Markmaking

Alain Bashung 1947-2009

Alain Bashung, gentleman rocker and chevalier in the Legion of Honor, est mort.

Sarkozy: "A prince has left us."

S. Royal: "France has lost one of its greatest singers."

Obits and homages:

Radio France (in English)

Nouvel Observateur

Le Monde

Liberation

Liberation: homages

AFP

Asa, the chanteuse

It's pronounced "Asha," as in Bhosle.

Asa, la nigeriana que soñó con París

La chanteuse Asa a reçu le Prix Constantin 2008

Aurgasm.us

BBC music

MBE @ KCRW; Fire on the Mountain

Mike Ragogna, Huffington Post

Puccini at 150

Puccini is 150 years old as of December 23. What does the academy think of this?

1) Alexandra Wilson

Puccini's reception must be viewed in the context of Italian nationalism. After the unification of Italy in 1861, the politician Massimo d' Azeglio supposedly said, "we have made Italy; now we must make Italians." Since the Roman Empire, at any rate, Italy was never really a country, but a geographic proximity of regions.

Torrefranca vs. Puccini: Puccini reception lay at the heart of a crisis of national identity that gripped Italy between the turn of the century and the First World War. For Puccini's detractors his works were an emblem of decadence; for his supporters they provided a means for regeneration. In his vitriolic monograph, Giacomo Puccini e l'opera internazionale (1912), Fausto Torrefranca associated Puccini with dangerous 'others' - women, homosexuals and Jews - in order to instil fear about the 'feminisation' of Italian culture. The reception of his book shows that Torrefranca's 'extreme' views were widely shared.

2) Helen Greenwald

Recent Puccini Research

I propose that certain 'Japanese' elements of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" have cultural analogues that support a reading of the opera as more profoundly authentic than has usually been argued. 

3) Michele Girardi's book reviewed by Helen Greenwald and Alessandra Campana

Fleet Foxes

The Fleet Foxes are the band of the year. What imagery and metaphors does their music evoke amongst criticdom? 

PS. Are Pitchfork and PopMatters the only publications that run record reviews longer than one paragraph?

Stephen M. Deusner (Pitchfork):

The band didn't leave town to record Fleet Foxes, yet it sounds like it could have been recorded anywhere in the United States-- Austin, Minneapolis, Chicago, Brooklyn, Louisville, or more likely some clearing in the woods. That placelessness constitutes an active effacement

Cole Stryker (PopMatters):

sounds as though it begins in Appalachia with a front porch family hymn, and makes its way west, trundling across the Midwest on a steam train, getting lost in Utah’s barren gorges, and finally settling in some Laurel Canyon pop oasis

Pete Paphides:

“Fleet Foxes Are Not Hippies,” ran the recent headline of a feature in a Seattle arts paper, just above a smaller headline that read: “Don’t Let the Floppy Hats, Jesus Beards and Five-Part Vocal Harmonies About Rivers, Trees and Sunshine Throw You.”

Will Hermes:

Indie rock is undergoing a folk renaissance, which has spawned some great harmony singing. Case in point: Fleet Foxes' debut opens with a woozy a cappella that's part sacred-harp-choral tradition, part Beach Boys, and it resolves into a Celtic-flavored march with a searing Richard Thompson-style guitar line.

Heather Phares:

mountains, birds, family, death

Sean O'Neal:

amber-hued melodies, guitar lines snaking upward like flames from a campfire, and cumulus clouds of strings, bells, and rolling tom-toms

Dave Simpson:

English folk, late 60s west-coast music (particularly the Beach Boys and Love) - this is the sound of late-night forests, skipping animals, music made by people as old as the hills they dwell in.

LaRue Cook:

sun-soaked mountains (the spacious ''Sun It Rises'') and the serene Pacific (the jangly ''White Winter Hymnal'')

Doug Freeman:

delicate, wood-smoked harmonies of Crosby, Stills & Nash and rustic reverbed vision of My Morning Jacket's Tennessee Fire

Amanda Petrusich:

warm and cathartic, with all the hopefulness of a balmy summer night

M.I.A., "Paper Planes"

Is M.I.A. 2008's top rapper of Tamil descent?

