Prodigies: The Value of the Uninitiated

As we have covered in the Twee episode, music can evoke the yearning to reach backwards in time to invent an idyllic past that has never happened. As for the other direction, music can equally serve as an emotional glimpse into the future. It reveals what could potentially become reality from inner hopes, dreams, or expectations. For instance, when I hear an inspirational tune I imagine myself slowly walking in cloak and top hat through the gala held in my honor towards the podium to receive my prestigious Most Brilliant and Insightful Blog Award. Music itself is inspired by these emotions and the performers feel them when they create and compose. They get to choose the direction: past or future.

Prodigies are a breed of artist that do not have that choice. They must barrel into the fog of the future without experience or hesitation. Born with enough talent as a child to compete with adults, they inspirationally convince the world that they have the power to change the foundations of their art entirely. Why not?

They seemingly achieve in seconds what others strive for in the span of a lifetime. Micheal Jackson was a breathtaking dancer and a better singer than James Brown when he was 19. Roddy Frame dazzled the fickle UK music press at 16 with Aztec Camera. Stevie Wonder auditioned for Motown when he was 11 and they made his mother sign a 5-year contract on the spot. Shuggie Otis was drawing mustaches on his face to get into clubs where he would perform with his dad’s band as a guitarist when he was 12. Mozart and Chopin were filling concert halls with original compositions before they were 12. Texas legend Doug Sahm was 11 when he was onstage for Hank Williams’s final performance at the Skyline Club in Austin and released his first record that year. 16-year-old Kate Bush had a demo of 50 songs that impressed David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, who launched her career in the midst of the late 70’s progressive rock fervor. Yo-Yo Ma performed for Eisenhower and Kennedy at the White House when he was 7. The beginning is always quite the whirlwind.

Unfortunately, this takes quite the toll on their little psyches and things generally go sour later in their careers. Kate Bush wouldn’t play live, Shuggie Otis fired everyone from his band and always recorded all on his own, and Michael Jackson redefined the limits of eccentricity. It happens to people when they are constantly adored. This makes perfect sense doesn’t it? When talent distorts the rules of society altogether it does damage rather than serve as a nurturing force. More often than not youth is punished by its own brilliance rather than rewarded. There is some kind of equation that merits study: how much ass-kissing can one person take before they go nuts? When they doubt the motivation behind every interaction they have, including those with their parents? Some made it out fine. Stevie Wonder is humble and eloquent and Yo-Yo Ma exposes traditional music from different cultures with his fame.

The music is astounding. Kate Bush’s album is a powerful work of art that makes you feel like a superhero at the climax of an action movie. Shuggie Otis merged funk, psychedelia, and pop in a way that has never really been replicated. Micheal Jackson is the greatest star the world has ever seen. They are uninitiated and can only push forward with fresh ideas. Their entire existence is a fresh idea and embodies the essence of originality. They serve as heroes/heroines of sorts, someone who is unbound by the chains of trends or specific popular styles.

Kate Bush – The Sensual World https://youtu.be/fsbKeX_ZhDw

Aztec Camera – High Land, Hard Rain https://youtu.be/vMy5V5K50tk

Shuggie Otis – Inspiration Information https://youtu.be/RmrxW06nMtI

Stevie Wonder – My Cherie Amour http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJNbijG2M7OwNLyW_D2BZvZD09X3cOKXi

Trip-Hop: Collage and Refinement

Listeners in the United States of America have grown accustomed to the creation of game changing musical phenomenon for the Western world. Jazz, rock and roll, punk, and hip-hop ushered in entirely new eras of popular music after hours of toil in the clubs, garages, and basements of the land of the free and the home of the brave. Of course, Europe/UK is the veritable “daddy” of the roots of popular music as we know it, ever since it was dancing off the fingers of Joe Bach in the 17th Century. There is interplay: we make rock and roll, they give us the the Fab Four. We make punk and they make punk. We make hip-hop and they give us trip-hop.

