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The Church Of Me
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Kissing in the churchyard, I know a righteous woman
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Monday, September 30, 2002
D’ANGELO
It would be wrong to think of D’Angelo as a musical conservative, a nu-soul Wynton Marsalis. Well, semi-wrong anyway. He looks back at what has preceded him with a great deal of reverence, but utilises their elements and pushes the spirits of their perpetrators forward. This is made abundantly clear on the sleevenote to his second (and to date most recent) album, 2000’s Voodoo, where the author (which I suspect is D’Angelo, referring to himself in the third person) states: “…most of my peers seem to idolise Donald Trump more than Sly Stone…they don’t seem to realise that Jimi Hendrix was and is a sonic Bill Gates. Oh shit, don’t make me call no names.” In fact he does such a pretty thorough analysis of himself, anticipating how other people are going to receive his work/vocal expression, quoting the expected antecedents (Prince, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, the aforementioned Hendrix), pre-empting criticisms, that it would seem to leave little else for this writer to evaluate.
The first thing which struck me on his 1995 debut album, Brown Sugar, was the bells which serve as additional percussion/punctum on the opening title track. The ringing undertow evokes memories of Pharaoh Sanders’ epic workouts such as “Upper and Lower Egypt” or “Prince of Peace,” an inheritance from the ‘60s New Thing. This gives a spiritual layer to the extremely carnal emotions which D’Angelo is expressing in the song itself. Musically, as with most of his work, it is restrained yet simmering, the passion sonically muted but perceptible. It’s as if the musicians are trying to play as quietly as possible. D’Angelo himself has a smoothly persuasive voice which can still hover deliciously on the verge of ecstatic breakthrough when that point is reached; rather like Prince, but without the gender-playing. The studio chatter at the beginning immediately reminds us of Marvin Gaye, but more “Got To Give It Up” than “What’s Going On?” – this is a voice in search of someone to connect with.
There frankly isn’t much to say about D’Angelo’s lyrics alone; set down in print, they can look pretty well like anyone’s stock repartee of soul parlance. The magic is how the contours and U-bends of his voice and the already surrendered music negotiate the words and enable feelings to be expressed which the words in themselves could not hope to contain. So the title track outlines his desire; “Alright” admits that “we may have an understanding, but that’s okay,” arguments will always be overcome by our deeper love; “Jonz In My Bonez” has a slightly less malleable rhythm and gives D’Angelo the opportunity to soliloquise on his fundamental uncertainty about his role in the world and in life; “Me And Those Dreamin’ Eyes Of Mine” expresses passion for a love which is as yet unrequited; while “Shit Damn Motherfucker” manages even to make adultery and murder sound strangely seductive. Here D’Angelo finds his wife in bed with his best friend, is more bewildered than angry; when he shoots both of them, he continues to sound confused, as though he had to do it to conform to the soul ballad template. Even as the police lead him away to the fadeout, you still feel that when he whimpers, “Why am I wearin’ handcuffs?” he’s in the middle of S&/orM congress with his wife.
The second side is of a much more straightforwardly positive frame of mind; here D’Angelo is content simply to celebrate love. “Smooth” is a selfless song where he has doubts about his own sexual capabilities and is overwhelmed by the Other’s patience and receptiveness (“How can you stand to take things so slow?”). The cover of Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’” is leisurely and blissful; hear how those backing vocals lope half a beat behind the rhythm to emphasise the feeling. “When We Get By” has an ineffable swing (and the vaguest of psychedelic references in “chocolate lemonade” unless that’s meant to be a double entendre) with a laconic lyric (“You scratch mine/And I’ll scratch your back sugar”). “Lady” is a sumptuous burner which celebrates unequivocal love, while the final “Higher” sees he and the Other ascending “higher than the sky above” and is almost gospel sex (“Please give us strength Lord to fight our battles/and we can walk on the streets of gold”) which for the first time on this album acknowledges the outside world. In summary, it is a fairly comprehensive musical analysis of the various stages of the positive aspects of love; not ignoring the existence of negative ones, but with enough faith to know that these can always be overcome if the positive is strong enough.
It was necessary to caress the brake a little; compared to the primary-coloured garish in-your-faceness of contemporaneous R&B in the mid-‘90s, this suggested a different, possibly slower but more colourful and varied route for soul music to take. If Prince were the Coltrane of nu-soul, D’Angelo would be the Wayne Shorter; simultaneously more oblique yet in a strange way also more direct.
It took some while for D’Angelo to follow this up; his next album, Voodoo, did not appear for another five years. Right from its opening, the grooves are audibly much harder, much more assertive. As with Brown Sugar, the first track “Playa Playa” opens with studio chatter, but here it is less amiable and more ambitious, perhaps more ominous. Here, for the first time, D’Angelo feels that he has to throw down a gauntlet. “I see right through your riddle…dirt’s our secret weapon…we came here 2 rip shit/strip U of your clout.” No seduction going on here. No perceptible Other, either, apart from The World In General. That is emphasised by the brutal psychedelic groove of “Devil’s Pie,” all stuttering, pointillistic beats and swooning guitar and synth fragments. With the opening line “Fuck the slice we want the pie” this is indeed D’Angelo against the World. “Demons screaming in my ear/All my anger all my fear/If I holler let them here/In this spinning sphere.” It is his Declaration of Principles for which he is evidently prepared to die: “With eighty five dumb and blind/There can be no compromise.” And there is no shelter in love here.
Love, or a variant of it, enters on “Left & Right,” but this is equally brutal and uncompromising. “So what U want?” D’Angelo asks. “Smack your ass, pull your hair/And I’ll even kiss U way down there/U know that I will/Think I won’t?” The rap by guests Method Man and Redman seem to undermine everything that D’Angelo has built up previously (“I’ll fuck you, brown sugar, in front of that fibreglass window”).
Suddenly, it stops, as though D’Angelo realises that he has gone too far, and we return to the grooves familiar from Brown Sugar with the next two tracks. However, on “The Line” his love is still confused, equating orgasm with revolution (“I’m gonna put my finger on the trigger/I’m gonna pull it and we gon’ see what the deal…the pressure is on/From every angle political 2 personal/Will I hang or be left hangin’, will I fall off/Or will it be bangin’?/I say it’s up 2 the man upstairs”). And on “Send It On” there is no ambiguity at all: “Send it up/send it through/sent it right back 2 U.” The music is seductive but the lyrics almost anti-sexual in their expressed desire.
On “Chicken Grease” an electronic fog smothers his voice as he goes through a bizarre dance routine which may or may not be a sociological metaphor. Back to musically familiar ground on “One Mo’Gin” with a sideways rhythm which seesaws between, and can be interpreted as either, a slow 6/8 ballad and 85 bpm midtempo hip hop propulsion, where D’Angelo sees a former flame and, although now with another, misses what they had and wants to renew it. On “The Root” he is on his own and not liking it: “I need someone 2 hold me/Bring me back 2 life, B4 I’m dead…from the alpha of creation/2 the end of all time” over a stealthy, stalking rhythm with odd guitar tangents shooting off from it, and a vocal which floats in complete disregard of metre or bar lines. Some things are more important. This in turn is rejected and his refreshed self is reflected on the livelier (and played by a live band) “Spanish Joint.”
The cover version on this album is of Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” and it is cut from exactly the same cloth as his version of “Cruisin’” – benign and welcoming. The bebop horn lines which close the track signify an increasing warmth in the music.
“Greatdayndamornin’/Booty” is luscious and perhaps of everything discussed here closest to Marvin Gaye; lots of echo-laden vocal lines interweaving a web of comfort and solace (the introductions to “Alright” and “Lady” from Brown Sugar have the same effect). Then the album climaxes with “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” a soul-delic surfeit of emotion which is worthy to stand beside the Prince who was capable of “Condition of the Heart” and “Adore” – here a fully reborn D’Angelo pleads, prays to the Other, asks for understanding, for love without conditions. And in the final 90 seconds of the song the ambience escalates dramatically as a chorus and his lead voice suddenly swing into magnified focus and proclaim his love and worship of the Other in torrents of ecstatic rain…a more straightforward equivalent of Lewis Taylor’s “Damn,” and as with that masterpiece, this ends with an abrupt cut-off.
But the album ends, not with resolution, but with a move forward; the track “Africa” wherein D’Angelo suddenly turns to face the World, this time with the intent of engaging with it. And it is the most avant-garde thing he’s done to date; separate lines of percussion, guitars and vocals which are never quite in synch with each other and are therefore dislocating and disturbing. The track is bookended by rootless ambient keyboard/electronic lines; yet again, back to the swirling waters, back underground to search for the maternal body as all children end up doing. The view of life as an ongoing loop is underlined by the final, brief sequence where the whole album appears to be winding backwards at high speed; an old life flashing before the eyes of a new one.
. . .
Friday, September 27, 2002
BETH GIBBONS
One tends to forget the impact that a voice can have when one has not heard it anew for some while. In the case of Beth Gibbons, it's now five years since we last heard her singing something new - on the second, self-titled album by Portishead (four years if you count the Live At Roseland NYC orchestral reworkings in 1998) - and from the disappointing evidence of the latter, you could be forgiven for not expecting very much from her return. It's not that Portishead was in itself a bad album, but the title was symbolic of the aesthetic cul-de-sac into which Barrow, Gibbons and Utley appeared to have reversed into; essentially more of the same, and sometimes bordering on self-parody to such a degree that it's unsurprising that Simon Williams in NME unironically hailed it as "a great Goth album"! You wondered whether this project could go anywhere. Nor did Roseland really resolve the dilemma, merely adding to existing songs rather than opening up a new direction, apart from Gibbons' Janis Joplin-style epiphanic wailing on "Sour Times." It wasn't perhaps their fault; three years after the consolidation of a revolution that was Dummy, Portishead, as with Kraftwerk before them and the Aphex Twin after them, had found themselves in the unenviable position of music having caught up with them, instead of their still being ahead.
But I am still interested in Beth Gibbons' soul. She never does interviews, and the lyrical hints dropped on confessionals like "Biscuit" suggest some great gulf of otherwise unexpressed pain. So it is important that we know what she is thinking now.
While Portishead have not disbanded, Gibbons has been at work on a one-off project with ex-Talk Talk bassist and O'Rang frontman Paul Webb, the latter using the pseudonym of Rustin' Man. The resulting album, Out Of Season, is due for release at the end of October; but having listened to an advance copy I can tell you now that this is a record which will quietly devastate you.
As Dummy started with a song called "Mysterons," so Out Of Season starts with a song called "Mysteries." A new start? Vague foghorns and waves can be heard distantly; and then a choir, like the nymphs in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, or simply there to comfort. An acoustic guitar enters, and above it the voice of Beth Gibbons; very quiet, palpably trembling, palpably singing a folk song. There is the same sort of tiny but irreducible unease which you get from the songs in The Wicker Man, but amongst other things it's a surprise to hear Gibbons' West Country burr come through her singing much more strongly than it does in Portishead. The words are no less decipherable, and my copy didn't come with a set of lyrics, so like the Cocteau Twins you have to listen hard and try to hear the voice as an instrument.
What I do know is that Gibbons on this album muses on isolation, growing old and mortality. Much is made of the beauty of nature and also the grief which it can bring. Listen to the song "Sand River" where she alternately celebrates and laments autumn. It immediately calls to mind that especially bright but poignantly shadowed shade of yellow/orange which comes with autumnal sunlight; acknowledgement of things past, but readiness for things to come.
The only time on the album when the volume is really turned up is on the comparatively straightforward R&B tune "Tom The Model" which doubtless will appear as the single. Fine of its sort, but really too Jools Holland/real ale for my tastes, and something of a compromise in the context of the rest of the album.
The song "Snow" with just voice and piano, is special, however, and is fit to stand alongside the Joni Mitchell of Blue. A lament for things she'll never have, a foreboding of the coming winter. Like Joni, she can plead and seduce and yet still sound in control of herself. This beautifully dangles above the abyss of pure silence.
On "Romance" we enter what initially seems to be a Billie Holiday pastiche, complete with a Nelson Riddle-style orchestration (Webb comments that "any of these arrangements could have been done in the '40s," which isn't quite the case, but we'll come to that). Halfway through, however, it dovetails into Beth singing "That's not me" over a very Portishead-esque unresolved minor chord sequence which could never have been dreamt of in 1956. Distant electronic and guitar noises shimmer in the far distance to remind us what century this is (see, I told you we'd come to it). Webb on this album always seems ready to derail our aural expectations with unexpected touches.
On the next three tracks, we return to quiet meditations over folk guitars. "Resolve" is a sober reflection on ageing in the "May You Never" direct-speaking style, but the off-kilter effects on "Spyder" (a Richard Thompson influence?) reminds us of the psychosis which lurks beneath the best of British folk-rock. You could be put on your guard by a song called "Drake" - I mean, this week we've already had Beck, ahem, paying tribute to "River Man" on Sea Changes - but again this doesn't quite go where you'd expect, and again harmonically and emotionally isn't really that far away from Portishead. The increasingly familiar environment becomes more shocking when you see it in full, like a giant creature rising from the waves seen close up.
(and, incidentally, if you want a real radical reworking of "River Man" hear Norma Waterstone's to say the least startling version on her last album)
The environment becomes even more apparent with the lengthy "Funny Time Of Year." Everything around Beth which was previously familiar - musically - now becomes gradually alienating again. Electronics creep in subtly. The vocal is subliminally subverted. A union is achieved, finally, between what Talk Talk achieved on Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock and what "trip hop" is still, in my view, capable of achieving.
Finally, on the song "Rustin' Man," we find ourselves back in the world of Dummy. Gibbons' soul having been naked and intimate for the rest of the album; she now decides it's too painful and retreats behind her cover of electronic fog. A distended post-blues soliloquy which wouldn't have been out of place on Walker's Tilt. The only end possible to this deeply touching but profoundly unsettling record.
. . .
Thursday, September 26, 2002
SCOTT WALKER - THE ROAD TO "TILT"
Part 1: Sometimes You Have To Start In The Middle
"The Electrician" in 1978 was the first I learned about the OTHER Scott Walker. I was prompted to investigate it by Chris Bohn's review of the Walker Brothers' Nite Flights album in MM, wherein he proclaimed that the four Scott songs contained on this album "make Bowie's Low sound High." I did not think that one could get any more alienated than Low, so had to listen.
Of these four songs, "Shutout" and "Nite Flights" still seem to me to have achieved that neurotic disco/pop interface which Magazine were perhaps too foreknowing to do (even though the guitar solos are the equivalent of Dave Formula's sometimes overstated and underfilled keyboard playing). "NIte Flights" in particular is the New Romantic blueprint, and the likes of Ure's Ultravox, pre-Sakamoto Japan, Simple Minds and A Flock of Seagulls constructed entire careers on the back of it (the "be my love" swooning vocal in the chorus IS Ure's Ultravox).
The other two songs are of a far more disturbing bent. Compare the use of Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part 2" in Walker's "Shutout" and Magazine's "The Light Pours Out Of Me" from the latter's contemporaneous Real Life. Magazine use the central guitar riff but elongate it over bar lines, as if they are trying to make it unpop; Walker takes the rhythm track, amplifies and distorts it to hell, overlays an out-of-synch, bitonal vocal harmony on top, and at the bottom adds and underscores the whole performance with a vast, terrible bass echo, as if a Bosendorfer piano had just crashed down from the top floor of the WTC. "Deaf, dumb, blind/Deaf, dumb, blind!" goes the anti-pop chorus chant - an indirect recalling of Pharaoh Sanders which is immediately brought to mind as the track suddenly but briefly opens up for a dense sustained string chord over which Alan Skidmore's bad-tempered atonal tenor sax rants through the flames caused by the sudden sunlight before being buried again.
Then there's "The Electrician." Just over six minutes long, and even in 1978 sounding like nothing else on the planet at that time, be it Pere Ubu or Sham 69. A sopranino-register atonal but shimmering string sustenato, echoed by a synthesiser, hovers like the remnants of a burst cloud over the ears of the listener, punctuated by a regular one-note, immense bass pulse. Scott and John's voices enter almost reluctantly: "Baby it's slow/When lights go low/There's no help/No." Then the drums start up, the strings become stately; it's turning into another Walker Brothers ballad - but what are they singing? "Screaming oh you mambos kill me and kill me and kill me. When I jerk the handle, you'll die in your dreams...you'll thrill me and thrill me and thrill me." A political prisoner somewhere in South America (Chile? Argentina?) strapped to the chair and about to be executed. The allegorical interface between sex and death. It stops again, with the same bass pulse, a brief shake of castanets - you have died, it is over, you are free.
And Dave MacRae's strings suddenly escalate into a lavish, harmonious major chord of release, harp cascading, Big Jim Sullivan's 12-string in the foreground. He can now fly. The song then comes to what would seem its logical close, the pain forgotten, freedom now resolved, as Sullivan's flamenco arpeggios reach concord with the orchestra and come to a final harmony.
No it doesn't. As soon as that disappears, the opening discord re-emerges, this time with distant percussive thumps (from the next cell?). The voices return with the "Baby it's slow" refrain, this time at three-quarters of its original speed. The jailers remaining prisoners? Or the equivalent of the closing sequence of Gilliam's Brazil, where Jonathan Pryce's Everyman appears to have gained his freedom, only to find that he is in reality still strapped to a chair, and will probably remain so forever. Did someone say something about a cloak of loneliness?
It's perhaps understandable that Walker elected to hand over the rest of the album to the other two "Brothers" (and it's perhaps symbolic that on every track no more than two of them appear together; there is no track featuring all three); what was in these four songs would have been enough to exhaust anyone.
Part 2: As With Lanark, We Now Have To Return To The Beginning
I didn't seek out any of Walker's back catalogue at the time; it was mostly unavailable apart from extremely naff-looking MoR cover version albums. There were other things I had to sort out then. Only when, as a Teardrop Explodes fan, I read Julian Cope in the NME in early 1981 telling Morley about how brilliant Walker's solo work was and announcing his intention of releasing a compilation called Fire Escape In The Sky: The Godlike Genius Of Scott Walker, did the man come into my orbit again.
The compilation, in its slate-grey cover with green lettering, deliberately devoid of "persona," eventually came out in August of that year. I had been bereaved a month previously and was about to start university a month hence. At the bridge, therefore, between my previous life and the next one. I bought it but for various non-musical reasons didn't get around to playing it until I actually was at university. It hit me like a thunderbolt, right from the opening track "Such A Small Love," which begins with another unresolved string drone from which Walker's voice emerges like a foghorn. "Mist falls," he says, decisively and unpushingly. I was hooked right from there, as was everyone else to whom I played it.
In the fullness of time the four albums which he recorded for Philips in 1967-9, Scott 1, Scott 2, Scott 3 and Scott 4 (the determined minimalism is a hallmark of Walker's approach) did become available on CD. Listening to them in sequence is a fascinating exercise, if only to assess how quickly and with how much determination Walker developed the sort of aesthetic which he wanted to project to the world in lieu of himself (or even to the inside of his own soul). Scott 1 contains perhaps the most tortured songs he came up with at that time, "Such A Small Love" and "Always Coming Back To You," both laments for dead love affairs (or, in the latter, perhaps a dead lover?) in which he constantly questions whether, even in his ruin, it was worth lamenting. The other aspect of his work at the time - and doubtless a consequence of his fascination with Jacques Brel, two or three of whose songs appear on each of the first three albums - was illuminating and sculpturing a luxurious vision of redemption from the world of lowlife. Consider "Montague Terrace In Blue," a touching hymn to belief in the strength of a relationship having to be lived in a dump of a bedsit. "But we know, don't we?" Or do we?
Scott 2 moves away from this angle slightly, to project a more cinematic, perhaps less immediately personal but no less passionate picture of the subjects of his songs. Consider the harassed Perrin-like businessman of "The Amorous Humphrey Plugg" who, after slipping on his kitchen's "newly-waxed floor," appears to fracture his skull and die, in the course of which he has visions of the afterlife, of "dying in nine angels' arms," of his relief in leaving the world behind, of not quite having left it yet but on his way to the next, better one ("Doreen of the candles"). Or the lament for a balloon in "Plastic Palace People," which doubles as an allegory for the corruption of innocence, as though something unspeakable has happened to the child who is supposed to hold the balloon. As in Bucks Fizz's "The Land Of Make Believe," an avowedly anti-Thatcherite song sung unknowingly by Tory voters, the reality behind the sugar-coated facade will ultimately kill the child (listen to that girl reciting the poem at the end of "LOMB": "He came today, but had to go...to visit you? You'll never know" as though she has already been murdered).
