Cha-lang-a-lang-a-lang

I've been too busy packing for the apocalypse, hence no time to blog. Thankfully Janelle Monáe continues to have you covered on that front.

On the desert plains all night

Dark but pretty. "Song for Zula," by Phosphorescent.
If you like this you should definitely hear Emmylou Harris's Wrecking Ball album. Just amazing. It has the same dreamy, shimmery, high desert vibe you get from The Joshua Tree (both albums were, not coincidentally, produced by Daniel Lanois).

Libre Soy

Like most other kids in the known universe, my daughter Quinn has proven defenseless against the charms of Frozen, and in particular the big show-stopper sung by Idina Menzel -- "Let It Go."
I've been trying to blog new music each week, and if I'm honest, this is the new music that has been ringing through our house this past month -- Quinn luuuvvvvs this song (and the Snowman one). We listen to the spanish version ("Libre Soy"), we listen to the various adorable versions sung by little kids, I catch her singing it to herself while she's playing. She's even started writing her own stories starring Elsa and Anna (her first fan fiction?).

All of which fills me with great parental joy (the princess thing notwithstanding). It's always exciting when your kids are genuinely excited about something (whatever it is). And up until this point Quinn's list of projects and interests and obsessions hasn't really included much music. Which is fine of course, but you can bet we'll be encouraging this going forward.

I am nothing without pretend

MD's two-piece Wye Oak play "Civilian" live on the radio. Drone-y and buzz-y and closes with a sweet guitar solo.
You can download the album track here.

And if they try to slow you down

... tell them all to go to hell.

Hot Knife

...by Fiona Apple.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of undergrad a capella groups across the nation are performing this song right this very minute. You know they are. Still, I love the mix of minimalism and chattering complexity. And of course, Fiona's vein-popping emoting and her willingness to risk dorkiness in service of a great song. I suspect the undergrads might keep singing it for a good long while.

Earworm

This song from Chvrches (chuh-verches? cherv-ches? chever-ches?) is a total earworm. It's been synth-ing around my head all week.
  CHVRCHES | The Mother We Share from Sing J. Lee on Vimeo.
Related: why does the vimeo player suck so much? is it that hard to queue the video properly without hanging? is it just that my internet and computer are super-slow?

Also: this live version of Tightrope is pretty awesome as well.

The Magnificent Seven

Check out The Clash playing a live version of "The Magnificent Seven." The Clash recorded this song in early 1980 -- as the 3rd single off their epic 4th album Sandinista! -- way back when hip-hop was still just a local New York thing, and maybe even just a Bronx thing, not the global behemoth it is today. It has the somewhat asterisky distinction of being the first rap song performed by a white group. (The slower album version can be heard here. ).

Even more amazing is that it's kind of awesome. ("Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)", the other rap track on Sandinista! is also pretty great.) Joe Strummer is clearly rapping in the style of early old-school hip-hop, but you don't want to cringe (at least I don't). It's not just that he sells the song, but that he gets it, he understands the power of this new form, way more than you would think a white Brit in 1980 would get it. He absorbs something from old-school rap and melds it to the collection of sounds and riffs and beats that make up the usual Clash style. It's rap, but it's also a kind of spoken word rant, a furious announcement over the PA. It feels organic and very Clash-like, consistent with their own artistic trajectory and not just opportunistic mimicry of a new style.

The Clash, of course, had always been fascinated with black music, especially reggae and dub. All of their albums included covers of reggae songs, like Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves," and Sandinista! in particular goes deep into those styles, turning its back on the punk that made them famous.

The DJ and filmmaker Don Letts is often hailed as one of the people who introduced The Clash to London's black music scene. Letts also directed a pretty cool documentary about The Clash, Westway to the World, which you can watch for free online at Open Culture [*]. I've always felt that The Clash's openness to a variety of music and their solidarity with England's black and immigrant communities is a huge part of what made them such a great band. It sharpened their politics and kept their music diverse and interesting.

White youth, black youth, Better find another solution
Why not phone up Robin Hood and ask him for some wealth distribution?

In his fantastic political history of hip-hop, Can't Stop Won't Stop, Jeff Chang describes this brief historical moment in the early '80s after hip-hop's emergence when it caught on with the downtown punk and art scene in NYC, a meeting of the minds between the Bronx and Manhattan. New wave bands like Blondie recorded rap tracks and members of the Talkingheads played as session musicians on some early rap tracks. The Clash, when they came to America, were also huge fans, apparently. They had Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five as their opening act for several NYC shows, and actually had to reprimand their fans for booing and throwing shit on the stage.

The moment didn't last forever. And of course the idea of a white band taking a black musical subculture and appropriating it to sell records is rock and roll's original sin. Just ask Mos Def.

