a story of doom when you have no imagination to see the potential for something else. It takes courage to tell other people that their vision of the future is not a fait accompli, and that we have better things in mind.

The music of “Somebody Else’s World” feels shaky and unstable, as though it could collapse at any moment. But despite that, June Tyson sings the words with great focus and conviction. She doesn’t sound angry. It’s more like someone standing their ground and stating a truth. It’s a correction, and a challenge. It’s a song of strength and dignity, and something I think we all need today.

Buy it from Amazon.


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