Scott 3 fuses these two aspects of his music and provides some closure to his work thus far, and is of the three the most satisfying of them, largely because, apart from three Brel covers at the album's close, he avoids the cover versions (from Tim Hardin to Tony Bennett) which take up a good half of the first two albums, and which, though fine in themselves, divert one's attention from the main thrust of his work; even with the Brel stuff, you want to hear what Scott himself has to say. Scott 3 started out as a vague concept album about individual lives in a block of flats, and this is still largely apparent in the album. Nothing startled me, though, as much as the shock of hearing, at the beginning of the opening track, "It's Raining Today," the exact same sustained string discord which opens "The Electrician," but here incorporated into a post-Sinatra ballad musing on the impermanence of relationships and even of people ("The street corner girl's a trembling leaf").
Scott 3 is where Walker found a conduit to connect the emotions of Sinatra's unassailable Capitol ballad albums of the '50s with Gordon Jenkins (particularly 1959's shattering No One Cares, which, though marketed as another Sinatra saloon song album, should have had a cover of Sinatra weeping at a gravestone; it really should have been called Songs For Dead Lovers, a Kaddish for the bereaved) with the bedsit fixations of those who were to follow him. Walker's portraits of losers here are sharp but never mocking, always compassionate; the sad old maid of "Rosemary" ("That's what I want - a new shot at life! But my coat's too thin, and my feet won't fly") or the transvestite of "Big Louise" ("Didn't time sound sweet yesterday? In a world full of friends, you lose your way"), ultimately the Other ("Winter Night," the closest he comes to a homage to Sinatra/Jenkins) and beyond that himself, in "Two Weeks Since You've Gone" ("and if I close my eyes long enough, will you happen to me again?"). With the final performance of "If You Go Away" it is as if Walker has done his work here and is ready to move on.
Scott 4 is where he starts to become, in one sense more abstract ("Boy Child" and "Angel of Ashes"), in another sense more overtly political, for the first time ("The Old Man's Back Again"), in a third sense more carnal ("Duchess," or what happens to the previous album's Rosemary from the Other's perspective should her dreams come true). And for the first time he leans more in a "rock" direction.
Part 3: By Necessity, An Intermission
No need here to go into the wreckage of Walker's subsequent career in depth: it would be unkind and unhelpful. No real compulsion to stay and observe the unfocused reruns of tracks 1-10 of 1970's 'Till The Band Comes In, most of which sound like rejected outtakes from Scott 4; nor the nice but purpose-free MoR cover version ventures like The Moviegoer (unlike Sinatra, he could never really lose himself in other people's songs, he was in some ways too imposing); nor the attempts at C&W-goes-existential on records like Stretch and We Had It All (GPand Grievous Angel, in a nutshell, they weren't); nor even the momentarily successful MoR comeback with the Brothers in the mid-'70s with "No Regrets" and which, as detailed above, terminated with Nite Flights.
The next brief stop has to be in 1984, hot on the heels of an unexpected cameo in a Britvic TV advert (exactly the sort of second-guessing thing you'd expect him to do), when a new solo album, Climate of Hunter, finally emerged on Virgin. Appropriately the cover shot makes him look like a startled rabbit.
And, while naturally applauding an album which can leash together Mark Knopfler, Evan Parker and Billy Ocean under the same roof, Climate has never seemed to me an entirely satisfying record, and perhaps even a step back from Nite Flights to explore the implications of Scott 4 further. Now it seems like a transitional record, a dry run for the astonishing one which was to come 11 years hence. The lurid close-up imagery of the opening "Rawhide" is certainly powerful, and the succeeding "Dealer," albeit a more measured-out rerun of "It's Raining Today" (musically if not lyrically), works largely due to what goes on behind Walker's voice, notably Evan Parker's surprisingly lyrical soprano solo (sounding more like Steve Lacy than Parker) and the Riley-esque minimalist double-tempo horn fanfares which appear towards the track's end. "Track Three," which incredibly was released as a single (as was, even more incredibly, "The Electrician"), does indeed feature quick-fire pointillistic backing vocals from Billy Ocean, shortly before he enjoyed his second career wind with "Caribbean Queen" et al, but sadly this makes the song sound like Joan Armatrading. And there are far too many dreary steppes of rock guitar on this album to climb over (mostly from Ray Russell - a pity Walker couldn't have worked with the incendiary Ray Russell who recorded Live At The ICA 1975 with Gary Windo, Harry Beckett et al), too much '80s flanged bass and treble-heavy drums. The record makes most impact when at its quietest: the ominous hum of "Track Six" which Parker's multiple saxes ignite with punctum, and the deadlier quiet of the closing reading of Tennessee Williams' "Blanket Roll Blues," where Walker is accompanied only by Knopfler's acoustic guitar. "And I took nobody with me/Not a soul" he concludes, meaningfully. Much as I'd like to believe Steve Lake's comments in MM at the time of this album being "a shotgun marriage between Scriabin and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer" - and how I wish this record was - it sadly isn't. Not quite.
The next one was, though.
Part 4: Tilt
Another 11 years we had to wait for this, following aborted sessions with Brian Eno, David Sylvian, Daniel Lanois and others. Sometimes it can take a quarter of a century for a butterfly truly to develop its specks.
It begins as undemonstrably as a record could begin, with a distant hum of 'celli, a plain minor chord and Walker's distant voice slowly approaching us: "Do I hear 21, 21, 21? I'll give you 21, 21,21." A farmer's market or just a meat rack? Remember how much Henchard sells his wife for at the beginning of The Mayor of Casterbridge. Something else - or more accurately someone else - is being bought here.
It is a slow lament for the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, a nighttime pick-up of a would-be lover. He may be driving to his death (as happened to the tormented homosexual Pasolini, beaten to death at hands still unknown in 1975). He seems to be surveying the talent on offer: "Don't go by a man (the sleeve says, though you could just as well substitute "buy" for "by") in this shirt/Go by (buy?) a man in that shirt." "Paolo (Walker sobs) take me with you...it was the journey of a life" even though the narrator "knew nothing of the horses/nothing of the threshers." Signified is piled upon signified in Walker's words now; there are no easy lonely-bedsit scenarios for the casual listener to grasp. He has gone beyond that. As with Beckett or Calvino, once you summon the nerve to climb that one extra step to understanding, you will be as one with the author's soul. This song is the nearest thing to a Scott Walker you might previously have known.
Doubters bail out at the next track, the uncompromising "The Cockfighter." Starting with Walker howling indistinctly at the moon, like the tramp in Scott 3's "Two Weeks Since You've Gone" who's "picking dustbins in the alley." But the careful intrusion of a celeste brings to mind another antecedent - Skip James, and his none-more-desolate blues laments of the early-mid '30s (never has anyone sung the words "I'm So Glad" with less uncertainty). Then a near-silent but sinister instruction "click...click
AND THE WHOLE FUCKING THING EXPLODES INTO AN INDUSTRIAL HOLOCAUST EVERYONE SAYS NINE INCH NAILS BUT THIS IS MORE TEST DEPT SPECIFICALLY THE UNACCEPTABLE FACE OF FREEDOM BRITAIN BEING DEMOLISHED IN 1986 SNOW BUT
OH YES
it's a beautiful niIIIIIIGGGGGHHHHHTTTTT yeah! Walker suddenly leers in your face.
It's the sex/death interface again. Excerpts from the transcripts of the trials of Queen Catherine and Adolf Eichmann are interspersed, linked: "Do you swear the breastbone was there? I saw it and made my escape." The song violently vacillates between studied quiet and howling torment, immense articulacy and inarticulate horror spectation.
As yet again the strings seem to indicate that the song will resolve into a major key to end, Walker says "she opened the tent to take a morsel of air" - the "breathe again" string harmony reappears - "before the sun came out..."
AND IT SMASHES ITS WAY TO OBLIVION ANDREW CROWSHAW'S WIND INSTRUMENTS SQUEAKING HOWLING HOARSELY BEHIND THE GRIND OF BODIES BEING COMPRESSED BETWEEN TWIN AXES
* * * *
"Bouncer See Bouncer" is punctuated by a booming yet distant percussion refrain (McGoohan's Rover preventing escape). "Spared - I've been spared," celebrates Walker's voice, "all the nickels and dimes...the trumpet Gabriel" with sudden violent exclamations of "DON'T PLAY THAT SONG FOR ME! (echoes of Aretha Franklin?) You WON'T play that song for me." What's important in this track (as with, in another dimension, Prince) is what Walker leaves out of the music. Listened to organically and joining the invisible dots, this could almost be a straight slow blues; the meter and vocal delivery fit exactly. But there is nothing in between other than a gaping space where humanity presumably once lurked.
Then, again, that string harmony suggests another brief respite; the narrator, rising above his circumstances, croons, beaming, "I love the season...right foot crossed to the left, left foot crossed over to the right." A prisoner, then, in bondage, strangely glad that he doesn't have to worry about earthly things any more, but equally glad that he hasn't been killed. The bouncing balloon motif returns. This song could go on forever.
"Manhattan" remains unclear to me. No doubt, with its references to "chief of police" and "white shirt, arms (or arm's?) in there somewhere (or even military "arms" in there somewhere)" one could envelop it with a lot of spurious post-9/11 relevance. The music arches grandly, however, the resonant organ of Westminster's Central Methodist Church sounding immense canyons before again disappearing into harmonic uncertainty.
"Face On Breast" is unequivocally about uncertainty of the Other. Casual sex or something else? Like everything else on this remarkable record, it achieves the feat of being sonically vast (Peter Walsh's production really does sound as if the music is occurring all around you) whilst being concerned about tiny actions in small, cramped spaces (Kafka!), the smallness conversely being amplified by the musical immensity. "You know how to whistle don't you/You just put your lips together and blow...THAT'S WHAT IT SAYS!" Walker's idea of a love song clearly being to drag himself beyonf cliche, a different angle from Scritti's "The 'Sweetest Girl'," but with the same intent. "What if I'm only pledging my love?" Walker paraphrases the doomed bastard Johnny Ace in the chorus. Pounding tribal drumming which could almost fit in with then-relevant drum 'n' bass; the askew whistling three-quarters of the way through the track underlines the fact that this is what Peter Gabriel COULD sound like if he were really serious about experimentation.
Things go deathly quiet for "Bolivia '95," a Greene/Lowry-like portrait of a ruined dictator, waiting for the world to close in on him. "Lemon bloody cola," he grumpily moans in the chorus (although sometimes seductively so, very like Prince on some of the choruses) while asking his "doc" to "sponge you down."
This is followed by "Patriot" which is subtitled "A Single" but never was (was he being ironic?). Over a shimmering Blue Nile major-teetering-on-minor sunrise-or-is-it? chord, carefully policed by John Gibling's bass (superb playijng from Gibling throughout the album, incidentally). Walker declaims at his own Customs gate "I brought nylons from New York...some had butterflies, some had specks." The song is of course about what the "patriot" is smuggling in beneath the nylons as the "chorus" makes abundantly clear. Again with a superb grasp of dynamics, the chorus roars in with John Barclay's undulating atonal trumpets, conjuring up memories both of Mongezi Feza on Wyatt's "Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road" and Parker on Climate's "Track Six," Walker exclaims, "he'll sell his arms to anyone." Arms to Irag? It was 1995, so this could have been on his mind. Once again the grandeur dissipates into small, whispered, snatched, atonal gestures patrolled by a piccolo and military drum, in which Walker repeatedly insists (reviving the drunkard from the beginning of "The Cockfighter") that he "never sold out." The tripartite structure is then repeated, but this time Walker reflects on "crippled fingers - some had clinging vines, some had specks" - the result of his arms-dealing. And for the final goodbye, the horror found on a "back road" with hordes of butterflies flying around what we daren't look at.
The most obviously "rock" track here is the title track "Tilt." Hard not to think, when listening to the unresolved guitar chordings and near-identical rhythmic approach, of what Jeff Buckley could have achieved had he not been so damned reserved. Here Walker laments a man who "when they made him, he broke the mould," to whom, again, something unutterable has happened (not Pasolini?). His mother stands in the green grass from "Farmer In The City," waiting for him and betraying nothing with her face. Guitars scream to fadeout something that Walker cannot.
And the logical conclusion of the whole quarter-century is that Walker is finally on his own. The epilogue "Rotary" is him and his guitar alone, though the latter sounds almost as if it is being hammered, like a dulcimer. A quiet, near-medieval lament - John Dowland waking up in Ground Zero - Walker will "string along" but will simultaneously "bite holes in the bullets." Where has all this got him? How many lives have been saved? Can we stop "it" from "bristling" or "pimpling"? All Walker knows is, "I've gotta quit." And, with those words, he does.
Envoi: Get You Back Home
My impression is that the logical thing for Walker to do next would be an entirely solo album, just him and his guitar, his own Oar. Perhaps if we are worthy enough to hear it, he will let us have it.
For how something positive can be drawn out of nihilistic environments, you will need to listen to how Walker produced Pulp's We Love Life, in many ways the transverse and yet the ultimate affirmation of Tilt. My review of this can be found on:
www.freakytrigger.co.uk/pulplovelife.html
. . .
Wednesday, September 25, 2002
ROBERT WYATT'S ROCK BOTTOM: THE SECOND GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE
It was his fault, of course. He was pissed. Trying to get out of a party via the kitchen window, forgetting that he was four floors up. The end result: paralysis, unable to play his beloved drumkit. He mused for a long time, listened for a longer time. Nick Mason from Pink Floyd, a long-standing mate of his, visited regularly, helped him out financially and urged him to go in the studio and record his thoughts when he was well enough. After long months, he was ready to marshal his thoughts in both lyrical and musical terms, and went into the studio with Mason as producer to make the 1974 album Rock Bottom.
On the original Virgin Records sleeve the cover illustration, by his wife the artist Alfreda Benge, shows a rear view of what is clearly meant to be Wyatt, his back to us, holding up a balloon in his right hand. Above the water you cannot see below the waist - he could be waving or drowning. Below the water you see, not a pair of legs, but a mass of octopus-like tentacles drifting widely into the ocean. So the inability to function "normally" in the world is replaced by the urge to return to the maternal waters. Or the urge to fly (the balloon) is frustrated by his earthly anchor (the tentacles/wheelchair).
Why, after nearly 30 years of familiarity with this barely 30-minute long record, does it still speak to me and cut me like no other record, with one exception (and you can read about that one exception in Stylus Magazine later this year), has ever managed to do? Even as a child, even if I had known nothing of his Soft Machine history or what he would later go on to do, I would have immediately known Wyatt to be a person of genius.
Perhaps it's because the subject matter of the record manages the extraordinary feat of being almost intolerably harrowing and yet hysterically whimsical at the same time. Perhaps it's because the record is a dissection of Wyatt's soul following his accident, and yet there is not one nanosecond of self-pity on it. He is reaching out to you and you cannot help but cling to him.
On a more prosaic level, it succeeds in uniting a pop framework with avant/improv elements as no other record (again, with the same one exception) has managed to do.
The opener "Sea Song" is literally an oceanic torch song. Wyatt expresses his thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness style, the music having to flow around where he wants the words to be. "Joking apart, when you're drunk you're terrific; when you're drunk I like you mostly late at night - you're quite all right. But I can't understand the different you in the morning, when it's time to play at being human for awhile. Please smile." The music then eddies into an unresolved sequence of whole tones; Wyatt's piano solo, and indeed his piano style, were unforgettably described by Steve Lake as "Cecil Taylor meets Monk at 16 rpm," here expressing the quiet fury fermenting beneath the waves, before Wyatt's voice placidly re-enters and says with resignation: "You'll be different in the spring, I know - you're a seasonal beast...your lunacy fits neatly with my own," answered by an Escalator-type choir before sailing off into the phenomenal finale where Wyatt finds words insufficient and breaks into his unreproduceable slow-motion vocal scatting (as he called it, "the theory of the longer line," the diametric opposite to the quick-fire syllabic pointillism employed by most "jazz" singers, Torme etc.) which touches upon Asian quarter-tones and at one powerful moment rises to a wailing crescendo which sounds like a newborn baby as the synthesisers swell up behind and around him.
(The make-do-and-mend choice of instrumentation throughout Rock Bottom is crucial to its overall impact. Wyatt mainly sticks to vocals and keyboards, and of the latter the most prominent is an odd Italian organ which he apparently bought dirt cheap and which I have never heard anywhere else, although some have tried to copy the sound. Unable to play his drumkit, he resorts to using whatever odds and ends he can find in the studio - on the sleeve, he is credited with playing, amongst other things, "Delfina's wineglass," "James' tray" and "a small battery." And largely he prefers to stick to this - a full drumkit, played by Laurie Allan, appears on two of the six tracks only)
The second song, "A Last Straw," is a more animated continuation of the same lost-at-sea theme. Here, as with elsewhere on the album, instead of indulging in lyrical cliches in order to obtain cheap poignancy, Wyatt sticks to his Lear-esque wordplay and can still manage to strike your heart with punctum - "reminds me of your rocky bottom/please don't wait for the paperweight" followed by "into the water we'll go head over heels" over a heartbreaking minor chord change to remind you that, physically, he can't do this any more. A rudimentary guitar appears (also played by Wyatt); he slides the notes to replicate the waves about to embrace or engulf him.
The track then goes straight into the deeply harrowing "Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road" punctUMed and powered by the multiple, hall-of-mirrors trumpets of Mongezi Feza. Poor Mongs, his soul already splitting into pieces, who was, barely 18 months after this record was made, to end up in Horton Hospital and die, unattended, of double pneumonia after wandering around the grounds in his pyjamas at night in the dead of winter. After smashing up a taxi with hallucinations that he was back in SA and the car was taking him back to be shot. Whose death hit Wyatt so hard that he barely did anything for the next five years. Here his trumpets explode, chuckle, caress and harass from all directions while the rhythm gathers and the lament begins "Don't say...oh gawd don't tell me...oh dear me...heavens above...oh no...I can't stand it STOP ME oh dearie me..." Wyatt working his way through banal, cliched expressions of pain, the face we put on to hide our real suffering. Finally it is all too much: "OH STOP IT STOP IT!" he screams
and then the track immediately starts going backwards with a new melody automatically created. This runs uninterrupted for a while and then Wyatt's voice creeps back in, improvising on the new melody:
"You see sometimes I know, I know. So why did I hurt you? I didn't mean to hurt you. But I'll keep trying, and I'm sure you will too."
This record's eye of the hurricane, what it actually must have felt like right at the moment of impact which paralysed him. At the song's death (with a new bassline added), Ivor Cutler surreally comes in with a mock-backwards recitation of part of the Wyatt poem which will be used to bring the album to an end.
After the storm, comes the contemplation. "Alife" (a life? Alfie? dedicated to his wife of course). Performed by Wyatt and Hugh Hopper, as well as a guitarist who isn't identified (is it a speeded up keyboard, or Hopper's bass speeded up? It actually sounds a lot like Mike Oldfield, who does make an unexpected appearance later in the album). After the soft billowing unhurried major-chord instrumental prelude, the song inevitably and smoothly evolves into a minor-key lament: "Na nip nop/Nip na noop/Nip nip folly balolley" he sings and continues in the same vein: "I can't forsake you or forsqueak you/Confiscate or maculate you you." How can someone sing what sounds like outtakes from Jabberwocky and make you weep uncontrollably? It is as if he's singing a lullaby to his Other in their own private language. In its superficial nonsensical veneer, this music comes awfully close to "the truth."
And if this is bliss, then it has to be subverted or negated; enter "Alifib" and first the bass clarinet, then the tenor sax, of another doomed bastard and future Carla Bley/Todd Rundgren right-hand man Gary Windo. The song starts boiling into a sardonic rage, Wyatt now spitting out and snarling the same words, mocking them as Windo squeaks behind him and finally emerges with a chaotic, screaming, howling tenor solo which acts as the point of release for the real grief. As the saxophone vanishes into high-register thin air, enter, suddenly, the Other (Alfreda Benge) arrives to sardonically but amiably deflate Wyatt's paradisical ideal: "I'm not your larder, or Alife your guarder...I'm your dear little dolly." The music resettles into brief repose, Windo's sax now purring with post-orgasmic satisfaction.
Then we go into the grand finale, "Little Red Robin Hood Hit The Road," where Wyatt solemnly sings of an unspecified disaster "in the garden of England," while here Mike Oldfield's guitar acts as his alter ego. Unsettlingly, as Oldfield comes to centre stage, the record momentarily does turn into Tubular Bells, but any cosiness is quickly seen off by Allan's restless drumming and Wyatt's closing fading lament of "can't you see them, can't you see them? Bridge can't hold them, rats control them." A children's nursery rhyme of experience - Hilaire Belloc rescripted by Edward Gorey (a similar sepulchral feel is conveyed by Wyatt's vocal work on Michael Mantler's album of Gorey adaptations, The Hapless Child and Other Stories, a couple of years later). The pain fades, the chaos fades, we see the crash now only from a distance as we are left with a John Cale-esque viola drone (actually Fred Frith). And for the final closing punch, enter Ivor Cutler and his "baritone concertina" to declaim an unremittingly silly poem by Wyatt, which still manages to end with him smashing up both the 'phone and the telly. As the multiple violas howl atonal pain, Cutler lets out a bloodcurdling "HA HA HA HA HAA!" laugh and the music stops dead.