I was thinking about all this after reading my friend Sandhya's typically thoughtful post on cultural misappropriation, and how difficult it is to distinguish misappropriation from sincere cross-pollination. She teases out a lot of the ambiguities in the question, and provides a good rule of thumb: don't use someone else's culture as a costume. I don't think that's what The Clash are doing on this track, but maybe I would think differently if rap had been less of a brief detour for them and more of a business plan. Like all many great bands, the Clash had the good sense to break-up before fading away. Who knows, maybe with time and more commercial success, they would have turned into U2: sincere, but increasingly corporate. Maybe the follow-up to Sandinista! would have been Rattle & Hum (an album I enjoy, but let's face it, cultural appropriation is basically it's whole reason for existence).

At its best cultural cross-pollination is a two-way street. And indeed, punk did influence black music as well, one example being the 2 Tone ska revival in Coventry, England. The biggest hit to come out of that scene is also pretty topical -- "Free Nelson Mandela." [via Africa is a Country.]


[*] Open Culture actually has compiled a list of over 600 movies that can be watched for free online (and by free I mean, you know, legally). There's a lot of old classics that have fallen out of copyright, including a fair selection of Hitchcock, silent movie classics, old westerns, as well as more recent documentaries and other stuff.

Happy 5605!

Vienna Teng has a new album out -- Aims -- which I confess I haven't listened to in its entirety yet. But the video for the song "Level Up" is really lovely.

It's really a New Years sort of song, in a way. Letting go of fear, moving forward, leveling up. She has always been a great writer of optimistic, hopeful songs (the Atheist Christmas Carol is another favorite of mine). It feels like an appropriate way to start off a year where we will be returning to the United States, settling into a new life, new house, new city, new jobs, new schools, moving to the next stage, whatever it may be.

Somewhat apropos, lately I've been missing coding. Strange, I know. I did a lot of programming in grad school. And I mean, a lot. But that was years ago and my life has been flooded by mental challenges of a different nature in the years since -- writing, learning spanish, raising kids. For me, debugging code has always had a kind of meditative quality that only writing comes close to. With code you can keep iterating until you get it just right, just how it ought to be. Within the realm of the computer you can make something perfect, exactly matching the vision in your head. How many other parts of your life can you say that about? I've made a lot of mediocre dinners where I wished I could have debugged and re-compiled them them after the first draft. Alas.

So I thought I would learn a new language. In my grad school days everything I did was C or shell scripting on a linux platform, but I've been hearing people gush about python for years so I thought I would give it a whirl. (Also doing this with half an eye for entering the job market this coming year, so if anyone has any recommendations for the hot new language to learn, let me know.) And yep, python is very pretty, like shell scripting but more elegant without all the ugly awk/grep kludges you usually need.

Anyway, the first script I wrote in python was for calculating numbers in bases other than base 10. Which is a long way of saying, Happy 5605 (base 7)! It's going to be a totally crazy year, no avoiding it!

Dying on the Inside

"The Other Shoe" by F*#^&d Up, from their punk-rock opera David Comes to Life. I think you would call this type of music post-hardcore (?). At any rate the singer has a super-hardcore-y voice, which might not be for everyone. But the guitars! Man, the guitars on this album are pretty cool. The music is this propulsive swirl of echoey, chiming sound. It's so dense I couldn't process it all the first or second or third time I heard it. And the singer's voice doesn't much help you figure it out. But eventually the melodies pop out like one of those magic eye things. It's a grower. There's supposed to be a storyline to the album (as you can kinda see in the video), but after the first few songs or so it's not entirely clear what's happening. ("Queen of Hearts" is another favorite from the album.)

Why Can't We Give Love One More Chance?

Annie Lennox and David Bowie singing "Under Pressure" from the 1992 Freddie Mercury-AIDS benefit. This concert was right in the middle of Queen's post-Wayne's World, post-Vanilla Ice bump in popularity, and I remember MTV hyping the hell out of the concert. I suppose it wasn't exactly the moment when HIV and LGBTQ issues went super-mainstream in the music industry, but probably not too far off. And us high schoolers watching at home got to see Elton John and Axl Rose rocking out together. It wasn't hard too hard to imagine a more inclusive, homophobia-free world after seeing that.

Plus, I *think* it was the first time I saw David Bowie perform. And he was pretty good, but Annie Lennox steals the show, naturally.

We jam the circuit yeah

I've been complaining about the lack of good music these days and about too many kids on my lawn. Clearly my problem has been not listening enough to the Coup. The new album--"Sorry to Bother You"--is fantastic. If you're not familiar with the Coup, they're a hip-hop group from Oakland who've been a well-kept secret since the early '90s. Their music is a blend of political activist hip-hop with funky party music. Serious like Rage Against the Machine, fun and catchy like Outkast, imagining the revolution as a giant block party.

The new album has a different sound, less P-Funk and more the Clash. You can tell that Boots Riley has been hanging out with Tom Morello because the album has got lots of guitars, sometimes fuzzed out ("The Magic Clap"), sometimes thin and sharp and garage-y, like this one:
There's a lot of experimenting on this album and not all of it works, but for the most part the fusion of hip-hop with post-punk, new wave indie rock goes goes down smooth. In terms of rap-rock hybrids, I'll take this any day over Korn or Limp Bizkit.