If you follow me through the next few lines of controlled ramble I will buy you a beer in addition to one for reading this altogether in the first place. Hip-hop owes its existence to the incredible funk bands of the 70s and 80s like The Ohio Players, The Meters, and The Isley Brothers or R&B legends like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield. After enjoying this music as much as their parents, the subsequent generation created hip-hop by taking the catchiest 4 bar snippets, repeating them in a loop, and rapping/crooning over this to create a collage of intelligently aggregated samples drafted from this fruitful garden (like No Diggety by Blackstreet, which nips the opening 4 bars of the Bill Withers tune Grandma’s Hands). This technique bled into club music in England starting with the 1987 M/A/R/R/S hit Pump Up The Volume*. Trip-hop used this very same sample based method, but with a dramatically emphasized downtempo approach. Critics called it “trippy” or “dubby†”, virtually falling in love with it’s use of pop culture collage and ability to make urban tinged music safe to play over the speakers in The Gap. It is slow, beautiful, and cinematically noir. It evokes the image of those who stuck around after the frenetic beats of the dance floor have long been silenced.

Bristol, England is the city where it began. It started with an art collective called The Wild Bunch making beats for the drug-addled crowd at a club called the Dug Out. The first label to extract it out of the city was 4th and Broadway (who also released the M/A/R/R/S cut) and later Mo’ Wax and Ninja Tune. Critics clearly tired of the genre when this production aesthetic was adopted by nearly every mainstream pop act in the galexy in subsequent years well into the 00’s. Just take a look at the awful pitchfork.com reviews for Tricky’s albums, a man who pretty much brought the genre to the world’s attention. As for relevant albums, Massive Attack’s Blue Lines and Soul II Soul’s magnificently named Club Classics Vol. 1 are top works at the beginning of the movement. The peak of the fervor includes Portishead’s Dummy (Bristolians), Björk’s Post, and Tricky’s individual effort Maxinquaye as highlights.

Trip-hop is a beautiful and refreshingly simple style of music. However, the genre’s efficient production inevitably drifting into the mainstream begs the question: is collage the only thing left? We live with our faces pointed into the open end of a media fire hose. Consumers read duplicate news headlines from different outlets, re-share and re-post quotes/videos/events between social media platforms ad infinum, and in the end become collage artists themselves by reshaping their own experience for their own micro-audience and validation. I won’t pretend this blog is anything different, but what can we hope for now in terms of artistic originality? Original filtration?

Massive Attack – Unfinished Sympathy https://youtu.be/PQQ8bVQbxAc

Soul II Soul – Keep On Movin’ https://youtu.be/LEHqOfKeabc

Portishead – Glory Box https://youtu.be/8uciibl0rcs

Björk – Army Of Me https://youtu.be/1_ONSN7ppJU

Tricky – Pumpkin https://youtu.be/oFPW4M93uYM

*This was in the middle of the “acid house” dance music thing that was happening in England involving gallons of drugs that slightly threatened to shove British guitar pop off of the throne of temporary global dominance. David Cavanagh mentions this in his seminal work about Alan McGee and the Cool Britannia phenomenon entitled My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize.

†Dub, from what I can gather, is the same technique of sample grabbing but rather than American funk bands it exploits the equally brilliant world of reggae recordings from Jamaica in the 70’s pioneered by Lee “Scratch” Perry, who is a legend and worth a peek.

Allanah

She has participated in TI-83+ as a keyboardist/vocalist and currently Madd Comrades as a vocalist and guitarist.

She likes Neutral Milk Hotel, Television, Kander and Ebb, Talking Heads, The Jesus Lizard, Nation Of Ulysses, Misfits, Meat Puppets, Beck, and Harry Smith’s Folk Anthology when she runs out of ideas.

Conversation:

M: Theatrical music is something you are always humming or singing. When it comes on the radio or pops up in any capacity you pretty much know the tunes note-for-note and word-for-word. What makes theatrical music so special?