Coda
A few weeks after finishing the recording sessions for Rock Bottom, Wyatt and Mason returned to the studio to record a single. Wyatt fancied doing "I'm A Believer." The ecstasy of regenerated faith expressed on the Monkees' original is subtly subverted, and you do feel a very deep vein of irony running through Wyatt's vocal. And yet the single proved to be a hit, and Wyatt and band were invited on TOTP, but unforgiveably tried to persuade Wyatt not to appear on stage in his wheelchair as "this might upset viewers." A furious Wyatt stood his ground (metaphorically) with the end result that the entire band appeared in wheelchairs, and Wyatt spat out the lyrics with barely concealed venom and even more naked irony. The performance has never been shown anywhere since.
And a mention too for the B-side, Hopper's song "Memories." With Frith's viola crying in the background, Wyatt contemplates what his life is now and where he is going to end up, while knowing that he must end up somewhere. It was later covered by Laswell's Material on their 1982 One Down album with Archie Shepp the featured sax soloist. The singer was a teenager called Whitney Houston.
. . .
SOME THINGS DON'T NEED TO BE SPOILED BY WRITING ABOUT THEM
For instance: Westwood Presents Volume 3 - as with 2 Many DJs, this has to be DANCED to, celebrated PHYSICALLY. The punctum here is all around you and does not need to be drawn out; in fact, multiple puncta draw in upon you and embrace you. 47 tracks; apart from Truth Hurts, the unhurtful truth is that this represents pop as it should be known today on buses all over the land. And - at the moment and for the moment - I would much rather have Westwood Presents Volume 3 than Sea Changes in my world.
SOME THINGS CANNOT BE WRITTEN ABOUT FURTHER
"Golden Boy" by Res has been definitively assessed by the Belgian lass and the Australian skykicker, so there is little for me to add, except perhaps that the vocal reminds me somewhat of Carole Bayer Sager, whatever that may imply. But what exactly do "the girls" know about this "prince," and will they grieve or exult at his downfall?
The album How I Do - maybe Ronan "I Love It When We Do" Keating is the "Golden Boy," though probably not - is a puzzle to sort out. It's what Pink would sound like had she paid more attention to Sam Phillips (that's the Cruel Inventions/wife of T-Bone Burnett Sam Phillips, not the Sun Records one) than to 4 Non Blondes; lots of odd guitar twinges over what is essentially another AOR analysis of who I am/do I/don't I need love which frankly has been done more purposely and/or deliriously elsewhere. Her backdrop will sometimes be an un-guitar drone which brings to mind MBV rehearsing Reich's Electric Counterpoint five rooms away, but sadly not for long enough. Good in its first half, extraordinary when it comes to "Golden Boy," but finally settling for the safest way in. Still I would rather have this in the house than Vanessa Please Please HIT ME Carlton, were I of a combative nature, which happily I am not.
. . .
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
KIM WILDE
Gardening. There’s a good way for a pop star to – well, not to end, but to, shall we say, develop. There are far worse ways to end. That is what Kim Wilde now essentially does for a living. She continues to participate in ‘80s revival tours, sadly, and really should not need to do so. One needs to justify one’s existence continuously. I would expect that a 52-year-old Peter Laughner would be more than content with gardening. Or a 53-year-old Lester Bangs while he’s at it.
Her eponymously-titled first album from 1981 was certainly needed – at least by RAK Records. Having more or less sleepwalked through punk with the dubious assets of Smokie and Racey at its helm, and more or less being kept afloat by Hot Chocolate, Mickie Most needed to justify RAK anew. And to do it, he turned to the family Wilde.
Marty Wilde, when you think about it, was smartly on the case, much more so in many ways than his contemporary Cliff. He had first attempted to kickstart the next Wilde generation with son Ricky, who had a single out on RAK in 1974 – “Teen Wave,” a glorious noise of a record on which Andrew WK appears to have based his entire career. Alas, despite being a Radio Luxembourg PowerPlay, it failed to trouble the scorers; that, coupled with Ricky’s sadly premature thinning out at the top, put a stop to that. Not to be defeated, Ricky retreated to the backroom, and he and his dad waited patiently for daughter Kim to come of age.
She did so in 1981, with almost over-impeccable timing; with Blondie’s Autoamerican demonstrating them to be on the descent, the gap was there to be filled, yet (as is often the case with Brits) a new gap was inadvertently created instead. Her debut single, “Kids in America,” was punctum-packed throughout; commencing with Eno-esque atonal synth stabs from which Wilde’s voice emerges, almost reluctantly, “looking out a dirty old window.” The vocal range, though not great, was exactly malleable enough to deal with the sublime pop which her folks provided for her. A great piece of power pop, with the double advantage of not having to labour under a banner of “power pop,” it deservedly shot up to #2 in the charts, prevented from reaching the top only by Shakin’ Stevens’ “This Old House” (and before we start sneering at poor old Shaky, by the way, he was still hip at the time; the NME applauded him getting to the top, after a decade of hard gigging, Communist party benefit gigs, and so on. Unimaginable now).
A superb start, then, but amazingly excelled by her follow-up and greatest single, the immortal “Chequered Love,” in which she achieved the sort of magic of which the likes of the Photos could only dream about enviously; the song moves with determined decisiveness, the guitar thrash competing with the excitable string synth to get to the end of the song first. And note the mid-section with its ascending line suspiciously reminiscent of Magazine’s “Shot By Both Sides” (and a more or less identical rhythm track) – indeed, Wilde, surprisingly (or perhaps not) a Devoto devotee, cheerfully admitted as much to Paul Morley in an NME interview at the time. The ecstatic doubling up of the riff by glockenspiel and guitar at the song’s climax is near-orgasmic.
And her debut album, black cover with spaced-out white lettering, Kim and the band dressed likewise, is full of exceptionally smart power pop, cheerful yet knowingly propulsive – “Water on Glass” and “Boys” for two, and even an element of angst creeping in on the song “Our Town” in which Kim defiantly swears to stay in the town she knows, even as her house is torn down in front of her and billboards erected in their place. One could perhaps do without the attempt at ska, “2-6-5-8-0,” or the can-we-be-the-Police adult oriented dubby dubbings of “Everything is Wrong,” but there’s a fantastic reading of “You’ll Never Be So Wrong” (Hot Chocolate had recently released their version as a single) – Kim trying to reassure the hurt girl that break-up doesn’t mean the end of love or life, but can’t quite convince her; the tangible frustration mounting up in the chorus, all set against a regretful guitar backing which recalls nothing so much as a prototype for 10,000 Maniacs (though Ms Merchant never got anywhere near to pop).
After this, Kim’s singles over the following year became increasingly remote and disturbed, and they remain profoundly uneasy listening. First, “Cambodia,” a #12 hit in that disturbed winter of 1981; I always assumed this to be a song about a wracked war veteran coming back to his home and family and unable to recognise or connect with either, but the vocal is slightly detached as if she is only singing to herself, almost engulfed by the now wholly electro backing.
And what about “View From A Bridge” from the shiny yellow spring of ’82? A song about suicide, in which she ends by jumping off the bridge “into space.” One would have been forgiven to be concerned about exactly what kind of stuff her dad and brother were giving her to sing. Amazingly, it still managed to climb to #16 (a lot harder to do 20 years ago, let us not forget, than it is now). Near Nordic in its angst, it precedes the much more overt anxieties of A-Ha three years hence.
Were that not enough, she then followed this death wish up with the most disturbing record she ever made, “Child Come Away.” Essentially about the aftermath of life for a rape victim, the song is sung almost dispassionately, the vocal mixed well back, almost as though the singer has already died and is communicating through a mechanical fog. Gary Barnacle’s alto sax floats in and out of the mix, at one brief point exploding in your face with Evan Parker-type tempestuous squawking. The song grinds mechanically to a halt, as if that is all Kim Wilde will ever have to say, before starting up again to accommodate Barnacle’s closing, inarticulable screams. This was finally a bridge too far for her fans, and the song managed a peak of only #43 in the autumn of 1982; her first single to miss the top 20. No wonder the Wildes back-pedalled after that, played safe with corny pastiches like “Love Blonde,” and that Kim eventually fled to MCA for a further, probably more commercially successful but artistically nondescript, series of hits throughout the latter part of the ‘80s. There is, however, one further track worth salvaging from her later RAK period; “Stay Awhile” is a heartbreaking plea to the Other to “tell me who you are,” to provide some degree (if not illusion) of permanence to her life, set against a canyon of poignant chord changes and synth lines which were later to resurface unexpectedly in the realms of the Aphex Twin’s SAW2 and I Care Because You Do albums. It destroys the listener and should have been a single.
. . .
Monday, September 23, 2002
WHAT IS TRUTH – AND WHY SHOULD IT HURT?
One could be very cynical about Truth Hurts. The fact that her debut album Truthfully Speaking is executive produced by Dr Dre would inspire the cynical thought that Dre was looking for his own means of filling the gap left by Aaliyah. Certainly the sleeve would appear to confirm that to the cynic – note the inside cover pose against a blood red/orange background, exactly like the last Aaliyah album. On the inside back cover we see the Truth Hurts symbol emerge from a painted-on tear falling from the left eye of Shari Watson, the singer/songwriter who is to all intents and purposes Truth Hurts. But the “truth” isn’t quite what you’d expect. Thankfully, more Baudrillard than Locke.
From both the pouting photos and the single “Addictive,” we are ready to expect another in the long line of post-Aaliyah dispassionate, impartial, uncaring “soul” voices. Functional and giving absolutely nothing away.
The introduction “Push Play” would seem to confirm this still further. It begins with her declaring that she has to “get my shit together” over a gospel electric piano and backing vox. She is desperate for “the truth” to “be told.” At 1:07 the rhythm suddenly comes in, distant string synth climbing and fluttering down like MBV. A sample of KRS-1 from “I’m Still #1” (“niggers can’t handle the truth – in fact, they scared of it”) is introduced and subverted (“to all your R&B bitches” – replies Watson, “yes I AM”). “I’ll drop. Your shit. Put mine. On top,” Watson sings in stiletto staccato reply.
“Addictive” follows, about which you already know. Set against an irritatingly familiar but uncredited Bollywood sample (see ILM for an extended discussion on what it is), Watson sets out her idea of passion and the perfection of the Other necessary to fulfil it. It is unclear whether this is an actual man or simply an imagined desire. Enter Rakim, still thinking of a master plan, and employed of course to evoke the “Paid In Full”-Ofra Haza interface of 15 years ago. He sounds as though he has just been cryogenically defrosted. The relentless minor key undertow of the Indian song implies that this ideal isn’t going to be fulfilled.
Next, the seduction, or need for it: “Next To Me.” “It’s not just sex to me…It’s something like a drug for me/If you’re not next to me, I need Ecstasy,” Watson pleads against a vibraphone/acoustic guitar-dominated ethereal jazzfunk groove, her voice ceaselessly floating over bar lines; the passion taking precedence over measured rationality. Is she quite as strong as she makes out, or only as strong as she wants to be made? This track is the equivalent of the opening chord of Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia; a perfection which can be glimpsed once but never quite recaptured.
A shaft of reality then blunts her dream; “Jimmy” reveals that her Other was a scrub masquerading as a saviour and is now in prison. It also reminds us that all songs with telephone calls in the middle are automatically brilliant. She starts by lamenting his absence and missing him, but then realises that there is doubt (though there are still hidden tears – hear how she weeps a dozen syllables out of the word “go”). And it’s a doubt which is explored in some depth over the succeeding three songs, “Grown,” “This Feeling” and “Tired,” which really constitute a single track; an extended dissertation on what sort of a person she is, what she wants set against what she isn’t given, how she views herself and how she wants herself to be reflected, what role love has to play in her life. Stylistically this again shows a debt to D’Angelo’s Voodoo, which is clearly a much more influential record than was generally assumed at the time of its release. “Grown” reflects her emotional obstacle course by the fact that the drums seem to be limping reluctantly behind the bass. “If I feel disrespected, that should be respected.” In “That Feeling,” she is practically berating her Other for being so much – “are you trying to make it harder for the next man?” and then rails against “that same old regular bullshit – ‘cos it’s something when a man knows how to be unselfish/He can make a woman feel free.” She then rhapsodises in praise of the Other. This is what Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” SHOULD have said. This is where founded uncertainty triumphs over unfounded arrogance. An extraordinary performance. “That’s real,” she reveals the “truth” at its signoff, almost as a cast-off afterthought. In “Truth” she is no longer sure who she is except as a reflection of other people’s reflections, be it “the man I love who thinks we gotta compete” or “the prejudiced sales lady thinkin’ I’m a thief.” “Somebody tell me who the hell I’m supposed to be.”
(Welch again – “I’ll send a letter/don’t know who I am”)
A piano tinkles this sequence to an end before we segue into the Gaye-style funk of “I’m Not Really Lookin’” where she is searching more for herself (or convinces herself that she is) than for another Other. The attempt to make her time good founders, inevitably – DJ Quik guest-raps as a man getting away from his wife and the “nappies” - and she ends with a muttered, “Oh fuck it, where’s my drink?”, more alienated than ever.
From the crowd noises into the isolated rain (“does it hurt yet?”) which underscores the devastating “BS,” a soul ballad for which Alicia Keys could excavate her innards for the next half-century and still be incapable of imagining. “Bullshit pours down like rain,” says the chorus. “I don’t care what they say/’cos the TRUTH won’t change,” she replies in a scream. She is still some distance away from finding it. Big Rube guest-raps a conscience warning about being dressed to impress and being unloved, as one backing vocal wanders into disordered atonality behind him. When he growls “bitch nigger,” she is of course growling to herself.
In “Queen of the Ghetto” she turns her attention to the mechanics of even exposing this sort of soul searching on this kind of a record. One “Cita” from “Black Entertainment Television” starts deconstructing concepts of truth over the post-trip hop backing – “this industry is based on the ultimate bullshit and real life ain’t far behind,” going on to attack albums in general – “only one song is worth listenin’ to, and even that is shit Dre did six years ago!” The punchline of course being that the character of “Cita” is as unreal as anything else which exists (in fact is “virtual”), which she herself acknowledges by concluding that “truth is as real as they come, baby, it’s the fuckin’ truth, and it hurts!” All signifiers with no signified.
Appropriate, then, perhaps, that the song on this album which is actually entitled “The Truth,” is masterminded by R Kelly, who on the intro Watson hears knocking, but will not let in. There is no need to comment on the attendant irony of using R Kelly as a scapegoat for the failings of man. Her “truth” is that the Other is, to her, unattainable, and there is no satisfactory compromise. KRS-1’s original comment that “niggers can’t handle truth” is recycled and turned around at this song’s climax.
The next two tracks, alas, are surplus to requirement. Timbaland is on hand for the track “Real,” but disappointingly lets the side down with a barely concealed recycling of “We Need A Resolution” and “Get Ur Freak On.” A good job that “Work It” has confirmed that he still has some new ideas. Similarly, “Hollywood” is a rather redundant rant against the biz, with Dre unleashing a standard moan against everyone who is not he.
The ballad setting of the finale “Do Me” might suggest a conventional wind-down ending for this album, but in many ways it’s the most disturbing, and yet the most logical, song on the record. Bereft of the touch of the Other (either asleep, or tired, or more likely absent) she has no alternative but to satisfy herself. In contrast to the playfulness of Tweet’s “Oops,” Watson here realises the “reality” to which the journey of this record has led her; the most hurtful truth of all, that to subscribe to the R&B template of “loving me,” of “depending on me,” you are finally left with no one to love you except yourself. Thus does masturbation become a lament, a substitute, rather than emancipation. Self-satisfaction can have no other ending. Grief can sometimes afford no other recompense.
It ends: “I’m alone.”
April Wheeler, about to terminate three lives, arrives at the same conclusion, albeit in a far bloodier fashion:
“But she needed no more advice and no more instruction. She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”
(Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road)
. . .
Friday, September 20, 2002
LEWIS TAYLOR
Going back to Sinatra's Where Are You? for a second: the centerpiece of that troubled record was his (partly self-written) knife-edge interpretation of "I'm A Fool To Want You" addressed very clearly to Ava Gardner. The reason? It is a relationship that will be troubled forever; he will always be one point of a triangle, or even one-twelfth of a dodecahedron; but he cannot give up the drug; the excitement, the LOVE is immovable. Only in the final verse, with Gordon Jenkins' orchestra completely silent and the studio echo turned off - with his voice alone - do we hear of love on this record. "Take me back..." he has to wrestle it out of his soul..."...I love you." He sings the word "love" as though he is piercing his own throat with a sliver of the splintered mirror glass into which he has just been staring.
And if Lewis Taylor's eponymously-titled debut album of 1996 (another good record from 1996! Whatever was I thinking of?) is about anything, it's about that kind of relationship contained within, or overpowering, one's life. Throughout the record he loves and worships the Other, knows that he is doomed by doing so and yet wants it more than anything. The Stranger he is trying to repel is in fact the interior of the maternal cord which he cannot let go.
The ghost of Marvin Gaye is prevalent throughout the whole album - but it's a magnification of the dejected Marvin Gaye, wandering the seafront at Ostend, trying to remember his own purpose while remembering not to run back to it (when he eventually did, it of course killed him). Like Earthling, about whom I talked not long ago, this record is an indicator of the road some of us would have liked "Britpop" to travel down, or at least help to open up the customs gates.
Appropriate that track one, the single "Lucky," should begin with a familiar static sample - the intro to "Magnetic Field" from Joe Meek's I Hear A New World (as with Monk in jazz, the colossal influence of Meek on subsequent pop is even today only slowly being realised). The song is a triptych of unresolved feelings, beginning with an undulating guitar/bass line and a chord sequence almost sore in its poignancy, and then Taylor's vocal; demonstrably never as free as Gaye's, but superb within its own limits. It rises to a mid-song crescendo (throughout the record, Taylor understands the architecture and cumulative impact of multi-vocal tracking much better than the Ashcrofts of this world) and then a major key emerges like a bleak sun rising over Ms Dynamite's unfinished Docklands. He celebrates his lamenting with his determinedly rock guitar (Taylor pretty well sang and played everything on this record himself).
The mood continues in the next song, "Bittersweet," where an unsettling melodic motif is set against a fuzzed bass and a pointillistic rhythm which foreshadows Dif Jux. He is with the Other but unsure about how he feels about how she REALLY feels ("You laugh at me after we make love!"). But again the darkness breaks, and the whole performance rises to a blissful mid-section of realisation, with multiple voices exploding like blossoming geraniums over "Great Gates of Kiev" organ; Earth Wind & Fire's "Fantasy" becoming a reality. And once he has overcome this barrier, it is easy for Taylor to ascend that one simple step higher into a rejoicing, exclamatory hymn of unconditional love - "you're so salty!"
The next song "Whoever" is musically fairly straightforward - but note the little punctUMations which demarcate it with their doubts; the solitary dying guitar echo, the sudden epileptic dubbing of a bass note, the backwards chorus sounding as though he's drawing back his own breath, the Fairlight vox-sample descent towards the end. In this song he is aware that the Other has many of her own Others, but knows that she loves none of them, possibly including himself ("Whoever you're in love with..."). Again this does not persuade him to abandon her.
The next track, called, with Scott Walkeresque minimalism, "Track," starts off with Taylor's voices drowning in its own whirlpool of uncertainty over a guitar chorale which could easily be Mike Oldfield. The song then cuts back to a slow soul procedural which eventually rises to a "Kashmir"-type climax and then recedes. The next song, called, with Paul Morleyeque pointedness, "Song," has him close to the mike, but his doubt is eventually swept away by gorgeous '80s synthesisers. Or is it?
Side two is largely a steadier, more closely inspected, kind of soul searching. Whereas Taylor elsewhere maximises his resources, his feelings, for the first few tracks on side two he becomes more interested in the microtones of rhythm, of vocal yelps, much in the same way as D'Angelo does on his forensic dissemination of a second album, Voodoo. And Taylor does it very well. On "Betterlove" which is heralded by an autumnal Sing Something Simple chorale quickly superseded by more eddying guitars, Taylor wins over the Other (or thinks that he does) with relish and real eagerness, but never overplaying his hand. Both this and the next track "How" stimulate like Prince used to be able to do (e.g. "Adore"). In the track "Right," which starts with some Aphex Twin bleeps and distant guitar foghorns, but quickly moves back into the eye of his unquiet storm, Taylor utilises the traditional "since the Garden of Eden, man and a woman, make sure she knows you love her" theme. Punctum is provided by his final paraphrasing of Tony Etoria's '77 Brit soul paradigm "I Can Prove It" which results in the admonition "are you good enough to go waltzing into her life"?