From Wikipedia:

"Paper Planes" is an alternative hip hop dance song written and produced by M.I.A., Diplo and Switch for M.I.A.'s second studio album Kala (2007). Its main riff is sampled from the song "Straight to Hell" by The Clash.[1] The lyrics to "Paper Planes" are a satire on immigrant stereotypes.

Sam Mangwana secouer

Neuroanthropology pays tribute to Sam Mangwana:

One of the leaders of the Soukous genre, derived from the French “secouer” (to shake) and once known as the African rumba. That means it’s fun! I also find it fascinating how it mixes African and Latin rhythms and sound together.

Give Me Love: Songs of the Brokenhearted - Baghdad 1925-1929

Pitchfork reviews a collection of music from Jazz Age Baghdad:

What you will hear are impassioned performances, instrumental and vocal, from some of the most well-regarded performers in Baghdad of the era. Most of them are Jewish-- for various reasons, Iraq's religious minorities dominated the country's music prior to the 1950s, when the vast majority of Christians and essentially all the Jews fled. This exodus began during World War II after a pro-Nazi coup d'etat and subsequent pogrom.

It would be nice to hear a little more about that side of it.  I'm trying to think of another country with a disproportionately Jewish entertainment industry...

Kenny Rogers in Kenya

Countrypolitan is a huge genre in Kenya, accoding to NPR, especially Kenny and Dolly.

Rob Walker on KCRW

Rob Walker writes about KCRW pbuh, the great, the merciful: "The Ad-Free Station Advertisers Love."

Spin magazine: "Chicks with Picks"

Spin magazine covers the blossoming all-girl heavy-metal tribute-band phenomenon (PDF link).

Ethiopian Idols

Ethiopian Idols subverts the cultural norms in that country. Alta fakedem!

The show even has it own Simon Cowell, the bad-guy judge on the British and US versions. The catchphrase of musician Feleke Hailu -"alta fakedem" or "you didn't make it" in Amharic - may seem positively meek compared to Cowell's acerbic reviews. But saxophonist Feleke, 46, has caused a sensation in this tradition-bound culture.

"Most of the time I tell [contestants] to go back to their old jobs, forget about a career in singing," he said. "Or I tell them they sing like donkeys. Sometimes they get angry. The girls burst into tears, and a few weeks ago one singer threw a stick at me after I told him he had failed to get through to the next round.

"The problem is in our culture it is not common to tell the truth or criticise. People cannot take criticism."

Fan Ejigahu Melesse, 25, says at first she and her friends were astounded by the bluntness of the judges. "I couldn't believe what they were saying to the singers," said the shop assistant, who lives in the capital, Addis Ababa. "We just don't do that here in Ethiopia. But gradually we became addicted because it was so refreshing. Now we don't miss a show and think Feleke's comments are hilarious."

Rapture Riders

The genius Mark Vidler mashes up Blondie and the Doors in "Rapture Riders"; The Observer reports.

Jimbo's gruff croon slinks through Blondie's sleek funk, seeking and finding a new tune, melding enigmatic backwoods Americana to urban pop art. Morrison's narrative of 'a killer on the road/ His face is squirming like a toad' makes a druggy B-movie connection with Debbie's rap about an equally destructive fantasy alien cruising hedonistic New York, consuming cars and bars full of revellers. The result is strangely sexy dance-pop deluxe.

Three eras of songwriting

ONE. Songs from another planet

In the New York Review,  Geoffrey O'Brien on Ken Emerson on the Brill Building fusion sound:

The Brill Building sound clearly had not so much to do with ethnic confrontation or ethnic self-definition as with a fusion of influences. In part this had to do with the same kind of smoothing out of differences that turned Joel Adelberg into Jeff Barry and Robert Ridarelli into Bobby Rydell. Yet the obverse of that homogenization was the radical alchemy it took to make a dissonant mix of styles and devices—blues, gospel, doo-wop, cha-cha, mariachi, lush string arrangements, echoes of Puccini or Irving Berlin, of country and western or Broadway musical—come out sounding as if all the elements naturally belonged together.