L: I grew up performing in stage productions since I was 6 and the only thing I listened to for the entirety of junior high was the musical Rent, which you should look into. Theatrical music is special because it allows you to inhabit a role written by someone else trying to show you a character, a being, a creature that has a form of expression and a life that the writer has all imagined. Can you inhabit that specific role and express it? It provides the tools to feel the music and feel the moment without thinking about the words as they are already sitting on your tongue and known by heart. So inevitably what happens with original music, personally, is that I similarly try to write some semblance of a role. It has words, a vision, a specific feeling and a space to creatively perform, but it is my own and that is where the expression lies. What is the ‘scene’ trying to be created for the an original song?

M: In terms of words/lyrics, who do you feel like are your favorites?

L: When I first listened to Sleater-Kinney I felt like they were heady, esoteric, but poetically inspiring. One Beat is my favorite album from them. The words are multi-syllabic and intelligent, but as a whole it always remains highly intelligent. The fact that the band comprises of just two guitars and a drummer makes it especially intense and puts the singing right up front. I also get reminded of Nation of Ulysses, who can bleed into actual slam poetry coupled with real punk power. This juxtaposition also reminds me of Misfits because of Danzig’s crooner-type singing coupled with punk makes for a powerful recipe. They have a bizarre doo-wop thing going, too, and it seems like rockabilly bands try to achieve this same contrast but not nearly as effectively.

M: Sometimes you profess your love of very old American folk music. Why?

L: I love the old style of language from another era, the kind of religious language that harkens back to another time. There is a great band that used to be based out of Shreveport called Gashcat and they use this in a song called Leach. When you listen to the old Alan Lomax recordings of regional American folk songs they are all generally biblical/religious in nature and the words are beautifully hymnal and simple.

Neutral Milk Hotel – Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone https://youtu.be/LO-zSxWRSVI

Television – Friction https://youtu.be/RwrCUEMl76U

Kander & Ebb – Maybe This Time (Cabaret) http://youtu.be/8hpUn46oVpg

Talking Heads – Thank You For Sending Me An Angel https://youtu.be/vP7GVC7Dbiw

The Jesus Lizard – Inamorata https://youtu.be/7u7OiIVwur4

Sleater-Kinney – One Beat https://youtu.be/TpLhrLzSaFQ

Nation Of Ulysses – N-Sub Ulysses https://youtu.be/QtPKO1DHo2w

Meat Puppets – Lake of Fire https://youtu.be/1SNqzKfbym8

Beck – Steal My Body Home https://youtu.be/eQkW3rerjoc

 

 

Twee: A Twee Piece

The Almighty Googz defines twee as a derogatory coined by the British to mean “excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental.” It goes on to state the origin of the term as a child’s mispronunciation of the word ‘sweet’. Furthermore, it presents a color line graph depicting its usage starting with the middle of the 19th century which struck me as interesting but excessive and I moved on with my life.

This does a fine job of at least setting the stage for nailing down a clear definition of twee music, if it indeed exists. The term is usually the utterance of guitar music connoisseurs that also love Morrissey or Paul McCartney and boast a high tolerance to sugary pop music in general. I can’t actually tell you what makes a certain style of guitar pop music ‘twee’ other than its overstated accessibility and its understated irony, but as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said “There are known knowns, things that we know we know…” We can start with that, right?

There are towering twee artists that create a sort of “stadium” twee, such as The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart or The Dum Dum Girls. On the other hand there exists the subdued and breathless ramblings of The Softies, who would rather play in your living room on a Tuesday night than anything resembling the Frank Erwin Center in the slightest. Nowadays, charisma gets thrown into the mix in the case of The Drums, Jens Lekman, or Girls (we’ll argue later). This was hot stuff during the 80’s in England with the rise of Orange Juice, The Pastels, the brief run of Close Lobsters, and the genre-creating C86 compilation by the publication NME. The labels that printed this music had pious names like Sarah Records, Postcard Records, K Records, and Slumberland.

I can tell you that it is definitely the best kind of music to play at your retail establishment or seduce someone that was badly picked on in high school. My pal Ryan, a forthcoming interviewee, is virtually an academic in this field and was the one who opened my eyes to this perpetually rose-tinted world while we worked together at a coffeeshop. His technique was to mercilessly play The Smith’s for six months straight until I admitted that they were great. After he was assured of my personal revelation, he began a confident walk-through of a universe that suggests dusty toy instruments, Super 8 footage of seagulls on the beach, impeccable glasses/cardigan combinations, and not a jock in sight for miles.