Doubt is defeated in the astonishing ninth track on this album "Damn" (as in "damn I love you/I never really wanted to"). Supported by some sublime Philly harmonies (listen to the unabashed chordal poignancy when the backing singers reach the word "down") Taylor confesses that it is pointless for him to doubt when love is present. He HAS to surrender to the Other, no matter what it costs him, even if it's his mind ("I don't know right from wrong/I don't know where my mind has gone"). And the motif is repeated over and over while organ and guitar gradually boil to a climax behind the voices, finally explodinig in a miraculous freeform storm, with Cecil Taylor piano clusters, backward tapes, guitar feedback, Sun Ra organ all symbolising the atoms of Taylor's mind derailing, splitting and reassembling in a far more beautiful shape, the chorus continuing all the while. "I Am The Walrus" redirected by Willem de Kooning. Before it all is about to boil over
it cuts off
you don't need to know the rest
but a Ligeti/Berio semi-atonal choir comes in for the epilogue "Spirit" in which Taylor outlines his reasons for surrendering to the Other...because, ultimately, he needs someone to take him under her care, needs to know that someone is there, needs to know if her God is really real. "Help me" he asks the listener politely at the end.
Forget the Verve; these were our real urban hymns.
. . .
Thursday, September 19, 2002
UNDERWORLD
A Hundred Days Off is Underworld's Sound of Water; a measured and steady representation of two musicians growing old. The body, abandoned by its primary external lifeforce (Darren Emerson) slowly winding down. Emerson's absence is crucial to this album; it's as though, released from the tentacles of trends, Hyde and Smith can just get on and make the album which I suspect they would have made were they still Freur. From the first track "Mo Move" (making it sound like a Gilles Peterson compilation) you can tell that they are in second gear. Over a reverse "I Feel Love" bassline, Hyde slowly incantates: "I became chemical." I sink back into the earth from which I emerged. It is hymnal rather than in the listener's face. The track progresses unhurriedly, with no particular timetable to which it has to adhere.
Then the single, "Two Months Off." Bookended by what sounds like samples from Big Brother 3 (though on the sleeve "spoken text" is credited to, heh, "Juanita"), a descending celestial keyboard line (Christmas is coming, resurrection a hundred days hence) enters and is soon backed up by enormous tidal chords, suddenly filling the canvas like Whistler's fireworks over Cremorne Gardens, immediately reminding you that Underworld are capable of visions. "You bring light in!" Hyde intones, barely concealing his ecstatic peace beneath the delayed vocal double-track. True, it sounds as though they've been absorbing the last Daft Punk album more than somewhat, yet this has coloratura and architecture which impels you to worship. It is Scooter had they gone to late 19th-century undemonstrative Sunday morning Church of England services and absorbed the frequently unexpected harmonic twists of Dr Dykes' hymns (cf. Hymn No 204 - "O quickly come!" later borrowed by Gounod). And everything remains in mid-range; this is as celebratory as "Born Slippy" would be with ten more years' experience.
Then it's back to second gear for the more laconical groove of "Twist," then decelerating to "Sofa Sister," a skank weirdly reminiscent of Scritti's "Lions After Slumber," with its steady but lopsided rhythm and the lyrical "my" repeat emphasis (key lyric here: "my devious nature - take it away"). In the more animated, Jazzanova-esque "Little Speaker," "Juanita" returns with more anecdotes about growing tall and what may or may not have been anorexia. Keyboard lines overlap with Philip Glass-type grace, the overlying effect, however, being unsettling. There is never a centre in this track on which to focus, which was probably the idea. This is pretty forceful rhythmically, but has to be really listened to before you realise that they have surreptitiously slipped back into first gear.
Then, two brief and odd interludes: "Trim" in which Underworld essentially turn into the Beta Band (I had to double-check the sleeve to make sure that Steve Mason wasn't guesting on vocals) and "EssGee," a straight-faced New Age guitar/synth pastoral mood piece which could have come straight off Metheny's As Falls Wichita... With Emerson gone, are they slowly turning back into Freur?
The title of "Dinosaur Adventure 3D" would seem to confirm their awareness of this possibility, but in fact it's the album's second big, unstoppable rhythmic avalanche, this album's "Cowgirl" or "King of Snake," and proves how effortlessly Hyde and Smith can still induce delirium in the oldest of minds. The vocal here is Vocoderised, and again careful not to get too close to the listener. Don't pension us off just yet, they are saying, we can still do this sort of thing if we want to.
But that's facile. There's not a lot left for the album to do after that but gently wind down, through the brief, uncertain echoes of "Ballet Lane," to the final "Luetin," where Hyde now turns into Bernard Sumner. "If you come back to me/I'll show you a good time/I'll give you a white plastic chip....Sex with everything." The track itself is appropriately parallel with what New Order would be sounding like now with Gillian Gilbert back on board, a twinkling electro descent, which winks its punctum at the listener as it slopes down to its natural ending.
So yes, A Hundred Days Off is exactly what you would expect the new album from an Emerson-less, fortysomething Underworld to sound like. And yet it works, whereas Scorpio Rising doesn't. Why? Because Underworld do not "do guest stars." The trouble with Death In Vegas, as with Primal Scream, is that you get no clear identify of what they are trying to achieve as a group in themselves; they cram their records so full of guest stars that you wonder whether they are trying to hide an essential blankness (is Scorpio Rising the Casino Royale of nu-dance?). Look there's Paul Weller singing Gene Clark. Look there's Liam doing Liam! Record collection rock, when it comes down to it, and deeply conservative. Underworld prefer to fall back on their own resources, do not try to exceed themselves, but are simply content with reminding the listener every so often of the mind-stunning genius of which they are still capable.
. . .
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
MR LIF
If El-P is the Picasso of avant-hip hop, Mr Lif is surely the Matisse; the edges of his figure are not quite tangible, but once penetrated he turns out to be extremely straightforward in his evasions. His new album, I Phantom, is visually bookended by a smoothed-out Michelangelo Everyman which, on unfolding the cover, turns out to be the centre of a Monopoly-type board. On the rear inner sleeve there are two large question marks. Dare you place me, he seems to intend.
And on the other hand Mr Lif is the sort of artist who defies subjective analysis. On the inner sleeve he provides a detailed breakdown of the thoughts and themes behind each of the 14 tracks. I quote:
“This album is an exploration of the dynamics of everyday life, and the pursuit of our dreams, in a rapidly decaying society. I Phantom is a story from beginning to end, told mainly from third and first person perspectives…The story is challenging to follow, because the perspectives change often, and the songs fit together in intricate ways. It takes close listening and some sharp detective work to catch all the links, but the following I Phantom Key should help you comb through the tale.” Which more or less should make this review redundant – the detailed analyses of the tracks, which it would be pointless for me to reiterate, seem to close off any possibility of a subjective reaction. It is rather reminiscent of the smug notes to Westbrook’s On Duke’s Birthday, in which the latter similarly explains to us how each of the sections link with photogenic accuracy into every other one. We are asked to admire an aesthetic toast rack for its straightness and perfection.
“A young man, down on his luck, has a nightmare about making a fatal mistake.” But does he? Well he is in a McJob, from which he resigns, finds that without job or money he is a cabbage in this society, so decides to get another job as well as money, marries and has children, but neglects his family in favour of his still foolish ambitions. Somewhere along the way there’s a Magnolia-style multiple situation scenario, but instead of raining frogs a nuclear blast destroys everyone. An extreme simplification, but That Is Basically It. The first part of course is a rerun of Original Pirate Material, but painted on an intentionally larger canvas; whereas Mike Skinner is still wandering around Brixton and cadging money for next week’s garage night at his record’s end.
Nothing left for the subjective critic then but to talk about the record musically. One always finds a way into art, especially when El-P is (largely) on hand to produce. Surreal and astringent his music remains, but the Rothko dark purples of Fantastic Damage are invaded by a rogue streak of yellow. Here he brings light in.
“Bad Card” opens the record like an Oval outtake, or Radiohead’s “Fitter Healthier” reconstituted by Jan Jelinek; backward flutes and beats flying across all viewpoints. No familiar Peter Skellern reference to hang your hat on here. A conversation ensues; “don’t fuck around and get killed” the gun lender tells the progenitor.
“A Glimpse at the Struggle” is determinedly midtempo, but constantly derailed by drowning Horace Silver block piano chords, sudden clustered pile-ups passing by each side of him like the deceptively ominous high-rises bestriding the M4 like outsized sarcophagi as you exit London. “Those were the days when it was really real,” Lif deludes himself. Heavy breathing combines with industrial rhythms and distant sirens. It is Gang Starr’s bucolic humour refracted into a desperately floating parabola of uncertain stability. Somewhere amidst this dream, Lif dies. The passage between worlds is unclearly marked.
Thaw re-emerges as Lanark, slightly surer of himself but certainly no wiser. “Return of the B-Boy” is built on a trellis of treble. He wants to go back to ’86 but remembers the landmines which El-P left there. A harpsichord loop has an epileptic fit behind him. The sunlit underpasses opened up by Eric B and Rakim’s “Follow the Leader” are excavated. “I’m gonna bring it back.” Gonna exhume it, more like. There is still nothing living here, not even when the song abruptly changes track, dismisses any notion of “back in the day” and retreats to a nocturnal deadened acid jazz throb; not even when Lif “awakens” and goes to his McJob. “Live From The Plantation” undertakes a forensic analysis of work-as-slavery-as-substitute-for-death which may well have been untouched since the days of the Gang of Four, though musically this is far more linear than GoF (even though a momentary paradisical harp and human beatbox attempt to derail the track). The sort of song/recitation which the Hughes brothers ought to use for their next film (Whitechapel just isn’t you; determinedly devoid of call centres). “The function of life is just to work and consume.” He “punches the clock right off the wall” and quits.
“New Man Theme” is dC Basehead’s “Brand New Day” in negative, without even a strand of irony within it. The beat immediately amplifies to signify revived arteries. He remembers dropping out of college for the same reason that he has just punched the McClock off the wall (despite the obvious fact that the McJob was a consequence of his dropping out). In his “torture quarters” (i.e. bedroom) he locked himself in. Someone who needs the world to fit in with him, rather than vice versa. Someone who ultimately is keeping the Stranger out with his pseudo-maternal shield.
Immediately he runs into problems. On the skit “Handouts” he tries to blag a free beat off Insight, but the latter quite reasonably argues that he “needs to eat, man.” Straight into “Status,” with a bassline which vacillates between Peter Hook and Stevie Wonder, and where Lif goes to a club, superficially to socialise, essentially to scrounge, really to find a future. The club is 12 blocks away; he walks 10 and takes a cab for the last two. But it starts raining while he is walking; his appearance is ruined and he becomes nobody. Mike Skinner makes glorious black comedy out of this type of situation (“All Got Our Runnins”). Here Lif is just a laughing stock. He is already dead. “One day you’ll make it and won’t have to deal with this madness” his conscience Insight assures him, but how sure can he be? He has to do something. They run out of money and out of studio time.
Exit Insight. Enter El-P, devastatingly. The track “Success” (featuring Aesop Rock, the Mondrian of avant-hip hop) sounds as though the whole album has suddenly exploded into colour. A weeping, distended string line (Dr Octagon’s “Blue Flowers” after Kevin Shields has had a go at it) screams at Lif throughout. Similarly the speed of his life abruptly goes into warp drive. In the course of this one track he gets a job, makes money, gets married, starts a family, ignores them for his ambitions, loses them, but remarries and gets another chance. One is reminded of G K Chesterton playing with the elasticity of timespans in The Man Who Was Thursday, wherein crossing the English Channel by boat seems to be accomplished in about five minutes, and Dover become Leicester Square in another five minutes. Time goes more quickly when you think you are accomplishing.
And of course he isn’t really accomplishing. “Daddy Dearest” is a merciless condensation of Harry Chapin’s “Cats In The Cradle” scenario, where the father clearly has no time for the son from his first marriage. Here there is only a cursory telephone conversation, and untold eternities of heartbreak behind it.
Because Lif wants “The Now.” Against a constantly detonating Funkadelic-type backing track, he denies his first family as far as he can and devotes all his energies to the nowness of his current family, or so he imagines; in fact the stress is so overpowering that his daughter commits suicide. He barely seems to notice. “Here’s the future of your perfect fucking child.” The synth bass finally mutates into an ECG heartbeat which inevitably stops.
And indeed here is where I Phantom suddenly decides to turn into a different, and frankly not as good, album. “Friends and Neighbors” is the aforementioned Magnolia-style scenario of seemingly disparate characters who are all finally connected. The improbably named “Officer Grief” comes to the family house following the daughter’s suicide, snaps under pressure and rather fancifully ends up killing “Kate’s mom and dad” – the latter, of course, the original progenitor about whom the album has thus far been. When he is erased from the record, again you hardly notice. The apparent irrelevance of individuals under a questionably defined catchment area of “social ills”; this is where the album seems to lose focus and grandly ascends to a Carlyle-type overview of the societal fallacies of humanity. When in the next track “Iron Helix” we are solemnly informed that “Iron Helix is a synopsis of colonization in which Insight plays the role of a tribesman, or anyone who may not be privy to the modern world (though how can anyone not be in our age? Are we meant to believe that Bin Laden in his labyrinth of caves somewhere in Pakistan is not “privy to the modern world”?)” one has to clear one’s throat rather sternly. And indeed if someone is “not privy to the modern world,” how can they presume to judge it? Identifying a disease presupposes a detailed knowledge of the circumstances and conditions in which a disease can prosper.
By the next track “Earthcrusher” (and Funcrusher Plus this ain’t) the nuclear holocaust has apparently already happened. This is clearly intended to be climactic but is actually about as frightening as Pte Frazer whimpering “we’re all doooooomed” in Dad’s Army. Insight is back on board for this, and it just plods too much to be in any way effective. In its implacable silence, Coil’s “The First Five Minutes After Death” is far more frightening, as indeed is Cassetteboy’s postscript to “Fly Me To New York” (long silence, “everything’s OK,” another long pause, “there’s no need to wor-RY!”). The epilogue “Post Modern” works better (though not as an epilogue) by the extra dread which El-P effortlessly threads through the track. One finally wishes that he had been given the whole album to produce.
. . .
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
BEENIE MAN
Prompted by the Belgian lass, I have been playing a lot of Beenie Man’s work of late – his sublime last album, Art and Life (a record which achieves the rare feat of having Wyclef Jean on it and yet still remain interesting), and a fine Best Of compilation. And my head is still recovering from last week’s astonishing dancehall mix which the Man provided on Radio 1. Louis Walsh, to hell with you, coarse varlet; you understand the profits of pop but nothing of its magic. Beenie Man UNDERSTANDS pop.
When talking with Chris Goldfinger he was at pains to emphasise that his branching out into other contemporary dance forms was not a betrayal of “dancehall,” was indeed integral to its nature (“Reggae never progressed or prospered in America – it was taken over to Europe by Marley and developed there,” he observed). And at this late yet early stage there is no room for studium-crammed “purism.” Embrace pop and you embrace the world. And I now instruct you to embrace Tropical Storm, Beenie’s newest and finest album.
Worry not, his trademark “zagga zag” (well, come on, where did you think the Spice Girls got it from?) is all over this record as ever; the difference between this and the forlorn inclusion of TS Eliot quotations in the margins of Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man is that this is not gratuitous, does not bestow false notions of merit on work which fundamentally does not deserve it; rather it powers the music and uplifts all ears.
“Party Hard,” which isn’t the Andrew WK song (and wouldn’t it be interesting to hear Beenie tackling that?), is a good start, with the standard “Sleng Teng” rhythm/bass interface stretched out into four dimensions. It is immediately furious but in a strangely amiable way.
What follows, the Neptunes-produced “Feel It Boy,” is a pop record of galvanising glory and as a single of the year contender is up there with “Hot in Herre” (perhaps its late summer equivalent?). A warmly embracing yet never predictable keyboard line links with the stealthy rhythm as Beenie pleads with Janet Jackson to take him back. Her chorus vocal is typically somewhere between naïve and dispassionate, but the song does her more good than her own recent work has done (she was first choice singer for Basement Jaxx’s “Get Me Off”). Endless summer? The High Llamas could labour for centuries and never produce anything this light yet powerful.
Next is a near 2-step raging rant “Bad Girl” wherein Beenie fulminates that the Other “lives in a palace while I sleep in the forest” (!). One of course realises that Beenie is basically a buffoon of the first misogynist order, but the sheer good nature of his delivery and music is enough to make you forgive him. Well, perhaps. So powerful and busily furious is this track musically that it overshadows the Irv Gotti-produced “Real Gangsta,” while “Fresh From Yard” finds him trading lines (and wishing he was trading fluids) with a JA-accented Li’l Kim. She evidently takes no shit.
Then “Miss L.A.P.” a number one if ever I heard one, an absolutely irresistible bubblegum singalong anthem (“Hang On Sloopy”? “Angel of the Morning”? “Baby Don’t Cry” by, erm, INXS?) with an enormously overpowering electronic rhythmic undertow. Stoopid but simultaneously laden with genius. Shaggy, go shag yourself.
This phenomenal punctum-packed pop sequence – which inspires a degree of worship comparable to the first four tracks of the Sugababes’ Angels With Dirty Faces - continues with the awesome “Street Life,” another monument from the Stargate team; it starts out as a ballad, again anthemic, and then in its middle eight suddenly and brutally shifts into an industrial rhythm. The impact is overwhelming and reminds me of the terminally dispossessed brilliance of one of the great singles of the ‘90s – Eternal’s parting shot “Don’t You Want Me.”
Where to go from that climax? Only into something completely silly – “Gangsta Life” which, wait for it, has a straight-faced Monty Python “Lumberjack Song”-style chorus of “We squeeze and make cheese/Cats freeze and beg please/We seize the opportunities/For our families/To make cheese.” It is quite absurd and confirms the existence of Beenie Mentalist. It ends with an ‘80s synth riff which in a different context could almost pass for an early Simple Minds backing track. It has to be heard to be believed.
“Pure Pretty Gal” returns to more familiar midtempo territory, the stop-and-start rhythm being pleasingly punctuated by a rogue augmented keyboard chord. “Bossman” sees the Neptunes back on board, the stock flamenco guitar line being brutally undermined by a sliding fuzz bassline and the trademark high synth punctuations, like inverted commas around Beenie’s gangster fantasia (with vocal support by Sean Paul and a demonic mid-song derailment by Lady Saw). “Yagga Yo” teams Beenie with So Solid Crew (or at least Megaman and AC Burrell of SSC). Over their epileptic track Beenie wisely opts for a legato vocal delivery, a sustained half-tempo lament which sounds like Max Romeo waking up in a spaceship.
Two love songs to end: “More We Want” (with Tanto Metro and Devonte) is superb post-Timbaland R&B, very subtly deranged throughout, while the closing “You Babe” is produced and played by Sly and Robbie. It always threatens to turn into the Miracles’ “Love Machine,” but the female vocal counterpart (Calibe) nicely balances Beenie’s (for once) understated presence, and the whole track is oddly relaxed, synth lines floating like clouds, providing an opacity and a cover for this extremely seductive groove. A great summer pop record which really ought to have come out in the summer. It demands that your life be preserved and enhanced. It is a long and warm hug of a record. It’s a direction to which I am becoming more and more attracted.
. . .
NOT ON YOUR NELLY!
Nellyville, let’s be candid, IS Country Grammar 2 – there’s even a track entitled “CG2” which recycles the original song, albeit with a less interesting backing.
Nellyville, let’s be honest, is misogynist piffle. The linking skits concern a man being nagged by his Other to go out and purchase a copy of, erm, Nellyville immediately (TS Eliot had nothing on hip-hop when it comes to intertextuality). He visits four or five record shops and ends up with the one remaining copy – the “clean” version! Naturally the Other is p*ss*d off about this and walks out on him. He loudly wishes that she trips on her Gucci heels and falls downstairs, and cackles as indeed she does.
Nellyville, let’s be sacrosanct, shouldn’t in most people's views be admitted to the Church of Me. No new lyrical avenues are carved out; the template is that which has faithfully served everyone from LL Cool J to Nore. If you have Country Grammar (and some might say if you have the first Arrested Development album you have Country Grammar anyway) (and others will say if you have the first dC Basehead album you have exceeded Country Grammar in every way) you already have this record.
Nellyville, let’s be brutal, gets played much more here than CG ever did. And no edges are reached. Well, nearly none.