Something quite new was being manufactured out of the collision of apparently antithetical modes, and some ears had to adjust to the noise of it. It is hard now to imagine that when Atlantic executives first heard the overpowering string section and Brazilian-inflected kettledrum part that Leiber and Stoller had added to the Drifters' "There Goes My Baby" (1959), they were so perturbed that they delayed releasing it. Even the astute Jerry Wexler thought the record—which of course proved an enormous hit—"sounded like two radio stations."

The upshot was that local music came out sounding as if it came from everywhere and nowhere. The Mystics may have been a street-corner doo-wop group of Italian-Americans from Bensonhurst, but with that name and with the rough-hewn yet ethereal harmonies on their one hit "Hushabye" (written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman)—the kind of song that makes yearning and fulfillment seem more or less the same thing—they might have dropped down from another planet. Or perhaps that other planet was simply the America where all the movies and songs were set, the America of beaches and beauty contests and advertising layouts that bore only a tenuous relation either to the world where the songs were made or to the various worlds for which they provided an increasingly inescapable soundtrack.

And of course, Stephin Merritt:

Who will mourn the passing of my heart
Will its little droppings climb the pop chart
Who'll take its ashes and, singing, fling
them from the top of the Brill Building

And life goes on, and on, anon...

TWO. Songs from Liverpool

Reviews of Bob Spitz, The Beatles: David Yaffe, Slate; John Kehe, Christian Science Monitor; Carlo Wolff, Boston Globe; Janet Maslin, New York Times; Jane and Michael Stern, NYT

THREE. The song from hell: "My Humps"

1. Hua Hsu, "Notes on 'My Humps': A song so awful it hurts the mind"
2. little lost robot: 'My Robot Humps'
3. soulstrut.com: "This mic was made specifically for Hitler"

 

 

Remembering John Lennon

[NB for the more-tender-than-dyspeptic approach see Steven Winn at SFGate via 3QD.]

John Lennon, one of the very greatest musicians, was killed 25 years ago. Years before the deaths of Princess Diana or Kurt Cobain, this prompted his fans, who immediately gathered in public to manically erect homemade shrines, an outpouring of self-indulgent bathos so unreflectively creepy as to involuntarily call to mind the unbalanced psychological relationship that connected his killer (only in his own mind) to Lennon.

Like all the Beatles, Lennon went into decline immediately upon the breakup of the group, if not before. Among his more ambiguous legacies is the by now well established tradition of well-intentioned but abysmally poorly educated and informed celebrities leveraging their air time to promote their pet causes irrespective of their actual understanding of any particular issue, and establishing permanent media circuses that have little if any connection to the talent or skill which once might have been the original ground for the celebrity -- in Lennon's case, musicianship and songwriting.

Thanks to his irresponsible and self-indulgent parents, Lennon went through huge psychological trauma as a child, which, owing to his immense talent, he succeeded in turning into timeless, classic art. For anyone who felt Paul McCartney too slick, showy, polished -- fake -- Lennon set an unrivaled standard of personal honesty and cathartic self-revelation. Always, however, disciplined with masterful pop technique -- not always the case, as ever, with his epigones.

According to the critical consensus, both Lennon and McCartney reached their greatest heights owing to the tension of their partnership and the general framework of the Beatles.*  Afterwards there was nothing to hold either one back from their worst excesses. Until then, however, there were seven straight years of routinely achieved perfection.

This would be hard to gather, though, from the music that invariably accompanied the televised tributes. Apparently the death of "John Lennon" has little to do with the Beatles but only with his intermittently successful solo career. To accompany the flashbacks, there is no "Twist and Shout," no "Ticket to Ride," "Help," "Nowhere Man," "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Revolution," or "Come Together" -- all songs where McCartney's talent helped polish Lennon's raw brilliance.

Rather, the official John Lennon tribute song -- bolstered by his idiotic, wide-eyed fans -- seems to be "Imagine," an interminably repeated throwaway riff, barely more, sung with the most insufferably pompous sincerity, an ode, moreover, to a nightmare utopia world stripped of everything that a human being might conceivably hold dear or find self-fulfillment in. Presumably necessary to maintain strict equality in the dream-world of "Imagine" would be strict administration, perhaps by those in the mold of the heroin-addicted Lennon, whose administrative capacities helped ensure the ongoing solvency crisis of the most popularly successful entertainers in history. One can only imagine what his wife Cynthia and son Julian, cruelly abandoned by Lennon in the interest of his self-realization, might have found appealing in this utopia.