Visual Echoes

Comparative R.E.M. Studies

Apropos of my last post complaining that there's no good music these days and that those durn kids better get off my lawn, Marty helpfully suggested that perhaps I might find agreeable the new Decemberists album, The King Is Dead.  And she's totally right (thanks Marty!), it's a really great bunch of songs.  Not quite as quirky or showy as some of their earlier stuff, but catchy and well-written and emotionally direct.  For example, here's the first single

So here's the thing: I thought the jangly guitar sounded really familiar, and after a few listens I realized that the song is almost totally identical to R.E.M.'s "The One I Love" -- both the guitar and the vocal melody.  Compare and contrast...Turns out that the guy playing the jangly guitar part is Peter Buck, so I guess he's allowed to swipe some of his earlier riffs.  And if they keep turning out songs this good I'm certainly not going to complain about it.  There's a couple other R.E.M.-y tracks on the album, but a lot of it is roots-ier and more down homey like this one, "Rox in the Box."  They also have Gillian Welch and David Rawlings backing them up on some songs too.  Awesome!

Mixtape 2010

Once Quinn was born my music listening habits changed overnight. There's that first year of parenthood which is just a blur of diapers and sleep-deprivation. You can't really blast stuff out of the speakers because the baby's sleeping. And then there's dishes and laundry and trying to figure out the shape of your new life. Honestly, who has time to sit down and listen (really listen) to a CD anyway -- much less obsess over the lyrics and let the songs sink in they way they did when you were 14 and taping songs off the radio because you had all the time in the world, but no money.

After that first year life relaxed again, but I kind of just... got out of the habit? We'd listen to kids CDs rather than the new new thing, and then Quinn went through a phase where she didn't want anyone else to play music. For a while I listened to music while commuting on the train, but since we've been down in Nicaragua I've barely touched my iPod.

And at the same time, the horizons of available music have become nearly infinite. I've started following a few mp3 blogs like fluxblog or club fonograma (a quite-excellent english-language blog that covers latin american pop music), but it all flows by so fast I feel like I'm only hearing a small fraction of the stuff I might like and really, truly absorbing even less than that.

I hope it's not just a symptom of becoming an old fuddy-duddy. I'd really like to get to know some new music that clicks the way it did back when. So if anyone has any really good recommendations, please let me know. Anyway, to celebrate the shards of good music that have been whizzing by me over the last year, here's a mixtape.

Dance up on them Haters

I'm totally loving this Janelle Monae video.
Alyssa Rosenberg has an interesting essay about how Monae is a kind of hip-hop Ziggy Stardust, with her James Brown pompadour and her Michael Jackson dance moves. But the thing I love about the video is her unusual screen presence and how she bugs her eyes out when she starts singing. Very unusual, but fun to watch.

Obligatory OK Go Post

So this music video is the raging viral internet thing du jour, but it's still pretty awesome.
I don't even care if they faked the timing or edited multiple takes together, I'm just happy that it exists. They also have a marching-band video version of this song which is somehow even cooler.

[Check out this interview to learn a bit about how they did it. Apparently they did several full takes, but none was perfect so there is one splice in the video. Also apparently the timing wasn't faked, although they did speed up and slow down the video by small amounts in places.]

I lived on the moon

Awesomely trippy music video from a band called Kwoon - definitely watch until the 2-minute mark, where the gentle acoustic vibe upshifts into Pink Floyd territory. (Via.)

Return Journey

Bittersweetly, our time in the East Bay is coming to an end, and we're heading back to DC this week. It has been a ton of fun being out in California again, and seeing family and friends on a regular basis. It's hard to believe 3 months is already over. Still, it will be good to be back in DC, and I'm sure we'll be back west sometime in the not-too-distant future.

At any rate, here's a geographically appropriate Rancid song...

Old Crow Medicine Show

A few weeks ago we expeditioned ourselves across the bay to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a gigantic free concert in Golden Gate Park. The goal was to hear Neko Case play and then meetup with some friends for the closing show. But due to a titanic public transit fail (involving a very slow, very crowded bus and a surprisingly large number of drunken Brits), we missed Neko.

Argh. Very sad. (But of course no show is ever truly missed when you have youTube).

Anyway, we did find friends and we did catch Old Crow Medicine Show -- a string/bluegrass band from Nashville. They were pretty fun - lots of whoopin and hollerin and instrument-swappin. They crowded together in a tight cluster in the center of a big stage, like they were used to playing in elevators and unfamiliar with all that space. (Much of that night's set is up on YT, including this.)

Good songs too. The song that caught my ear during the show was Methamphetamine. Apparently their big signature song is Wagon Wheel, which was written by OCMS based on a Bob Dylan outtake. Anyway, it's nice to discover a new band - I'll have to keep an eye out for them in the future.