Nellyville, let’s admit it, has “Hot in Herre.” Exceptional even by the Neptunes’ own standards – and enough of an exception to make you regret that Nelly didn’t just give the whole album to them to produce – its punctum is in that extra “r.” Why the extrra “r?” The clue is in the first line, the heavy rolling Southern pronunciation of the word “here,” and indeed Nelly himself has admitted that it’s a phonetic representation of how his folks say it. And yet the production is so New York, so post-No New York even – it has Ze Records written all over it, with those staccato yet subtly echoing electric piano chords, the unobtrusive but unstoppable light rhythm, the echoing percussion (Tom Tom Club?) and those lovely poignant In A Silent Way ascending chords. A “Pull Up To The Bumper” for the 2000s, but with Grace Jones’ deliberate freezeout superseded by Nelly’s bumptious warmth.
Nellyville, let me be, has in its finer rhythms the kind of gorging, fat and very sensual rhythms which stimulate me in many ways. That fat squelchy bass synth which grinds assiduously through tracks like “Pimp Juice” and “Splurge” recalls Cameo at their horniest and finest (Cameo’s The Hits Collection really is a must-have; even dumbo codpiece-sporting Larry Blackmon’s asinine wish to “tie you up a while” on “Single Life” is nullified by the highly pervasive slinky rolls of the music. It’s one of the juiciest records you could ever listen to).
My friend RW says that the reason why Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” hit so big is precisely because the rhythmic thrust which accompanies vegetable-starved Chad’s “yeah! yeah!” exhortations is exactly the same as the optimum rhythm required for hip movements during intercourse. It’s the same story with Nellyville, albeit far more aesthetically justifiable – unlike Nickelback, it stimulates you to begin with! One could have done without the token guitaristics on tracks like “The Gank” and “# 1,” and Justin Timberlake disappointingly does very little on “Work It” (I await his upcoming Justified solo album with interest) but the ballad “Dilemma” is delicious. Driven by a vocal harmony sample (the grasping ghost of Marvin Gaye?) which provides a very purposeful punctum, the song alternates between female vocalist’s Kelly Rowlands’ idolising and yearning, and Nelly’s awareness of himself as an idol worthy of yearning. Arrogant? Maybe. Limited lifespan? Definitely. So what? Grasp it before Nelly is nullified by MTV Unplugged, or gets religion (as I learned today that Michael Ivey has!).
. . .
Monday, September 16, 2002
dC BASEHEAD
And now to another isolated guitar-playing DB – or should that be MI? MI for Michael Ivey, guitarist, singer and songwriter, the frontman and the larger proportion of dC Basehead. Recorded in Rockville, their debut 1992 album Play With Toys more or less invented slacker hip-hop. There is virtually no rapping as such on the album, but plenty of what one might call modified Sprechgesang, essentially speech as song but confined to a few recurring notes within an octave (Nelly, to be discussed above, does more or less the same thing).
Now Beck Hansen can afford expensive lawyers, so it’s not my place to suggest that Ivey/dC Basehead were ripped off something chronic by Beck in the latter’s career per se (Beck was still in his Ribena-Daniel Johnston Stereopathic Soul Manure phase at this stage). But it’s all here, fully two years before Mellow Gold, and without the vague air of corporate smugness which makes Beck’s work impressive but ultimately unlovable.
This album has room to breathe. Seldom have despair and alienation been expressed in such an airy and graceful fashion. It starts with Basehead’s approximation of an awful C&W bar band (Jethro and the Grahamcrackers who “appear courtesy of Countryfunk Records”) plodding through “Sex Machine” in front of a disinterested audience, one of whom asks them to play “Copacabana.” “Can’t you tell it’s a soul night?” says an exasperated “Jethro.”
Musically, the opening Basehead track “2000 BC” (“2000 brain cells ago”) sets the template. The music could be described as a marriage between the Meat Puppets and De La Soul (the spacious vistas of the former’s 1985 masterpiece Up On The Sun are irresistibly recalled). Ivey’s discreetly echo-laden vocals are almost narcoleptic and virtually disembodied, not so much PM Dawn’s Prince Bee but more Arthur Russell circa World of Echo. The scratching (by Paul “DJ Unique” Howard) sounds as though it’s being beamed down from an asteroid. The utter lack of body or centre in this music is bewitching (Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus is especially relevant here).
“Brand New Day” has a transcendental floating chord sequence (a direct antecedent of what the Neptunes/N*E*R*D* were to do a decade or so later; see “Bobby James” as especially strong evidence of this). Ivey is pretending to be able to cope with his girl leaving him, varying between pessimism (verse) and forced optimism (the heartbreaking chord change into the chorus). The song is constantly interrupted and analysed upon by his colleague (bassist Bob Dewald) who midway asks for some sample breaks to test out before returning to the song proper. Certainly the conversation/song interface here (and throughout the whole album) is comparable with Kevin Rowland and Billy Adams’ Pinteresque chats which PUNCTUMate Don’t Stand Me Down. Get beer and vodka – “get real drunk ‘til we turn blue!” Optimism revealed as a death wish.
The song then segues straight into “Not Over You” in which Ivey is utterly bereaved and simultaneously inactive/incapable of doing anything about his situation, denying that he is in grief (the reverse lyrical double-bluff to 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love”). A piano chord recurs like nails being hammered into his coffin. Dewald again enters the song halfway through, encouraging Ivey to cheer up, flicking through radio stations in search of a cheery song or two. First song up: Heatwave’s “Always and Forever.” Despair results. Second song found: Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine.” The guy’s ready to shoot himself by this stage. The channel flipping continues as the song resumes, and it’s a disturbing moment; Ivey desperately looking across the radio, looking over his life, trying to find something to hang on to, trying to find a justification for continuing to live, painfully trying to make sense of his life, his world, while the narcoleptic vocal continues in front.
(How the relevance of songs change: back in 1992, Laura and I used to laugh ourselves silly at this track, even though we both recognised Ivey’s despair at the time. I’m not laughing now. “Not Over You”)
On “Better Days” Ivey attempts to address the world in general, capitalism, etc. The guitar continues to go to unexpected places, the unresolved chords (the Meat Puppets influence again) confirming his and our restlessness. He eventually gives up and starts to sing an “Ode to My Favorite Beer,” a love song to alcohol. More channel-flipping (this time the TV – “eight-ball junkie!” NWA sample included) follows over the languid Frisell-ish guitar ambience. “Things just wouldn’t be the same without you” cries Ivey quietly.
Some female heavy breathing initiates the song “Hair,” in which Ivey accuses his partner of cheating on him on the basis of the “fucked up” condition of her hair. A dialogue ensues:
Ivey: What have I done to deserve this?
The Other: Well maybe it’s those marks you’ve got on your neck.
Ivey: It’s just an allergic reaction. I’m allergic to cats.
By now Ivey’s vocal is so low and laidback (even as the increasingly hysterical Other has had enough and packs her bags) it sounds almost a dead ringer for Stuart Staples of Tindersticks.
On “Evening News” Ivey again attempts to gaze upon the world and there is more TV channel-hopping, with an evidently lousy sitcom being superseded by a beat which momentarily threatens to turn into “Jack and Diane.” A third voice comes in to implement a critique of the song’s unwillingness to talk about the state of the world. He then gets into an argument with Dewald about the unnecessity for Ivey’s songs to be “relevant” to the state of the world and ends up getting shot. Reality used to be a friend of Ivey’s (“He can’t go on givin’ out all this information and shit and not give us a solution!”).
Ivey is finally left on his own. Running away but still trying to run back. The unbearably poignant tune of “I Try.” “I’m not gonna let the world go and get me down,” he is almost sobbing at this stage, like someone who has been irretrievably crushed by the world. “Everybody keeps talking about a brighter day…Nobody lives in my world.” The double-tracked vocal gradually drifts out of sequence in the chorus. This is someone who has stopped trying to try. At the fadeout his horizons are narrowed to “I’m not gonna let this song go and get me down.”
The echo returns for the closing title track, implying that in his disconnection with the world he has a greater understanding of it than those actively participating in it (“surviving is the crime…don’t play with guns and knives…all you little boys and girls are just playing with toys”). He is ready to “get a bus to anywhere” like the old man sitting at the deserted, disused bus stop in Ghost World (but whose bus eventually comes). There is an astonishing ambient interlude with REM-type guitar/chamberlain chords and indistinct samples of children’s voices which presages Boards of Canada by at least seven years. Drums and guitars move out of phase and into bliss; note the psychedelic-raga guitar line which is played at the end. “Learn your wrongs and rights” Ivey admonishes at the song’s close.
There is nothing more to be said, so we return to Jethro, playing a messy C&W mutation of “Play With Toys.” He then recklessly goes on to dedicate a ballad to a lady in the audience, much to the chagrin of her companion with the “bald head and the big stomach,” and then retracts his sentiments at gunpoint, his voice remaining distended and passive throughout. Comic? Perhaps. But when playing the record in preparation for this piece, I followed it with the Palace Brothers’ There Is No One What Will Take Care Of You, released a year or so afterwards, and a fugitive strand of punctum was identified.
Like the Dream Warriors, there was one further obscure album in 1993, and then silence. Most probably dC Basehead decided not to pursue the trail which they’d opened up. Perhaps they’re still out there, somewhere in the Midwest. Still, as I am reliably informed that the Church of Me now has some influence in places of medium height, if not quite high places as yet, it is incumbent upon me to point out that this masterpiece of a record is not currently available on CD. BMG are advised to resuscitate it immediately.
. . .
COVER VERSIONS: HOW TO MISS THE POINT
Liberty X's "Just A Little" was a great pop single, so it's a shame that their new one, a cover of Mantronix's "Got To Have Your Love," misses the point so badly. The whole punctum of Curtis Mantronik's work lies in the fact that he is (or was) unafraid of silence or space. Thus the original "GTHYL" at one point cuts down to the bassline alone and thus magnifies to titanic levels the singer's urgent need for love. The minimalism and general unresolved melodic procession of the song may owe something to the influence of the then-relevant (1990) Soul II Soul.
The Liberty X cover is fairly faithful, and it's such a good song that it would be difficult to damage. But there are two factors which deter from the record's potential greatness; one is the irritating post-Spice Girls urge to let everyone in the group have a line or verse to sing. The female lead here is up to the task but the male voice isn't - that awful gloopy, haven't swallowed my treacle properly gunge which passes for UK male soul singing at the moment. And having the song shared between one and the Other detracts from the single-minded urgency which powered the original. Secondly, in the key break which on the original was, as I've said, the bassline alone, the producers here have been unable to resist cramming in useless vocal detail (standard "soul" mangling which is unattractively meaningless and just gets in the way). Like everyone these days, they're scared of being quiet, even for a nanosecond, in case the automatic Top Shop party tape comes in and drowns the underlying fear of impermanence. Still, it went in at #2 this week, so the kids obviously don't want "silence" either.
. . .
DEREK BAILEY – “BALLADS”
The song “Laura” is about the futility in trying to pin down or define an elusive and ultimately indefinable spirit. “But she’s only a dream”…as a film theme, it of course relates to a murder victim (or not?) who is ceaselessly alluded to but never really seen. When redefined by Sinatra on 1957’s Where Are You? album he elicited something deeper and perhaps more painful from the song; his reading is a lament (unhistrionic but undeniably foredoomed in its delivery) for someone who not only cannot be caught, but someone whom he once could have touched but is now beyond his reach forever. For obvious reasons I cannot bring myself to listen to this recording at present.
But Derek Bailey must have had in mind the idea of personifying himself as this elusive spirit. Why else would Mr Nowness of Now, Mr Contrarian himself now (re)turn to the sort of standards which he must have played thousands of times over in dancebands and pit bands in his youth, as evidenced in his extraordinary new album Ballads? Well, the difference is of course that he did both play and enjoy these deathless tunes – that phenomenal canon of songs penned to order in the early-mid 20th century for supposedly ephemeral entertainment purposes and yet whose durability looks set to outlive all of us – in his younger days. Crucially he turns 70 this year; his upbringing, as with many of the elders of British avant-jazz/improv, was utterly dependent on the times and, of course, the war. There is a book waiting to be written about the not very divergent paths of creative music-making and the entertainment industry in post-war Britain (through ENSA, the Gang Show, etc.). Grounded in providing backing to order for any number of visiting luminaries, from Gracie Fields to Bob Monkhouse, from Morecambe and Wise to the Supremes, this music, this culture is in the blood of the guitarist from Sheffield.
Ballads appears on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, and it was indeed Zorn’s idea to have Bailey come into the studio and improvise on some standards. The cover maintains the seeming artifice – the eyes of a ‘50s diva appear in monochrome on the cover, peering out from behind what appears to be the ears of a cat. The titles are picked out in Women’s Journal pink. Typically, though, Bailey remained contrarian when preparing for the recording. “I bought this guitar which was totally inappropriate for playing standards…the fact that I was going to play a standard did something interesting to the improvising…I’m not interested in Improvised Music with a capital I and a capital M. I’m interested in improvising.”
So we could call this record The Popular Derek Bailey, or perhaps look upon it as a bookend with which to summarise and wrap up his life’s work; except that at 70 Bailey thankfully shows no signs of retiring or expiring.
Ballads is not a series of set performances, but a continuous 41-minute piece in which Bailey freely dips into his memory and plays various standards but simultaneously improvises as he has always done. For those unfamiliar with his “previous” life, the immediate sound of Bailey plucking identifiable harmonic chords on an instantly recognisable tune (“Laura”) may come as a shock greater than that of hearing him tangle with DJ Ninja’s beats on 1995’s Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass. The tune (as with all the tunes here) is played with immeasurable and deep love, but this does not stop him from deploying his usual improvisational techniques in the song’s service. As the song slowly dissipates into abstraction, you feel that Bailey is striving to find the essence of “Laura,” to try to use his positively anti-orthodox style to get nearer to, and perhaps inhabit, the song’s cynosure. You hardly notice the unlikely but logical transition into “What’s New?” (another song also sung definitely by Sinatra, on 1958’s Only The Lonely) – elements of the opening melodic motif of “Laura” continue to pervade the Burke/Haggard standard. This song is of course about meeting up with an old flame and finding that the love (at least on the singer’s part) has neither changed nor diminished in its passion. There is always a sense of something lost in Bailey’s more desolate playing, especially on acoustic (which is what he sticks to on this album). The technique, however, remains astonishing; note how he skilfully strikes the upper notes of the fret in such a way that instant echoing harmonics are produced, to get a kind of acoustic “feedback” effect.
Through “When Your Lover Has Gone,” the guitar becomes more pointillistic and more animated, with dazzling high-speed runs tossed off almost as an afterthought. On the epic seven-minute dissertation on “Stella By Starlight” you might believe that an acoustic guitar can scream. The playing here is jagged and uncomfortable, and the song itself only becomes explicitly apparent in the closing moments. On “My Melancholy Baby” the song is hardly there (though everything that happens, no matter how abstract-sounding, has a pronounced relationship and relevance to the song’s basic structure. Bailey has to be listened to and heard).
Then he relents for a little; Walter Donaldson’s “My Buddy” is played almost straight, and we then go into a section which is bookended by references to the songs “Gone With The Wind” and Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair.” Again, these performances are fairly faithful to the song structures, but note on the first performance of “Rockin’ Chair” how Bailey is accompanying himself with octave runs, the lower register then shooting off on a very different direction to the rest of the guitar. This is almost his equivalent of his former playing partner Evan Parker’s multiphonics. Then to the Mount Sinai tablet of jazz improvising to which all improvisers are one day fated to come: “Body and Soul.” This is a very faithful interpretation and Bailey never loses sight of the tune but is not deterred from utilising his techniques in ways which constantly derail the ears’ expectations of what is to come. Then he returns to the preceding two tunes. On the second “Rockin’ Chair,” note how structural symmetry is achieved by the fact that the octave runs here are high and middle register, and now it is the high register which is going off on a tangent.
Acidity re-enters in the performance’s closing stages: “You Go To My Head” is played with reverence but with extremely askew rhythm (get the violence of these arpeggiated, heavily struck block chords!). “Georgia On My Mind” is dissolved into fragments, ever more fragile, ever more transient. Finally, on a 30-second reading of “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone,” a chilling threnody is struck, the song barely clinging to its side, and an explicit relationship with Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night” (to which Marc Ribot refers in his sleevenotes) is revealed. Krapp’s last will and testament, the tape slowly dwindling to silence and the serrated hiss of its final fadeout before termination.
Notes for interested readers
Bailey as solo acoustic performer is best exemplified by 1982’s definitive album Aida, which irritatingly drifts in and out of print. But for neophytes, a more approachable (not to mention more easily available) starting point might be the recently reissued 2CD set New Sights, Old Sounds, a concert recording made in Japan in 1979 which provides a good overall guide to the range of Bailey’s playing approaches, from pure feedback to the incorporation of his older influences (e.g. Charlie Christian). For light relief 1975’s Domestic and Public Pieces (Emanem) is also highly recommended, featuring as it does several examples of Bailey’s lugubrious Sheffield voice ruminating on everything from the fire at London’s Unity Theatre to middle-aged impotence.
. . .
Friday, September 13, 2002
LET US SALUTE THE ORIGINAL BASTARD (of) POP - DUCK ROCK
Worthiness is not the same thing as worth. To seize a music, take it to pieces, expose it to its aesthetic polar opposite and thereby (hopefully) refresh it is not a task to which the adjective "worthy" should be applied. There are places for reverence and respect as long as you don't let them block your future. I could spend the rest of my life revering Spencer's Resurrection at Cookham but simultaneously realise and adore the pelvis-driven imaginings which give that masterpiece its multiple puncta.
As with World Music. If music is truly to be of the world then it must by definition be exposed to "impure" things, it must be acknowledged that the music itself is probably "impure" to begin with. It cannot be adopted or handled with dainty fingers, nervously examining their adrenalin reserves to ensure that they contain adequate nullifying agents of respect. Thus are Luaka Bop or World Circuit (whatever their considerable merits) not much else than houses of studium, picking the right musicians, the right post-Cooder/Lanoir ambience, picking the right ambience but never picking punctum. It is all middle-distance, respectful, designed never to derange. Mr Byrne really should have taken the lead from Malcolm McLaren and Trevor Horn.
Ironic that, with the Duck Rock project, McLaren set out to combat and nullify what he viewed to be the sterile blandness (though you and I know better, being closer to it at the time) of New Pop. And how better to attack than to employ its chief architect, Trevor Horn, to arrange and produce? McLaren said he wanted Horn to obtain some "bollocks" in his work, get "a bit of the rough, the spontaneous" into his meticulous productions. Doubly ironic, therefore, that Duck Rock is one of the most seamlessly, microscopically put-together things which Horn ever did.
How did they approach this? It was McLaren's ceaseless strivings for a new punk, and his moderately keen ear for developments. He was in America while hip-hop and electro went overground with Flash and Bambaataa, witnessed with amazement kids breakdancing to a modified "Trans-Europe Express," scratching up records like John Cage with a good drummer (a disciple of Karel Appel's COBRA group/philosophy as well as of Debord, McLaren instinctively knew how to insert the art into this sort of thing). His ears wandered vaguely in the direction of Africa, specifically in view of Bambaataa's Zulu Nation and any connections which McLaren could discern (Nigeria's King Sunny Ade and Senegal's Youssou N'Dour had yet to break overground, though the former's Synchro System was, usefully, a minor UK hit at around the time of Duck Rock's release, while the fatally less mischievous Laswell got to N'Dour first). His wits further led him to discern a vague (probably imagined) link between the square dances of the white South and the hip hop culture of the black North - apart from their both being ritual occasions to allow participants to somehow become more "themselves" - the same idea which, of course, prompted Punk into existence. How to marry all of this up?
McLaren and Horn did some field trips to NYC, Tennessee and the South African townships, made some recordings and then returned to London to knock them into shape with what was eventually to become the Art of Noise (indeed, the latter's epoch-beginning Into Battle EP largely originated from Duck Rock outtakes) with some help from Thomas Dolby. Significantly, from NYC, they employed the DJ duo The World's Famous Supreme Team to act as a kind of Greek chorus for the album, turning it into one of their then legendary late night/early morning radio shows.
It's hard to visualise just how radical the first single from the album "Buffalo Gals" seemed when it came right at the death of 1982, right when the careerist ambulance chasers (Wham!, Tears For Fears etc.) seemed determined to strip New Pop of all its mischief and sensuality. And how appropriate that both McLaren and Horn should signify a way out. Radio One played it; the likes of DLT and Steve Wright sounded completely baffled but, to their credit (unlike DLT with punk five years previously), knew that this was something new and correctly predicted that it would be a gigantic hit. True, to those long familiar with things like Grandmaster Flash's "Adventures on the Wheels of Steel" (a minor UK hit about a year previously), this was not exactly something unprecedented, although one could argue that what McLaren and Horn did with it was unprecedented. Certainly square dance cut-ups were not yet on the Zululand template, although downtown Double D & Steinski were simultaneously busy preparing their likewise groundbreaking "Lessons." For the other big hit off the album, "Double Dutch," McLaren reversed the template, getting Zulu singers to exalt the praises of NYC skipping contests.