Not that any of that matters to the fans. It is enough that Lennon stands for peace, love, and creativity, and has unassailably cool glasses. The aesthetic criticism of music is only ever important to a minority subculture, and the moral criticism of philosophy and politics poses too many uncomfortable obstacles to a consumer economy and society.

*cf. David Samuels in Slate:

"Without McCartney and producer George Martin to rebel against, Lennon turned out to be another lazy entertainment world hippie, doing lots of drugs and making up pointlessly Dadaist fictional personas with names like "Dr. Winston O'Boogie." McCartney couldn't help writing hits—superficial fluff that never came close to equaling his music with the Beatles. George Harrison was sued for ripping off other people's songs."

[...]

"John Lennon's personal recorded output after leading the Beatles may be the most complete history of intellectual and emotional regression put together by a performer—an honor for which there is no shortage of worthy competition among rock stars. "A million kids are better than one/ so come on," Lennon sings, like the host of some insipid Electric Company spinoff. No matter how controlling and awful Yoko Ono might have been, there is no way that she can be held responsible for the awfulness of Lennon's solo career. You need only listen to one or two of the songs on Mind Games to realize that the post-Beatles Lennon was, except for one or two brief spasms, virtually bereft of musical ideas. "

Music Lust

Nic Harcourt has published a book of lists. (For more context, see links in "The Empire of Semipopular Music.") An excerpt is available at PGW.com.

Reception:

• enki, Blogcritics
• Chris Estey, Three Imaginary Girls
• Brent DiCrescenzo, "Boxing the Nineties," Pitchfork
• Dr. Reptile
• Sean, HickoryWind.org
• Keith, In Which Our Hero
• Trill42, Kofi's hat
• la-underground
• Hua Hsu, Blender

Listening to Turkish music in Germany

Germany, or at least East Berlin, seems to be a great place to hear Turkish music (and of course, to eat Turkish food). References:

1. Amazon.de: "Musik - Weltmusik - Europa - Turkei"
2. Signandsight feature: Daniel Bax, "Crossing the Bridge" (2005 film about Istanbul music scene)
3. Wikipedia: Ajda Pekkan, Athena, Sezen Aksu, Tarkan
4. Deutsche Welle article translated on Qantara.de about the "Şimdi Now" music festival in Berlin

Another Tribe

Andy Beckett reviews Simon Reynolds's book on post-punk in the L.R.B.

Scritti Politti began as an intense but amateurish collective of musicians and non-musicians named after an approximation of the title of a book by Antonio Gramsci. They were based in a London squat, took speed, read philosophy books, talked all night and gradually developed a unique ramshackle sound. Their first record was called ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’. It ebbed and flowed for twice the duration of a normal single, and its lyrics were concerned with a lonely girl, Italian revolutionary politics and the empty rebelliousness of being in a rock band. At a time when post-punk seemed to be opening up new possibilities for pop on an almost monthly basis, this was perhaps the most seductive of all: a pop that was about romance and about the wider world and also cleverly about itself, with a warm current of melody, so often missing from post-punk, keeping the whole thing buoyant and desirable.

But this alchemy was exhausting. ‘We were a sick group,’ remembers Green Gartside, Scritti Politti’s singer and guitarist. ‘I used to read and write a lot, which was the only thing I did apart from being debauched.’ In 1980, two years of relentless self-examination and experiment in Scritti Politti caught up with him: the morning after one of the band’s heavily improvised concerts Gartside suffered a paralysing anxiety attack that put him in hospital. Convalescing, he decided that the band should change direction by dropping their political lyrics and dramatically polishing their sound. Over the next five years, he imposed his will. The Scritti Politti collective became a trio, then Gartside plus orthodox musicians chosen by him. The group’s music became as sweet as Abba’s, the words as stylised and uplifting as Madonna’s. References to Derrida and Lacan and the latest styles of dance music were woven into Scritti Politti’s mid-1980s hit singles, but when you heard the records on the radio as a teenager they were easy to miss. Gartside himself, with his huge Bambi eyes and flicked-back blond hair, had been striking to look at even in his Marxist period; now he appeared on record sleeves photographed in luxury settings and bearing at least a passing resemblance to Princess Diana.