On the surface, it is out-and-out pop music but with an intelligently sad and endearing angle. The heartbreaking part is how it invokes the feeling of being taken away again, body and soul, back to youth or maybe a youth you never had. The version with yourself as the unlikely protagonist. Isn’t this what we seek out of music? We all use it to escape, future or past tense. Jacques Attali, a French economist, said:

“Music is prophecy. It’s styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.”

Orange Juice – Blue Boy https://youtu.be/0qz9Uqk55Jo

Action Painting! – These Things Happen https://youtu.be/Fsm-OcDuxFU

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – Beautiful You https://youtu.be/eQck_JOB3LY

The Softies – Count To Ten https://youtu.be/lptJScg9wpI

Brighter – Killjoy http://youtu.be/VVmTux3VH9Y

Jens Lekman- Your Arms Around Me https://youtu.be/NIwIAbcLFhI

Unrest – Cherry Cream On https://youtu.be/9M2iRTe6-Tg

Caleb

He has participated in International Waters, COOL Serbia, Heavenly Beat, and currently Dress as a drummer.

He likes The Church, 7 Seconds, GoGoGo Airheart, Nicholas Nicholas, Sean Nicholas Savage, Burzum, Prince, Michael Jackson, Ramona Lisa, TOPS, Cattle Decapitation and listening to 96.3 KKMJ when he runs out of ideas.

Conversation:

M: We are perpetually engaged in an endless discussion about artists with large bodies of work that also innovate. There are many artists who offer large bodies of work but do not innovate whatsoever and only regurgitate themselves over and over again out of relevancy.

C: David Byrne and The Talking Heads are the first thing I think of when I defend that idea. After the Talking Heads work David Byrne went on to make a whole string of albums of expansive pop, which would normally be lame, but his work has never gone down in quality. His solo albums are a quality listen all the way through. A good example is the album Feelings.

M: What makes them timeless? They’re a pop/funk band, right? You have roots in much harder music playing in punk bands growing up. How did you fall in love with David Byrne?

C: No way, it’s punk! More Music about Food And Buildings is a punk album. The razor sharp, angular guitars and easy two-part arrangements are punk. The quality of the bass/drum work on Talking Heads records tricks you into thinking your listening to disco or just plain pop rock.

M: Well, speaking of pop, I catch you listening to 96.3 often, especially if you are driving us somewhere. Do you listen to that to balance out the your nostalgia for punk albums?

C: I like rhythmically driven music and the music on that station is completely driven by that principal alone. It’s simple. Beat, then a bass line, then some beautiful singing + harmonies, always vocal driven. There is a certain innocence to that kind of R&B pop music, always with the vocal as the main instrument like in the case of Caroline Polacek or John Maus, with his really grandiose lo-fi pop or even further with Sean Nicolas Savage stuff. It’s like riding on the back of Falcor or some kind of dragon-wiener dog. It’s escapism and completely mindless, but very beautiful with the simple structure.

The Church – Reptile http://youtu.be/uCPC_5j1Few

7 Seconds – Spread http://youtu.be/zmH1_xaQ-vg

GoGoGo Airheart – Here Comes Attack http://youtu.be/reJ6paO6pDM

Nicholas Nicholas – Wrong (album) http://youtu.be/XxjgluhW4mY

Sean Nicholas Savage – Heartless http://youtu.be/h9y7PMmlpK8

Burzum – Dunkelheit http://youtu.be/DPyOhP1GTRQ

Micheal Jackson – Don’t Stop ‘Til you Get Enough http://youtu.be/yURRmWtbTbo

Ramona Lisa – Dominic http://youtu.be/BVPjTC0IGWU

TOPS – Change of Heart http://youtu.be/zBXI9_-sRMc

Cattle Decapitation – Kingdom of Tyrants http://youtu.be/6mgNLE4GHvk