The album itself remains eminently playable. Though the Supreme Team's patter is now a stock template for Radio 1/Kiss DJs, it sounded fresh and spontaneous at the time, sounded like an injection of (s)punk into the barrenness in which post-New Pop pop had marooned itself. And McLaren let no stones lie in his "world tour." From the near-holy murmurings of the introduction "Obatala" effortlessly into the welcoming Supreme Team ("leave your guns at home! Tell me Shirl, how do you manage to stay up until four o'clock in the morning to listen to our show??!?") and the killer opening sequence of "Buffalo Gals," "Double Dutch" and "Merengue," this is a grin-inducing record. On the latter, six clear years before the Lambada came to public prominence, McLaren gleefully romps through the salsa-meets-kwela-meets-Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra like a postmodern Bruce Forsyth, excitedly intoning lines like "nice little cemetarios will be waiting for you!" Even the fact that McLaren's delivery (especially on "Double Dutch") recalls no one so much as the late Harry Corbett of Sooty the Bear fame somehow lends even more humanity and mischief to this record.
And what about "Punk It Up"? In his sleevenotes, McLaren recalls the glee and enthusiasm with which the Zulus entertained his stories about the Sex Pistols, and how much more enlivening than Paul Simon's worthy and perhaps necessary but ultimately dull deployments of mischief in the service of his sub-Woody Allen neuroses is the joy of hearing the Zulus singing, "I'm a Sex Pistol man" to top-notch Afrobeat. This seeming disrespect for "other musics" (sics) actually betrays a greater and deeper respect for them than mere Xeroxing and blanding out. The whole thing continues in similar (if slightly more contemplative and ritualistic) mood on side two before bowing out with "Duck For The Oyster," a straightfaced square dance for fiddles and scratch DJs where McLaren manfully fuses both mutually hating though ultimately alike extremes together. Note the parting cry of "Promenade you know where/AND I DON'T CARE" where he performs the final bonding ceremony with Punk and thereby regenerates it.
A shame that no room could be found on the CD for perhaps McLaren and the Supreme Team's greatest moment, "D'Ya Like Scratchin'?" (the B-side of the 12-inch of "Soweto") where the Team's especially demented scratching interacts with proto-Art of Noise beats to almost hysterical levels until McLaren strides in with a straight hoedown version of "Red River Valley" (cf. Scooter's "Fuck the Millenium" to see how this spirit remains propagated to this day).
But this is a joyous record which superficially doesn't give a fuck but deep down its fuck is much more sincerely given than any "worthy" or "respectful" Social Clubs could really offer.
. . .
Thursday, September 12, 2002
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
Can I kick it?
OK, so what have you got to say about the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates? Some of us are waiting.
You only ever seem to drop in when there's no one else around.
I didn't fancy a pint and wasn't keen on watching slow motion collapsing buildings with unctuous Robert De Niro voiceovers.
It's taken me a long time to make my mind up about Revolutionary Road. I'm not sure that I still have.
You didn't like it did you?
The texture of it I do like. Some sequences pierce me deeply. I'm unsure of what Yates was intending, however. Is this a pitiless indictment of two lives wasted and destroyed by compromise, or...
Or...
Well why is it always the woman's fault? April Wheeler's the one who has to be sac...
Wait a minute. Not everyone's read this book yet. Start from the beginning.
OK. Revolutionary Road was written in 1961, when Yates was 35. He wrote about eight novels subsequently but none made the same impact. He died in 1992. It's about an unhappily married couple, Frank and April Wheeler, who married too young and too hastily, had a child and have subsequently attempted to live what they perceive to be a "normal" or "interim" life in suburbia until they have the means to live the life they really want.
About Frank Wheeler...
He fought in WW2 and didn't go to college, just like Yates. He says that he nurtures ambitions (literary? poetic?) but has deliberately taken a desk job (in the same firm for which his father worked) which is dull, monotonous and requires minimal mental and physical input. He argues that he will not be there forever, but we know full well that he will be, that really he likes the inertia, he likes not having to think.
Fear that his cover might be blown?
Probably. He can quote from numerous literary and philosophical sources but never demonstrates any evidence of understanding or developing them. He read a lot when he was 19 but doesn't seem to have done so since (in this book they are both about 30). He hates April for imprisoning him with the early child, for not letting him get on with being nothing. I am unsure whether he hates himself even more; my impression is that he doesn't. He is putting on a facade all the time in his social life, with his supposedly bovine neighbours the Campbells, with his secretary Maureen Grube, with whom he inevitably has an affair which equally inevitably ends in tears, with the superficially kind but secretly despairing letting agent, Mrs Givings, and her near-mute husband and psychotic son. Perhaps the only time that he actually is himself is at work. He clearly enjoys playing delay games with the in-tray and "filing cabinet" (bulging bottom drawer of his desk, which he periodically empties into the bin without reading), and when called actually to do some urgent work, manages to deliver the goods and improve his standing in the company (merely by drafting a series of ludicrously cliched manuals). My feeling is that this is what he wants to preserve, this is what he really cares for. Too bad for any other human being who might have the misfortune to care for him.
And what about April?
Same, but the other way round. Driven by a misbegotten need to "fit in" (inevitably the father in her youth is away for long periods of time and hardly ever present, which starts this mental process off) and hating Frank for the same reasons that he hates her, she joins a local amateur dramatics company. In the opening scene of the novel Yates gives us a merciless dissemination of her lacklustre performance in The Petrified Forest, and the possibility that she may count this as a public suicide. Thereafter she is a living ghost. To try to resuscitate her idea of a "good life," she suggests to Frank that they sell up, move to Paris and start a new life. With her secretarial skills, she could earn a good living there, which would leave Frank free to "find" himself and achieve the sort of life which she thinks he wants. Now of course any other young man in his position would probably jump at the idea and start packing straight away, but...
...except of course he is mortified by the proposal.
For two reasons; firstly, this would require him to demonstrate more fully that he loved April, which he doesn't; and secondly, that his cover would be blown and he would eventually be unmasked as a slacker with a nice turn of literary phrase. One imagines that he is completely relieved when April becomes pregnant again...except later on, as the novel progressively darkens, we learn that he doesn't even want this child anyway, although he has made a Herculean effort to persuade her into not aborting it. This proves fatal.
Why?
Because April decides to play along with it. She goes past the last date when she could safely abort the child. But arguments recur, everything comes to a head and uncomfortable truths are learned about both of them; on April's part, from her neighbour Shep Campbell, with whom she has a brief consummation, the result of which is that she doesn't know who she is; and on both their parts, from John Givings, the asylum day release ex-maths teacher, who is, predictably, on the mark about their relationship. On the last night they are together, their relationship explodes and is apparently beyond repair.
But on the next morning everything is miraculously restored. April greets Frank warmly with a splendid breakfast, takes what appears to be genuine interest in his work (the company is about to welcome computerisation, an interesting angle which maybe allows the modern reader a hook on which to hang on this story), is very kind and loving, waves him goodbye as he drives off to work. She is still smiling as she returns to do the washing-up, maintaining her smile until every other facial muscle has cracked, until finally she sobs. Then, suddenly, methodically and apparently dispassionately, she makes preparations to self-abort her child, knowing full well that this could kill her...which of course it does. This is the most frightening sequence in the book, more frightening because of its superficial serenity. Like Poltergeist, it scares you most when everything is quiet.
And of course I suppose Frank doesn't die.
Yes and no. Physically he doesn't. There's a very moving section when he has returned home from the hospital, and cannot believe that someone whose presence is still very strong in their house (down to the smell of her dresses in the wardrobe) is in fact dead. He hears the Campbells enter the house to look for him but hides until they have disappeared. Subsequently the story moves to Shep's perspective, a few months later. He thinks of how Frank disappeared, moved back to the city, and then visited a couple of months after April's death; much thinner, talking with evident fake enthusiasm about work prospects and seeing an analyst, even throwing in the cliche that if his wife hadn't left him a note he would have killed himself. Shep knows that Frank didn't have the nerve to do anything like that, but equally knows that he is, to all intents and purposes, dead, as an inquiring and passionate human being. A living death which may be worse than the actual death which April initiated for herself, because he will spend the next 50 years slowly dying of something internal.
Strong stuff.
It certainly is at times. But...
You haven't said much about the other characters yet.
Because they're all caricatures rather than characters. They're drawn so flimsily that you imagine that every one of them is a projection from Frank or April's own minds. The names - Mrs Givings as the leaseholder. His father's sub-Pickwick boss was one Oat Fields. Maureen Grube - the little "other woman" nothing more than an insect. Shep - the faithful dog (and of course the reverse of Frank; high-class family, rebelled against upbringing, became an engineer, lived a blue-collar life, but then re-rebelled back to the sort of life from which he shouldn't have run away in the beginning).
Some of these scenes with others read uncomfortably like screenplay drafts.
Indeed. Their actions and reactions are largely predictable. And I can't buy into the idea of the mentally ill son who of course knows the Real Truth which is unavailable to Ordinary Humanity. The part of John Givings requires several more dimensions than Yates was prepared to give him.
A part which at its best would have required a Brando at his sentiment-free peak. Instead it reads as though it was written for...Michael Parks, or Tony Franciosa.
And the urban Tennessee Williams deal?
Hmmm. Too much unanalysed slapping of the wife. The underlying suspicion that Yates actually sympathised with Frank and detested April.
It was 1961.
It was already five years past Look Back in Anger, which this novel resembles in several intriguing ways. Frank and April are Jimmy Porter and Alison, except in Revolutionary Road Alison really wants to be Helen, if that makes any sense.
I'll have to go and refresh my memory. Speaking of dramatic parallels...
You read my mind. I doubt that my doubts about Revolutionary Road would be quite as concrete without knowing Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? from a few years later. Here everything is garrotted down to brutal essentials. Failings are out in the open, wounds are gladly chewed over.
That's not really the point of Revolutionary Road, though. Here it's to do with what happens when emotions are kept from coming out in the open and emotional wounds left untreated.
Indeed. The book has too much power in it to be dismissed. That closing section cut me to the quick the first time I read it. What Frank turned into after April's death seemed to me to be so much like what I turned into, or thought I had turned into. Hiding from grief.
You wouldn't have had the guts to kill yourself either.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. September-November last year was a difficult time in lots of ways, as have the last 12 months in general. It's a last resort when every other coping mechanism has failed.
Is The Church of Me a coping mechanism?
One's life has to be justified somehow.
. . .
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
AMM WITH CHRISTIAN WOLFF
Conway Hall, London, 10 September 2002
Viewed from below, one could almost be looking at a 17th-century alchemist's laboratory. One reading lamp, placed back at the far left of the stage, though not directed at anything in particular - from Titian onwards, always the attribute of guidance, of Godhood. The light positioning in Citizen Kane is always staged in exactly the same way.
To the right of the stage, a Bosendorfer grand piano with two stools. Centre stage there is a drum kit, a huge gong and a large African drum, along with various small percussive devices. To the left of the stage, but with the light facing away from it, there is a table set out like a workbench. It is unclear from my viewpoint what is atop it, but there is certainly an electric guitar, positioned flat and horizontally, with sundry electronic devices, wires and plugs. Onto the stage come four middle-aged gentleman who could pass for off-duty philosophy lecturers. Their collective age is somewhere in the region of 250 years. One of them, the percussionist Eddie Prevost, greets the audience and explains that the musicians will start once the lighting has been sorted out. Keith Rowe, the guitarist/electronics operator, smiles affably at the audience and apologises for the delay. The two other gentlemen, John Tilbury and Christian Wolff, endeavour to squeeze themselves behind the piano. They start as they usually start - some static hiccups from the speakers, some light brushing of the cymbals; you still think that they're warming up but, no, they have started. Started to transport you, started to realign your attitudes to music, noise and silence, as they always succeed in doing.
They are tonight's incarnation of the group AMM, which has been in existence for almost as long as I have, which in its earliest days recorded their debut album AMMMusic for Elektra Records, shared management with Barrett-era Pink Floyd (for immediate confirmation of the effect that the former had on the latter, just listen to "Interstellar Overdrive") and had Cornelius Cardew in their line-up. There's a famous photo of the group in action from early 1968 - in terms of gestures and set-up, hardly different from tonight - with young Cardew, Rowe and Prevost looking the spitting images of, respectively, Joe Strummer, Arto Lindsay and Keith Moon. And they have stayed with it, where the Floyd didn't, where Can couldn't; possibly they manage to be both the most conservative and the most radical music group on the planet.
Wolff has been a floating "satellite" member of AMM since the Cardew days (originally on electric bass) and shares with Cardew a Cagean musical upbringing (he was a student of Cage's in the early '50s) which progressed into Year Zero musical radicalism ("all music is propaganda music") which somehow managed still to align itself with populism in a distant way (folk songs were regularly utllised in Wolff's '60s works; AMM, on the other hand, famously used to tape loops of then-current hits like "Lightning Strikes" and "Barbara Ann" 20 or 30 times in a row, and then attempt to drown them out with noise). Also in common with Cardew is his interest in making his music accessible to non-professional musicians - Carla Bley is on record as saying Wolff was a major influence on her approach when making Escalator Over The Hill. Unlike Cardew, though, he never let his art be submerged in misguided ideas of "what the people want," as, like Cage, he figured that if the people could find his music, they would want it. Tilbury has been associated with AMM for nearly 30 years, and is in himself a distinguished interpreter of Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman et al.
To begin with it was difficult from my viewpoint to work out exactly how Wolff and Tilbury divided their piano duties. It seemed to me as though Wolff was at one point working the pedals and leaving the keys to Tilbury; at other times he would dampen the strings which Tilbury was hitting, while contributing an occasional meaningful low chord or cluster. They were both evidently good listeners, which in AMM you have to be - no room in this egoless music for grandstanding. Seldom do you see musicians being so quiet and unobtrusive in trying to make sounds and noises, and this is why improvised music can never successfully translate directly to record; you need to see the interaction between musicians, you need to see how they are responding, how they react to the environment in which they are playing, where, in moments of near-silence, even the creaking of a chair leg in the audience can carry considerable significance. In this sense AMM are the Harold Pinter of improv.
Prevost stared intently at his percussive assemblage, striking notes and sounding tones with great deliberation and caution. Frequently he will use a violin bow across cymbals, the sides of his snare drum and/or against the African drum itself, to engineer tonalities and drones. This is a similar approach to that of Tony Oxley, but unlike Oxley he doesn't use electronics; the acoustics are sufficient in themselves. He and Rowe are the two remaining founder members still in AMM, and their empathy was very apparent.
If you hear Rowe's guitar work on record without knowing anything about the group's approach you might assume considerable physicality, Thurston Moore-type scraping of the fretboard across the speakers. Well, no - the noises which he produces on stage are, in sonic terms, infinitely more radical than anything that anyone else could produce (even Hendrix), but he merely sits there, deep in concentration, purposely moving the screwdrivers up and down the frets, deploying odd little electric contraptions (was that a shaver I saw/heard at one point?), adjusting the sounds as needs be to integrate with what the other musicians are doing. Aural violence is usually indicated by some deft and rapid movement of his left arm, nothing more. Speaker static and crackle are also harnessed creatively, as are what must have been sampling trigger key pads. The legendary shortwave radio made just one brief but significant appearance.
The quartet only actually played for about the first 20 minutes of the 80-minute (CD length!) performance. Deceptively tentative textures, which reminded me of nothing more than George Crumb's Makrokosmos works for prepared pianos and percussion; plangent Debussy chords appearing as though they were the most natural thing on Earth. Unlike the AMM of even 20 years ago, tonality is never far away.
After that, Wolff left the stage for a break, leaving Tilbury in sole charge of the piano. This frequently beautiful sequence was a strong reminder of how, in a sense, AMM have "come back" to the listener over the last 15 years or so (a process best documented on 1987's The Inexhaustible Document) allowing perhaps a more subtle and lyrical approach to become prominent. The interplay between Tilbury's yearning chordality and the careful suspension of gravity by Prevost and Rowe was spellbinding to witness. Not that it couldn't get animated when it needed, as demonstrated by brief but punctum-filled sequences where Rowe cranks up the volume and makes his table howl while Prevost attacks the kit with his phenomenal offhand rhythmic technique. But the noise is never allowed to spill over into undefined chaos; these people, crucially, know what they are doing. And the calm returns.
Then Tilbury exits to make way for Wolff again, who assumes sole piano duties for the remainder of the performance. This section starts in a noticeably more muscular and dynamic fashion; Wolff's clusters are still a world away from Cecil Taylor, but that kind of ultra-rhythmic propulsion isn't really required in AMM's music. Even in their densest moments, they always somehow remain light.
And then, eventually, a long and transcendental closing section which unavoidably reminded me of Morton Feldman (who dedicated one of his last pieces to Wolff), specifically his final, considered, meditative microtonal pieces, above all Coptic Light (imagine the final chords of Ornette Coleman's Skies of America stretched into mathematical infinity, all numeric combinations worked out as precisely and as unhurriedly as Coltrane). To watch this tonal centre with its ever more gentle sonic abrasions slowly reach a compromise with silence was an experience which I will not easily forget - particularly right at the end, where phantom piano chords (straight out of Crumb's Makrokosmos III, final movement) materialised which were not being played by Wolff and could only have been triggered off by Rowe's sampling key pads. A graceful adherence to life and acknowledgement of whatever lies beyond it. It was the most quietly powerful music I have heard this year. They remain universes ahead of everybody else.
The concert was recorded and will no doubt be released on CD in due course. I'm not sure how much, if any, of the irreducible ambience of the physical performance will transfer onto record - this is something you needed to witness and ultimately be part of.
I don't know what "real" music is, am unsure whether such a thing could ever exist. But, beyond even the sort of music which was "real" because the pleasure derived from it was engendered by more than one person, there exists another remote territory - of music which I want to nestle close to me, music in which I can wander and hide myself when necessary. Music which belongs only to me. AMM come very near that territory, but they manage to do it for every individual listener who has ears with which to hear them. That is their great triumph and their deathless divinity.
. . .
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
SCOOTER
You know what we need right now? Less Beatles/Stones/Roses tribute bands…and more KLF tribute bands! If one is to venerate the past then try to venerate a part of it which isn’t already overcrowded with chasers of a long-gone ambulance. And because I can only assess through my own perspective, I am justified in saying that Push The Beat For This Jam: The Singles ‘94-’02, a compilation of hits by German stadium house operatives Scooter, is a far worthier, far more stimulating, ultimately far more compassionate companion than the collected works of Bob Dylan. For me. To me. It sings to me because it sings to too few others. Or other lovers of music and movement who are sufficiently wise not to analyse and know that movement counts above all else.
Their formula has scarcely changed in the last eight years; they are reliable but always fresh because no one else is doing it. There is no ZZ Top to nullify their Status Quo. Roaring crowd sounds, blissfully obvious fast beats, and a German toastmaster/ringmaster who can sound almost like Shaun Ryder if you squint your ear enough.
The opening track “Hyper Hyper” would coincide with Mike Skinner’s epiphany of the lazily swaying cornfields, except this is visceral rather than soothing (although the latter can never be ruled out; poignancy, intended or otherwise, is essential to all great Europop). A galaxy of DJs is saluted, out of whom only Carl Cox and Laurent Garnier appear still to be prospering.
The introduction to “Move Your Ass” is sublime – “Get off your shirts and wait for further instructions!…I’ve got one message for the next decade – MOVE! YOUR! ASS!!” A “Kick Out The Jams” for the generation succeeding me, suitably apolitical, yet in its wider implications paradoxically much more political. A 2 Unlimited-style stomp without the distracting cheese – and can we trace the history of the stomp in European pop through Joe Meek via Glam and Moroder, finally emerging into what we hear here? “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice!” The MC (commonly known as “Dave from Sheffield”), who fittingly looks uncannily like Heinz, outlines his utopia.
After that it is predictable, true, but a predictability which entices rather than a predictability which simply bores or frustrates (the B Gillespie Academy of Proper Music). “Friends” marks the first appearance of another of their trademarks: the speeded-up vocal, determinedly asexual – sex has no real place in this music, celebration (of what?) is all. “Friends – we’ll be friends” the echo repeats to an impossibly jubilant major chord change suddenly dipping into warped mid-line synth bass and re-emerging triumphantly.