New Weird America

Perhaps not the adjectives most frequently used for America. "New Weird America" is a genre of music [christened by The Wire magazine, UK].

• Alec Hanley Bemis, "The Soft Revolution," Los Angeles Times, 05.05
• Chris Dodge, "Folk Music's New Genre Benders," Utne, 03-04.04
• James Rutledge, "Joanna Newsom and the New Weird America," BBC, 11.04
• "Explore 'New Weird America' and Beyond," by "gratefulshrink," amazon.com

Demise of the rock snobs?

Michael Crowley in The New Republic:

But there's a dark side to the iPod era. Snobbery subsists on exclusivity. And the ownership of a huge and eclectic music collection has become ordinary. Thanks to the iPod, and digital music generally, anyone can milk various friends, acquaintances, and the Internet to quickly build a glorious 10,000-song collection. Adding insult to injury, this process often comes directly at the Rock Snob's expense. We are suddenly plagued by musical parasites. For instance, a friend of middling taste recently leeched 700 songs from my computer. He offered his own library in return, but it wasn't much. Never mind my vague sense that he should pay me some money. In Rock Snob terms, I was a Boston Brahmin and he was a Beverly Hillbilly--one who certainly hadn't earned that highly obscure album of AC/DC songs performed as tender acoustic ballads but was sure to go bragging to all his friends about it. Even worse was the girlfriend to whom I gave an iPod. She promptly plugged it into my computer and was soon holding in her hand a duplicate version of my 5,000-song library--a library that had taken some 20 years, thousands of dollars, and about as many hours to accumulate. She'd downloaded it all within five minutes. And, a few months later, she was gone, taking my intimate musical DNA with her.

Recent Five-Star Songs

Which songs from recent years have made it into my personal five-star canon? Here I can only admit that my taste is a mere subset of Nic Harcourt's taste.

• 2005: Sufjan Stevens, Feist, Bloc Party, Amos Lee, Ray LaMontagne
• 2004: Patty Griffin, Modest Mouse, Magnetic Fields, Luna, Los Lobos & Willie G, Kings of Convenience (4x), k.d. lang, k-os, Julia Fordham, Gary Jules, The Flaming Lips, Eminem, Angelique Kidjo
• 2003: Steve Earle, Rachael Yamagata, Outkast, Julieta Venegas, Fountains of Wayne, Belle & Sebastian

They all have "pop instincts," that's for sure. Also, "it's all about the music."

Five Star Songs

Every afternoon, I go and, after crusing for 20 minutes for an available desk, sit in the marvelous Potsdam Street building of the State Library Berlin (StaBi), designed by Hans Scharoun and Edgar Wisniewski. [About the Staatsbibliothek: Galinsky.com; Archinform.net; Archiseek.com]

To accompany the reading, I usually use the iTunes software to shuffle among a library of songs of which about 400 were purchased using said software, 2000 copied from my friend Dan, and another 3900 diligently ripped from a pre-existing CD collection, for a total of about 6300 songs.

ITunes allows one to rate the songs (one to five stars); I haven't rated all of these songs by any means but I've been sure to rate all of the five-star songs. Inspired by a set of CDs in the possession of my friend Robin simply entitled "Five Star Songs."

Which musical groups, by my lights, have given me three or more five-star songs? The answer surprised me somewhat, but not completely.

1. The Talking Heads (22)
2. The Magnetic Fields (21)
3. The Beatles (13)
4. Eminem (9)
5. Bob Marley & The Wailers (7)
6. The Flaming Lips (7)
7. Bob Dylan (6)
8. Neil Young (6)
9. The Clash (5)
10. MC Hawking (5)
11. Richard & Linda Thompson (5)
12. The Rolling Stones (5)
13. Van Morrison (5)
14. The Band (4)
15. Charles Mingus (4)
16. Jimmy Cliff (4)
17. Kings of Convenience (4)
18. Outkast (4)
19. Aimee Mann (3)
20. Allman Brothers Band (3)
21. Beck (3)
22. Belle & Sebastian (3)
23. Billy Bragg & Wilco (3)
24. Derek & the Dominos (3)
25. Lucinda Williams (3)
26. Santana (3)

I was not surprised to see any of these names here, but I was a little bit surprised about the order. Do these artists have something in common? It's hard for me to say. I have no doubt, however, that they make up my canon.