It is the MC’s job to uplift. “Party people! The sky has changed! Can you smell the sun? It’s time for the most exciting season – an ENDLESS SUMMER!!” the next track begins. It is relentlessly euphoric, and here there are indeed rising piano tones looping over and over and a yearning diva (another legacy from Meek?). The polar opposite to Fennesz’ idea of an Endless Summer, though the latter would sound great at 6:30 in the morning as you’re winding down and getting back into the car. “Feel the energy – rough and tough and dangerous!” he exclaims, after emitting an unearthly scream. The speeded up vocal here sounds, however, uncannily like it’s singing “I walk alone” – a comment on the transience of the “generation of the future” so smartly nailed by Pulp and the Streets? Certainly the crowd fadeout could well be a football chant. The sublimely absurd, just the right side of the cheese fence, central riff of “Back In The UK” – somewhere between Kraftwerk’s “Radio-Activity” and Cannon and Ball’s Casino. “I wanna check the birds, the trees, the cows and the seas!” Beat that, Dickie Ashcroft. The distended, shattered choir which kicks off “Let Me Be Your Valentine” – a love scenario which would be, I suspect, unreproduceable outside of a Russ Meyer film or a Larry Clark photojournal. “Listen to the voice of Valentine – MU MU MU!” The first of several overt tributes to Drummond and Cauty. Clearly these men have studied the How to Have a Number One Manual in loving detail. Well, someone had to. “This is a Valentine’s party!” “Heil! Heil! Heil!” the crowd may or may not reply.
Alas, as is common with this genre, they lose the knack when they make the mistake of letting other music(s) invade their territory. The cover of “Rebel Yell” is ill-advised and far too reverent, showing the joins. “I’m Raving” works better – this starts off as a straight cover of Shut Up and Dance’s original Cohn-sampling “Raving I’m Raving,” but instead of going proto-junglist, the track quite remarkably segues into synthesised bagpipes playing “Scotland the Brave” FOR NO LOGICAL REASON AT ALL (hey it’s the Illogical Song!). Quite remarkable in its unabashed genius.
The next track “How Much Is The Fish?” might reasonably lead to expect sampling of Stump (“does the fish have chips” et al), but no – this begins “the chase is better than the catch” followed by what may or may not may be “transforming the Jews – we need your support!” if you’re not listening properly. The titular question appears to have little to do with the general urge to movement proclaimed in this song, though the synthesised folk song seems here to be modified klezmer (or possibly a mutation of the Jeux Sans Frontieres theme tune, voiced by the Red Army Choir at this song’s climax). Isn’t this a truer resurrection than “Bitter Sweet Symphony”? Even “Fire” which is a fairly unremarkable attempt to do the Prodigy, is redeemed by the “hey-hey-HEY” chant remembered from Geordie’s great forgotten plumber-glam stomper “All Because Of You.” “The Age of Love” promotes “love, peace and unity” and in the next breath claims this purity to be “rough and ready.”
With “No Fate” an air of melancholy begins to infiltrate Scooter’s anthems. This is low-key (their equivalent of a ballad) and although it talks about saying “goodbye to the past, hello to the future,” Dave warns that “the struggle continues.” It’s the first minor key song on the album.
But next, out of chronological sequence, but still a stroke of genius, comes a compromise with doubt and a consequent dismissal of angst, so brilliantly evoked in the best single of 2002 so far, their visionary rereading of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song.” What a work of art this record is. Starting with the first four lines of the original, with the speeded up voice returning, but sounding more wistful and perhaps more hurt than ever. A recollection of a golden youth which may only have happened in one’s imagination. Wisely the song sticks with the first four lines, not bothering to list the causes of the singer’s subsequent descent into deathly cynicism. No song since the Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring” has managed to evoke the past so poignantly, and yet still sound utterly futuristic.
The angst is dispelled by Dave’s over-eager voice intoning “Good morning” like Fenella Fielding over the tannoy in The Prisoner. Like Hendrix, rising out of the ashes of Woodstock at 10 am on Monday to blast out “The Star Spangled Banner.” Life returns despite repeated attempts of the Supertramp excerpt to negate and demolish it. Yes it was beautiful and magical, the MC is saying, but it can be AGAIN. It will be DIFFERENT, she will be DIFFERENT, but it will HAPPEN AGAIN. What better way of reaffirming life than to blow a raspberry in the face of despair. Dave’s climactic proclamation of “Love, peace and unity – SIBERIA IS THE PLACE TO BE! The K, the L, the F and the Ology…HALLELUJAH!” may well be one of the most sublime moments in love ever perpetuated by pop music.
The KLF intonation initiates a full-blown homage. “Posse (I Need You On The Floor)” IS (at least in its first half) “What Time Is Love?” The delivery becomes more unhinged. “Materialski!” “I’m bigger and bolder and rougher and tougher” he samples. “In other words sucker, I’VE GOT NO BROTHER!” (negating the community again) “Check your watch! We’ll never stop!” Subliminal drum segments recalling the Dave Clark Five, immediately succeeded by synth burps evoking Cabaret Voltaire. “Haile Kylie!” he may or may not be yelling. The synthesised Russian choir and tympani which drive “Call Me Manana” and which would be worthy of ZTT at its peak, and which unaccountably mutates into a fairground organ at its fadeout.
Were that not enough, we now get “Fuck the Millennium,” though this is not quite the KLF tune. Instead of sturdy trawlermen at sea, we get “I’m the candyman. Also known as Dave. Dave from Sheffield. Furthermore known as the Screaming Lord (Sutch? Another Meek reminder). But you can call me Ice…Ice Ice Baby – THIS IS THE LIBERATION! I wanna fuck!” now sounding like Iggy Pop. A synth siren wavers. The song suddenly grinds to a halt. “Staying on the edge” smirks “Dave.” Inexplicably we now go into a Eurocheese version of “Wheels Cha Cha.” McLaren could never have conceived this. This is completely devoid of self-consciousness, and all the better for it.
“Coming at ya like Cleopatra!” says Dave, quickly drowned by a cinematic choir on “AIII Shot The DJ.” Morrissey talked, “Dave” acts. “All I want to do is chasin’ the punani” he, however, adds as a qualification.
The Scooter musical heritage appears to be a remembrance and recycling of all pop music of the last ten years remembered and recycled by no one else (electroclash hasn’t quite got to that stage yet). “Faster Harder Scooter,” for instance, shamelessly recycles the verse riff from the currently deeply unfashionable Shamen’s “Move Any Mountain.” Somehow this is much more palatable than, say, the Coral’s gruel-dominant, worthy diet of the Bunnymen, Madness and Morricone (misunderstanding all three, naturally).
Finally we hear the upcoming single “Nessaja,” another anthem of genius. “Always lived my life alone/Been searching for that place called home” says the speeded-up asexual voice with even more poignancy than before. “3 AM!” says the eternal Dave as the rhythm lurches once more into a race for immortality. “I AM THE JUNGLIST SOLDIER! It’s not a bird, it’s not a plane, it must be Dave who’s on the train! Wanna wanna get drunk! Am I gonna get dry?”
The alternating pelvis-driven beats and the inner voice telling Dorothy to come back. Back to life. It ends with a plaintive affirmation “I know that it’s not too late.” It is heartbreaking. It is the only climax imaginable for this divine pop record, which, being deadly serious about its deliberate facileness, presents a truer picture of what pop music meant to people over the last decade than virtually any Britpop back catalogue.
And it’s a message to Paul Morley, to Simon Reynolds, to Paul Lester, to all the acolytes of 1982 who never stopped believing; for ecstatic, shiny and wonderful pop music, you KNOW that it’s never too late.
. . .
DREAM WARRIORS: THE 13TH SIDE OF THE DICE
Spare a thought for Canada’s forgotten hip hop visionaries the Dream Warriors. I have recently rediscovered their 1991 debut And Now The Legacy Begins, and contrary to many of the artists/records I have lauded elsewhere on CoM, the trails they laid do seem to have been followed, albeit belatedly.
Unjustly dismissed as an Acid Jazz novelty act following their two hits “Wash Your Face In My Sink” and “My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style,” these tracks in fact manage to be mischievous as well as aesthetically astute. Borrowed from Gilles Peterson’s bottomless collection the samples may have been, but they still signpost a way forward from the original De La Soul template with their ingenuity (hear how the “Sink” sample – from Count Basie’s cover version of “Hang On Sloopy” (?!) – is artfully deconstructed into a ska rhythm in the intro and middle eight, thereby opening up another avenue of influence). The lyrics are playful and perhaps not very meaningful – gleeful gallimaufry as opposed to DLS’ primary-coloured surrealism. Indeed, the album as a whole gives an idea of what De La Soul Is Dead might have sounded like, had not sample clearance difficulties scuppered that particular record’s aesthetic (the original mix have gone down in history as the Smile of hip hop).
While some of the record is light – the deliberately warped skank of “Ludi” for example – other parts of it are determinedly adventurous. Try the near-industrial clanking of “Follow Me Out” with its refrain “who is the fool? The fool or the fool that follows the fool?” – ominous in its undertow; the title track with its subliminal minor-keying of “Genius of Love”; the astonishing “Tunes From The Missing Channel” which anticipates both trip hop and glitch in its stumbling, cut-up beats; and indeed the whole of the second side, which, with its skewered sci-fi lyrics and its sonic middle range concentration, makes them precursors to the likes of Deltron 3000, Mike Ladd and, ultimately, Dif Jux. This is an adventure which, perhaps predictably, was not satisfactorily followed up by its own creators; to my knowledge, there was one more album a couple of years later which failed to stimulate anybody, and then nothing. But it’s an important record which shouldn’t be overlooked.
. . .
Monday, September 09, 2002
THE “DON’T STOP ‘TILL YOU GET ENOUGH” TRILOGY
The song is of course about sex. Three different versions underline three different societal and aesthetic responses to the same “force.”
Michael Jackson, the song’s author, had probably not expressed as much gleeful joy on a record since “I Want You Back” a decade previously, and certainly has done anything but in the subsequent near-quarter century. There is no need for his recording to be included in the Church’s occasional Greatest Single Ever Made As Of Today column as its greatness is so evident that there is no need to point readers towards it, particularly since the spatiality of its arranger and producer, Quincy Jones – he really is the de Chirico of pop, if Boris Blank isn’t already – has only recently been worshipped here (6 Sept).
In MJ’s hands, it is probably the most selfless let’s-get-it-on record since…well, “Let’s Get It On.” Listen to the way in which the 14-piece band (not counting the string section) manage to sound both intimate and vast…from MJ’s nervous opening ad lib, as the guitars and percussion limber up on the starting blocks: “Uh…I don’t know ‘cos…you know, the force…and, er, I was thinkin’…” - almost a parody of a high school chat-up line, though there might be a subliminal reference to the then current Star Wars with all the talk about “the force” - and eventually when the tension gets too much, “…OOOHH!” and the record sets off. Significantly it is sung in his virtually asexual falsetto (all three versions under consideration here stay in the falsetto range). He wants the Other to take as much from him as she needs; he will do his best to satisfy her needs. The rhythm manages to be both restless and encouraging. And hear how, in the instrumental break, the synth suddenly starts running away, the horns take up the gauntlet, every musician in the studio suddenly striving towards orgasm THEY GET THERE
and there’s a second-long, immaculately timed pause for breath
and then it starts off again. The song does not climax again but the rhythm continues, the enthusiasm and love are still there. Finally, the song discreetly fades with just the Brothers Johnson’s almost high-life juju guitar lines maintaining the pulse. MJ would like the song to go on forever.
Compare this with the extraordinary version recorded by James Chance and the Contortions, live in Rotterdam in 1980, for the album Soul Exorcism. This is similarly active rhythmically, but here the jerks are virtually epileptic in their near-demonic need for sexual congress. There is no set-up intro; the band dive straight into the belly of the song. Chance gulps out the words in his strangulated alto voice, supported in the chorus by Frenchman Patrick Geoffrois, whose slide guitar was an inspired addition to the band and whose constant derailings of grooves are a delight throughout the album. The slide crazily weaves Dadaist patterns around Chance’s frenzy, bassist Al McDowell (on loan from Ornette’s Prime Time – I’m continually driven to thinking that Dancing In Your Head was the real Year Zero starting point of postpunk) constantly inventive, trumpeter Lorenzo Wyche holding the identifiable hook of the song practically all on his own. Chance’s improvised rap mid-song is largely indecipherable, but perhaps genuinely inarticulate in trying to express desire amidst the squashed together brickwork of the Lower East Side at high temperature. There are three climaxes during this version; in each, the band simply takes off for the planet Venus, and in the final closing climax Chance’s almost reluctant alto sax does its own squealing equivalent of MJ’s opening nervous salvo (albeit placed at the other end of the song) before he, Wyche and Geoffrois come together for a final ascension, and then end. The desire and enthusiasm are still there, but the urgency is far greater. This is an urban version of the song.
For the third version, we have to travel to Kingston, Jamaica, for some space. On Hustle! Reggae Disco, a lovely new compilation from Soul Jazz Records which contains reggae “Discomixes” of well-known ‘70s/early ‘80s disco hits (and incidentally, on One Blood’s rereading of “Be Thankful For What You’ve Got,” one realises where Massive Attack got their take from), there’s a superb reading of “Don’t Stop…” by Derrick Laro and Trinity. At seven minutes or so – significantly the longest of the three versions, and equally significantly not feeling as though it’s long – this reading decides to take its time with expression, and with love. There are no “climaxes” as such; simply a languid, steady but always stimulating rhythm and Laro’s falsetto almost pleading his offer of selfless congress.
(Slight digression: Commentators on the ‘60s free jazz scene always point to geography as a crucial difference in approaches to music-making; the thrown-together, high-rise, congested, claustrophobic infrastructure of New York led itself to the frenzied, do-it-all-now approach of Ayler, Sanders, Shepp et al (again, see Ornette’s New York Is Now album from the late ‘60s as a good example of freeform expression within overpowering geography – and of course the whole No Wave/No New York scene of which Chance was an integral part), while the open spaces of Chicago allowed the more leisurely, picturesque, contemplative approach of the Art Ensemble, Braxton & co.
Actually, a very good example of the two differences would be the career of Arto Lindsay, from the percussive guitar-beater of his DNA days to the Tropicana avant-balladry in which he now specialises)
In the same way, the open spaces of Jamaica lead themselves to a more understated but still persuasive approach (yes I know about the guns, the corruption, but they hardly figure in this analysis – try the unreservedly recommended recent Rebel Music compilation on Trojan Records for the other side of the story). So this is certainly the friendliest of the three recordings. Trinity comes in for the final section; he doesn’t talk about very much except “going to the disco,” “making you move,” and “skanking,” but he doesn’t really need to talk about much else. This is affable and approachable, and a rural version of the song. Absolutely lovely.
. . .
SUGABABES – DON’T LET ALBUM TITLES GET YOU!
It’s an unpromising title for the second Sugababes album, Angels with Dirty Faces. The same title, coincidentally, which was used by Tricky for his underperforming third album from 1998. The labyrinth forms when you consider that the first Sugababes album was largely overseen by Cameron McVey, husband of Neneh Cherry, all of whom have at some stage been associated with Massive Attack. No sign of the Booga Bear on AWDF, and only one brief glimpse of one Massive Attack associate. And when you further ponder that Tricky’s AWDF was a rather brave yet unheralded attempt to form a new music – using his paranoia to try to fuse post-Cypress Hill hip hop noir with the rhythmic dualities of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time – you would realise not to let cliched album titles defer you from attending to them.
And, out of a seeming career ruination – dropped by their previous label, one member going AWOL to be replaced by an AWOL ex-member of Atomic Kitten – the Sugababes have by some miracle pulled off the second great British girl-pop album of 2002 (the first being Mis-Teeq’s Lickin’ On Both Sides – specifically the “Special Edition” with the 2-step single remixes). And, as with all of the extraordinary post-hip hop/swingbeat pop music of the last decade, it manages to be simultaneously avant garde (sonically) and still manage to be danced to and sung with on buses and in shops all over South London (or wherever). There are no theorems in this music; any innovation happens naturally, without having to be signposted, implanted or fought over, because it has evolved naturally from the pop which preceded it. Certainly this album will be a sober reminder to Andy McCluskey just how Atomic Kitten could have turned out, had he had just that tiny little bit more nerve.
The first four tracks on AWDF are as strong an opening to a pop album as I can recall since The Lexicon Of Love 20 years ago (the last time pop in general was this good). It of course begins with “Freak Like Me,” the album mix of which sounds slightly tougher than the single. I must rescind previous comments made elsewhere regarding this track’s perceived inferiority to the Girls On Top bootleg "original.” The dynamics demanded of mainstream entryism are different from those of informal bootleg clubs, and here producer Richard X meets them fully. Utilising and subtly resculpting Numan’s original backing track, this record could not have happened in 1979 – and yet Joe Meek would have felt entirely at home with the aesthetics of desire and the electronic whizzbangs; this is the sort of thing he would have ended up producing had he lived. The static which threatens to overwhelm the singers and the song at the fadeout is really of the same kin as that which gloriously drowns Cabaret Voltaire’s “Nag Nag Nag.”
Whereas Destiny’s Child seem to be about girl(s) wanting to impose themselves (herself) on the world, the Sugababes are lyrically more concerned about just getting on in the world – so there is a lifeline there with which listeners can identify, as opposed to idolising a cold monolith (although pop music would be unworkable without enough examples of the latter). So where DC are determinedly unlovable, the Sugababes really do want to be loved – albeit on their own terms; the uselessness and general scrubness of the male is ceaselessly returned to on this record, though balanced by simple expressions of love and companionship, or the desire for them.
The second track “Blue” definitely falls into the former category; attacking a male ambulance chaser, the refrain very negatively goes “The colour that suits you is blue” (of course there might be a hidden political subtext here – cf. Fine Young Cannibals’ song “Blue,” though interestingly Siobhan, the Sugababe who jumped ship, was a Tory supporter). Musically it demonstrates that Timbaland’s lessons continue to be learned. The co-producer here is Howard Jones – surely not THE Howard Jones? If so, it’s the best thing he’s been involved with since the title track of Human’s Lib. Hear how the clenched beats suddenly break into a cantering acoustic guitar riff in the chorus which is strangely close to Electronic’s “Tighten Up” – an exhilarating adrenal rush. Overall, though, the track echoes, both musically and lyrically, Neneh Cherry’s “Buddy X” from a decade ago (and thanks to the Belgian lass for reminding me of how good an album Homebrew was!), though with two crucial differences – the vocal vulnerability of the Sugababes is the exact reverse of the nice-but-don’t-fuck-with-me utter assurance of Neneh; and, conversely, the bitterness in the lyric goes further (“don’t fuck with me! – you’re lame, you’re broke!!”), its spleen fully directed at the freeloading man, though one suspects that the singer’s hatred and fear will eventually turn towards herself.
“Round Round,” their deserved second number one, with a rhythm/string sample angular intro which again calls Cabaret Voltaire to mind, before going straight into what they used to call a classic pop hook, superficially lively yet sung very solemnly against a nagging compressed grunge guitar line and purposeful percussion (Bananarama meets the Velvets) which becomes sinister by the ease in which “love” is being rejected in this song – “I don’t need no man/Get my kicks for free.” There is no exultation at liberation here; it’s a chant being used as self-defence against inflicted pain. Note how it slows down to the classic 6/8 soul ballad form in the middle eight, as the vocal meaningfully pronounces the question “Does it hurt when you see how I’ve done without you?” There is no smirk in her voice when she sings this, implying that she needs to know herself how she’s done without you. The very title is of course the seed of doubt – “round and round and round and round…” – one routine replaced by another. As with all great pop, this works on innumerable levels.
The fourth track is the big ballad “Stronger.” Co-composer is Marius de Vries (the aforementioned Massive Attack associate) and the trademark static but deep string section is very much in evidence, speaking the inarticulable yearning of the song. Right from the musical and lyrical parallel in its first line to the first line of Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” this song talks about surmounting pain and entering a new phase in one’s life. The lyrics are not very original but the way in which the music expresses them is – the augmented minor-to-major chord change in the chorus underlines that she has not yet made it through the rain, as confirmed by the lines “I’m not the type of girl that will let them see me cry/It’s not my style/I get by/See I’m gonna do this for me.” Again, see how the beats suddenly magnify in the middle eight and start to swirl around the speakers, paralleling the confusion in the singer’s soul.
It is not belittling to say that the rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to this stunning opening quartet, as it’s still (mostly) very fine. “Supernatural” is a fantasma of decisive, stern vocals, orgasm-inducing synth bass and subtle “French Kiss”-style rhythm. The title track doesn’t let the record down, either; the “angels with dirty faces” is wisely qualified by “in the morning” and the refrain “you don’t know where we go.” We’d still like to know, though. “Virgin Sexy” moves the record towards more conventional R&B territory, but the semitone descent of the second half of the chorus is thrilling, even if the lyric “’Cos I’m virgin, virgin sexy/If you want me, jus’ text me” isn’t.