The 60s

Two desert island discs?
MHR (b. 1972):

• Mingus at Antibes
• Velvet Underground 1969 Live

JC (b. 1974)

• The Beatles (White Album)
• Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet

BL (b. 1976)

• Abbey Road
• Blonde on Blonde

Consequent question: how late do you have to be born, not to see the 1960s as the archetype of pop music?

Batanga.com

[Aug. 2005:

• Bienvenida a los visitantes de habla hispana. ¡Recomiendo el Web site Batanga.com! Recomiendo también  el CD de "Sounds Eclectico" de la estación de radio de KCRW.
• Benvenuti a gli ospiti di lingua italiana. Suggerisco il Web site Batanga.com. Suggerisco inoltre il CD "Sounds Eclectico" dalla stazione radiofonica di KCRW!

-Ben]

Batanga.com offers a number of RealAudio streams of Latin music -- very helpful in educating non-Latins about the different styles of Latin music, including among others:

• Aventura
• Balada
• Bachatas
• Boleros
• Cubanismo
• Flamenco
• Mariachi
• Norteño
• Radio Brasil
• Reggaeton
• Salsa
• Tango
• Tropica
• Zonica

The Empire of Semipopular Music

Nic Harcourt, Santa Monica's Emperor of Semi-Popular Music:

• Pro -- Jaime Wolf, New York Times (AtomicPop link); NYTimes Archive link; link via jescahoop.com
• Con -- kausfiles.com, "He Played Dido," 05.07.2005

I agree with Kaus as regards the existing weaknesses of "Morning Becomes Eclectic."  My taste departs from his, though, with the belief that "MBE" is, even with faults, still so much better than anything on commercial radio (and most college radio, frankly) that it's worth supporting.

The Chicago and New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Bands

Link: Who We Are.

But what did we want anyway? We knew that we wanted to make music that would embody the radical, feminist, humanitarian vision we shared. And the lyric were the obvious place to begin—the field was wide open. Most of the rock songs women have sung till now were about the pain men cause us—the pain that’s supposed to define us as women. We didn’t want to deny that tradition (women struggled hard for the right to sing even that much) bvt we wanted to sing about how the pain doesn’t have to be there—how we fight and struggle and love to make it change.

Analogies (draft)

Coachella, All Tomorrow's Parties, CMJ Festival, Pitchfork, KCRW, Atlantic Records

::

Venice Biennale, Documenta, Whitney Biennial, Artforum, October, Leo Castelli

[more TK]

2004 Music

Landmarks in music 2004: Arcade Fire, Devendra Banhart, Franz Ferdinand, Finn Brothers, Loretta Lynn, Nellie McKay, Rilo Kiley, Usher, Kanye West.

The easy part is rattling off a list, which I disdain, including my own. The hard part is arriving at critical historical categories within which such a list makes sense. There seems to be, not quite an iron, but perhaps a copper or bronze law in the press against publishing or writing such categorical or synoptic thinking. Although Robert Christgau makes an effort every year, in his way: 2003, 2002, 2001, etc.

The irony of graduate school for art history: sitting at a study carrel with streaming music on a laptop, it's easier to get a direct overview of the year's developments in music than it is in art.

Acoustic Pop

Kings of Convenience and Jim White, both promoted by Nic Harcourt on Public Radio International's Sounds Eclectic radio show, all make use of conventions of first-person interiority and I-thou intimacy: strummed or picked acoustic guitar and breathy vocals. But they both also use danceable beats to suggest a communal, corporeal dance-club experience. Does this imply that you can connect your inner world with your social context?

Two opposing models are Iron & Wine, who uses acoustic guitar but not danceable beats, and The Postal Service, who use intimate vocals, but without the acoustic-guitar emphasis. Consequently, Iron & Wine has been accused of both anachronism and historical consciousness, and The Postal Service is easier to call just "pop."