Even the dreaded Sting-sampling let’s-get-a-hit-in-America appearance of the track “Shape” (i.e. sampling “Shape Of My Heart” fairly heavily, to karaoke level really) works for me. It is the necessary balance to the sampling of “Are “Friends” Electric” in “Freak Like Me,” the contemplation after the thrill. “I live my life in chains…In this man’s land I can understand/Why I’m taking command” nicely subverts Sumner’s insufferable solipsism. The uncertainty is not tempered by arrogance. And I like the tune anyway if not the man har har.
Similarly, “Just Don’t Need This” is the ballad which bookends “Stronger.” This is noticeably darker but not, I think, as impressive. Lines in the line of “The way I’m feeling now is mental/The problem first starts in your dental” would frankly shame even Bernard Sumner at his Prozac-less worst!
Invoking Bob Marley is usually the signpost for the rest of the album tailing off, and sadly there’s no exception here. “No Man No Cry” is rather pedestrian, depending upon a hoary old reliable R&B melodic/rhythmic line (I can’t place the origin, but J-Lo has also been using it recently – hear it and you’ll see what I mean). “Switch” competently adopts Timbaland’s methods but doesn’t do much else. “More Than A Million Miles” revisits and reverses the career-or-love theme of Luther Vandross’ “Stop To Love” but one has to say NO to the ‘babes’ attempts at rapping. In this sense at least, Mis-Teeq they ain’t.
(Speaking of Mis-Teeq, which I shamefully haven’t on CoM very much to date, Alesha Dixon is truly a one-woman punctum – listen to the way she suddenly erupts 2:16 into “B With Me (Bump & Flex Radio Edit)” and fast-thrusts the entire song into another galaxy!)
The album gently winds down with an “acoustic jam” version of “Breathe Easy” which in its original (and better) form appears on the “Freak Like Me” single – in which manifestation, with the crowd sounds and crucial rhythm, it’s like Paul Weller doing “Whole Again.” But hell, I could never get through “4 Ever 2 Gether” on Lexicon of Love either.
People really oughtn’t to complain. For what Morley called “shiny yellow new pop,” this now has to be the best time since 1982. From LCD Soundsystem to Scooter, from Rob Dougan to Tweet, it’s finally looking as though the options are opening up again. And the Sugababes are up there with the best of them. This record will inspire in you open-mouthed astonishment and real love. You need this record.
. . .
Friday, September 06, 2002
THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY
"Strawberry Letter 23" by The Brothers Johnson (1977)
I know you all want me to talk about "Work It" in this column but the latter has been so widely exalted elsewhere that there is no need for me to repeat the obvious here. So instead, a hagiography of the usage of space and echo in the productions of Quincy Jones. It's always been there in his work, right from things like "Soul Bossa Nova" (sampled by the Dream Warriors for "My Definition...") through Off The Wall and The Dude, but perhaps best exemplified on this unplaceable and therefore indispensable pop record.
I know the Shuggie Otis original is back in circulation and that every schoolboy should be familiar with it, but for me the Brothers Johnson's rendering takes the song away from an obvious "psychedelic" realm to something closer to the listener (because more populist) and yet much more strange and fantastic. From the maternal outpourings of the harpsichord at the intro we dive into a free blue world of suggested beats, fragments of guitar lines, meaningful bass, all united by a distant vocal which does not overly strive to convey feelings but makes them profounder simply by their very suggestion. The absence of any "soul" in the male lead or female backing vocals forces us to construct our own mental landscape and respond only in accordance with our own perspectives.
Watch how the entire record converges on the eddying/edifying whirlpool of the central middle-eight guitar riff which multiplies in its own mirrors and disappears within its own reflection (it is COME). The record is perfectly symmetrical. The suggested minor lift underneath the major fall of the languid and unhurried fade-out, back into the circuitous carnival calliope which began the record. It arrives, kisses you and departs.
It was the summer of 1977. In that "depersonalised" year for pop - and outside of punk, and perhaps Bowie's abrupt vocal entry on "Sound and Vision" which sounds as though it's emanating from the inside of your head - few records came closer to the listener than this. The echoes are its very justification.
. . .
Thursday, September 05, 2002
MISERY MUSIC
Yes I know, the Church should be more cheerful. But in a solitary life, this is what one is driven to.
What to make of My Computer? They are two chaps from Manchester with a past history on Creation Records as a guitar band - I think they were called One Lady Owner, or possibly Ten Days Off. But what matters is what they are now.
Their first album is called Vulnerabilia (this really should have been the title of the first Soft Cell album) and I cannot quite figure out where I stand on it yet, which usually turns out to be a good thing. Certainly the first track "All I Ever Wanted Was A Good Time" takes almost ten minutes to explore the various corridors which My Computer have placed within their remit. Within it you will hear bitter, hateful and sorrowful lyrics, mostly amiably crooned in and buried under a vocoder, against a soft Air/Royskopp backdrop with some beats haflway through. This is quite astonishing to listen to, at least until the final 60 seconds when the voice is suddenly stripped of the vocoder and we hear - well, another Jeff Buckley wannabe with a guitar of Convenience. Is someone finally taking up the challenge of Tiger Bay?
Well I would love to have told you that. The problem is that they spend the rest of the album wandering the same corridors. For much of the time the music sounds like Muse with beats and string lines mixed in rather randomly. At other times you feel that they might be developing something new - the way in which the Underworld-style rave-up of "Majic Flat" suddenly decelerates into an acoustic lament, the way in which an Altern 8-type old skool barndance wanders into the midst of "For Something Else" apropos of not much at all. The way in which "I Don't Care How You Treat Me" mixes drum-and-bass with John Barry harpsichordal poignancy and doesn't make it sound the dull cliche it reads like (did you SEE that Observer review of Barry Adamson's King of Nothing Hill last Sunday where the reviewer wheels out the comparison "a combination of John Barry, Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone" as if he still felt that this was anything but a complete turn-off?).
Lyrically it occupies the cynosure of a triangle bordered by Rob Dougan, Ms Dynamite and the Polyphonic Spree. Or, "I can't go on. I go on" (for the lyrics, go to www.vulnerabilia.com/lyrics_frame.html).
So it's a bit of a mess. But I keep playing it. And I'm rather moved by it. Isn't that what matters? Not where it came from, not how many other people have done it in the past - what does THIS piece of art do to YOU right NOW? And does that negate criticism?
The end of Vulnerabilia sounds like death.
Mortes, the new album by Fernando Corona, aka Murcof, is the music which might be heard after death. 51 stately minutes which I used to soundtrack HBO's In Memoriam 9/11 documentary last night. Unhurried yet deeply lamenting; odd violin drones, one single instance of a human voice, glitches and seraphic edits which might recall Akufen's radio snippets wound back and replayed at 16 rpm. It is essentially one long track divided into eight, with some animation from track five onwards, but strangely calming.
Yes, it's summer. Yes I should be out there grooving on down to Hustle! Reggae Disco. I would be a better person if I could. Does anyone out there wish to join me?
. . .
Wednesday, September 04, 2002
THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY
"Say You Don't Mind" by Denny Laine's Electric String Band (1967)
Is this the most wasted career in pop music? McCartney's glorified teaboy for a decade followed by 20 years croaking round the German pub circuit? Now Denny Laine produced an awful lot of good work in between the Moody Blues and Wings, not least of which was the still extraordinary "Catherine Wheel" with his demented intervallic leaps (like a slow-motion yodel).
But today I am spotlighting this beautiful record which might have changed Laine's life entirely had its sales been as plentiful as its airplay. Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne dug it enough to become inspired to form ELO.
The song is a plea for the Other to take him back following sundry fuck-ups on his part. It is a humble apology. Light at the treble end with twiddling oboe (is she twiddling her thumbs?) and strings offset by foursquare bass and a strong drum track with its 1-2-3-4 hammering after each chorus exposing the "LET ME BACK IN" subtext of despair below Laine's apparently meek delivery.
Unlike Brian Wilson's self-humbling "You Still Believe In Me," there is no guarantee that the Other will take him back. So Laine also humbles himself with fantastic lyrics such as, "Stupid fish, I drank the pool" and "a doormat has seen better times" (followed by his sardonic ad lib "that's BAD!") but betrays himself at the end: "I've been doing some growing/'Cos I'm scared of you going." Note how his voice trembles at, and pauses immediately after, the word "scared." And then the chorus payoff: "Say you don't mind...you'll let me off this time" - implying that this might not be the last time. Psychedelic geezerdom.
Of course the song was eventually covered, stripped down to strings only, by Colin Blunstone on his 1971 album One Year (a gorgeous lament of a record which you MUST have) and as a single finally became a hit in '72. Impossible to imagine Blunstone even being on the same planet as geezerdom. His vocal and the strings-only, rhythmless backing track strips the song of any irony and turns it into a hymn of penitence.
. . .
TEE-HEE!
OK, so Ms Dynamite may one day blow up, but I have to be the Nit Nurse to start off with and pick nits – an introduction to an album is NOT an “interlude,” it is a PRELUDE. It betrays laxity rather than laterality. Particularly when you start off your debut album with a public health announcement.
“Fuck coke fuck ecstasy/fuck powder fuck pills see me” she proclaims in yet another variation of the dispassionate R&B voice in “Natural High,” the PRELUDE to A Little Deeper, her first album. The sleeve is dark – bleaker than that of Original Pirate Material; at least on the latter there is urban life in evidence. On this sleeve, however, Ms D is pictured in a variety of poses wandering round what looks like a deserted set of docks, far further East than anyone would dare to venture – Iain Sinclair’s idea of the East End, where erstwhile gangsters sans rottweilers go to meet their inevitable execution. It looks like the end of the earth, making Roots Manuva’s New Cross/Lewisham interface seem like Hampton Wick in comparison.
And yet – out of the darkness bursts LIGHT! The first song proper, “Dy-na-mit-tee” is fused and explodes with a truly exuberant high voice, fizzing like a newly-opened can of ice-cold Coke (so don’t “fuck coke” with a capital C?), maybe the most enthusiastic, love-me vocal to bless a debut single since Michael J on “I Want You Back.” Even more impressive considering that it is musically set against a minor key, vibes-driven trip hop template – never has trip hop sounded so positive, so un-itself! And upon this Ms D illuminates every corner of potential darkness with her will to live, to BE. Listen to that chorus vocal of “I stay blowin’ up ur stereo/Hear me bussin’ on da radio,” a folk memory of 2-Tone (Specials “Stereotypes Part 2” and Selecter “On My Radio” specifically), a common memory of something which existed just before she did. Yet it is already in her blood. It transposes the wicked playfulness of the original movement and dazzles you with its renewed wonder. That sextuple-stop intro – everyone to order now! What miserable wretches like Nelly Furtado would sell all of their ceilings to achieve! The punctum – the extra “hee” at the end of “Dy-na-mit-tee” and its amiable vibrato wobble. She is LAUGHING and PLAYING with you.
But don’t forget, she has only started, so really she is still at the One In A Million stage, as painfully evidenced by “Anyway U Want It” an utter treadmill of an R&B canal boat with one Keon Bryce on dullard male voice. Ms D runs circles around him and graffitis his torso while she’s at it, cheating the bar lines, snaking her way around the cliches like Aaliyah’s asp. The Art of Noise style human bass line is the only other thing of interest here.
Now it’s time to go fla-blooming-menco again, but the pointillistic pinpricks which punctuate “Put Him Out,” seems to revive Ms D. The voice really slashes its way (even through the AARGH rock guitar, leave it ALONE or get Keith Rowe to play guitar over your beats) through the song. It’s fantastic. You are carried by it, public health announcement # 2 though it may be. She IS the punctum, stretching over the studium with which she has been furnished.
Although sometimes she doesn’t exceed it. Witness the would-be weepie ballad “Brother” which is essentially a cut-price replica of Pink’s “Family Portrait” and wherein, alas, Ms D can only but turn into Ms Flipping Furtado. She talks about depression and wanting to end it all, but unlike Tweet, she cannot make you believe her or emphasise with her. More pranks needed. So we get the hit single “It Takes More” which is the best accordion-sample driven would-be hip hop track since Siouxsie’s “Peek-A-Boo.” Hear how she mangles the final syllables of “ur just a racist man’s PUSSY.” As with the rest of the record, too much of the Peckham Community Centre is in situ, but the “righteousness” is spiced by the restless rhythm and completely compelling groove, even stretching the fact-recycling to the surreal: “Tell me how many Africans died for the baguettes on ur Rolex.” ????!!!??? The sensuality of the repeated “avoiding, adding” mantra.
She once recorded with So Solid Crew but doesn’t subscribe. The inverted Dr Dre groove (“Everything But The G String?”) which powers “Sick ‘n’ Tired,” a fuck off to the other woman song (AGAIN that “take my kindness for weakness” tidemarker). The loving way in which she licks the man between her lips when singing “kitty kitty” is remarkable.
Next is my favourite track on the album, “Afraid 2 Fly.” Sampled waves crash and puncture, sounding like gunfire. Harps and strings dart about her head from all directions, like vultures swooping in for the kill Published by the Art of Noise! Music by one Hernst Bellevue (why isn’t the lead singer of Interpol called Hernst Bellevue, and that’s the most original thing that will EVER be written about them!). “I ain’t ready 2 die/but I ain’t afraid 2 fly” – a revival of the Utopian ideal engineering ‘70s soul at its peak (Mayfield’s “We’ve Got To Have Peace,” Rotary Connection’s “I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun” etc.). Should be listened to while reading the associated (unsung) sleevenote, which includes the words “Never give them the satisfaction of being the reason that you wouldn’t.” It’s the antidote to Rob Dougan’s “Speed Me Towards Death.” In the latter Dougan says you cannot fly until you die. Ms D says if you don’t fly you cannot live. She almost makes you believe it. Time for a wake-up call? “Watch Over Them” is a brief acappella gospel intonation, asking God to look over and protect even the gangsters. In her lower range she can be very dispassionate, centring on one note. It doesn’t make you cry. Similarly “Seed Will Grow” has Kynani Marley sounding remarkably like another Marley but sadly not far enough from worthy.
All albums by law should be obliged to have a song called “Krazy Krush” and this one is an electroclash delight, synths (ever so slightly atonal) flitting from channel to channel in the best Martin Rushent fashion, albeit with a bass line which could only have emanated from 2-step. A song more likely to start revolutions than any amount of by rote Southwark Council lecturing. “Now U Want My Love” is more average but lifted again by the ragga undertow of her vocal delivery: “said u wouldn’t mind getting up between my legs” spat out with genuine venom. “Too Experienced” is a terrific “Sleng Teng”-type romp with discreet occasional dubby piano wandering in and out of the lovely (because underused) electro construct. It is better than all UB40 and Spice Girls records, especially when Barrington Levy’s vocal enters, and the music immediately slows down almost to a standstill, as if in respect. “Too experienced to rock and roll” – the exultation with which Levy ascends to that final “roll” is unearthly. And only 2:56 long, like, ahem, proper singles should be. Number 1 for 18 weeks, would that it were.
Alas, as is also the law of all R&B albums, we have to grind to a dreary halt with the open-the-fridge-door-light-the-candles ballad sequence. Even so, the guitar/bass angles (both played by Van Gibbs) which decorate the verses of the track “All I Know” keep your interest. Actually I like this track a lot; I’m a sucker for seductive Marcus Miller chord changes and it just falls on the right side of the enticing/bland fence, even when the Ronnie Hazlehurst horns and flute come in shortly before the end, just before the two main elements of the song come together and provide a satisfying end. Reminds me a bit of “Flies In The Buttermilk,” which despite its title brought Justin Warfield’s My Field Trip To Planet 8 album to such a succulent close.
We finish with the acoustic ballad title track. The lyrics are pure sub-Halliwell do it for yerself positive thinking garbo (that’s really going to wash down the Sumner Road at 11:30 on a Saturday night) but there’s still enough self-doubt evident in her voice to keep you hooked. Lost love, living her life behind the curtain. “Get a little deeper…if you know what I mean.” No, leave that sort of secondary analysis to smarter folk than me, e.g. Deleuze and Guattari.
. . .
Tuesday, September 03, 2002
It's easier to tell your secrets to someone that you can't see...
...especially when you are not fully conscious. You have no time to put your thoughts into order so you have to speak your soul, have to articulate your heart. A late night/early morning conversation which I am likely to remember for the rest of my life. Three days ago I didn't want to live. I was staring my past life in the face. I felt alone, divorced from music, people, the world, life. And yet I walked back to life. Because I want to get in touch with life again. Because music has to touch you, whatever the artist's original intention, however it was displayed before a public audience; it has to penetrate you in a completely individual way which only you can understand. Is that tautology? Hang me, then. It's what I feel.
I worry when I imagine in my silly paranoia that people for whom I care and who care for me are slipping away - but of course they're not, they have to cope with their lives as best they can, too. My friends are the most important thing to me in my life. My friends keep me alive. And true friends will always find their highway back to me, and me to them.
. . .
EARTHLING
I really have to remind you what a brilliant record Earthling’s sole (soul?) album, 1995’s Radar, is…even though, as with too many other records discussed in CoM, it is currently unavailable, doubtless cursed by the completely misplaced “trip hop also rans” banner, especially with Geoff Barrow guesting on “cuts” throughout. This music is radically spacious in a way which is not necessarily lacking today, but is merely better hidden.
Listening to the stately, submerged grind of track 1 “1st Transmission,” its introductory vibraphone tolling the Dies Placidae, I was reminded of nothing so much as “An Even Whiter Car,” the 16 rpm instrumental revisit of the Associates’ “White Car In Germany” from 1981 which more or less templated trip hop. Deliberately pedestrian beats, slowed down and gaining in depth, as though the pedestrian were walking in a dream with an anvil attached to its shins. “I know who I am, I’m not who you think I am” intones vocalist Mau in a Peter Lorre drone (echoes of Mongezi Feza’s “You Ain’t Gonna Know Me ‘Cos You Think You Know Me”) before launching into a typical freeform word association rap about identity. He’s Nat King Cole, Shostakovich drowning in a goldfish bowl, the ghost of the dog chasing Edie Brickell, McLaren (“indeed I killed sid”). Gosh gosh he’s Juliette Binoche. He is a visionary tethered to a banal world (“Jesus Christ Superstar driving around in an old yellow car”) and perhaps tired of the world (“driver take me to the other side”) but not enough to exit it (“I jumped off the balcony/landed on a bigger man”). He is simultaneously alone but has a girlfriend who’s “a simple schizophrenic/but we get along fine.” He bridges two cultures – “Michelangelo working on a totem pole.” The track eventually stutters to a halt (Nabucco’s anvil chorus?), Mau having giggled “It ain’t easy” – or is he crying?
The same vibraphone, now playing a lugubrious refrain, powers track 2 “Ananda’s Theme,” a context-drained reshaping of the pointless ambition of Ice-T’s “New Jack Hustler.” Here Mau simply “pretend(s) to be a misfit” and he’s “a plastic thief with no belief in what I steal.” Again the track strolls to a pregnant halt as if unsure where to go next, as if having reached a dead end, as if dreading beyond comprehension what it is about to give birth to.
Next it’s “Nefisa.” “Franz Fanon – yeah yeah I get it!” versus “prostitutes in Ilford Lane.” Mau has written books in 710 and 1969. “If you find ‘em you can burn ‘em/if you burn ‘em you can keep warm.” Geoff Barrow is very much in evidence on this track, but the performance uncannily anticipates Roots Manuva – that same nervy-meets-confident baritone voice, those wavering synth minor chords (which surely owed more than a little to MBV’s Loveless) charting precisely the vertiginous descent into despair which one can view from the top of Chingford Hill – the City a mere blue haze, the Lea reservoir its custom post; the wordplay which would not be unworthy of Basil Bunting (“Bearing in mind my mind’s Aquarian/Bearing in mind m y mind’s mine”). He has Panasonic headphones “but nothin’s on ‘em.”
“I Still Love Albert Einstein” is the nearest this album gets to Portishead-land. Inspired by a barely recognisable Athletico Spizz 80 (!) sample, the curves make this a real Jeanne Moreau of a backing track. Alas it is spoiled by the same dessicated sub-Gibbons vocal (here by someone called Moni) which has ruined so much otherwise visionary post-whatever music this last decade.
Following the brief Birtwistle-goes-Bollywood interlude of “Accident at Injured Strings,” there follows a prepared piano (melodic yet pointillistically distended – midway between John Cage and Keith Tippett) which takes us into “Soup or No Soup,” a reproachful Curtis Mayfield sample reproducing very quietly in the background. “Soup or no soup/Sing your own Hallelujah!” There’s a girl telling him “how real life could be” “spinning at 45.” He has “dived out the window/I couldn’t take no more.” This is bookended by the minute-long “God’s Interlude,” credited appropriately to “god.”
Then to the most extraordinary and visionary piece on the album, a trope which has as yet been unrepeated and not taken up – “Echo On My Mind.” Driven by the astonishing simultaneous dual vocals by one Segun (a performance matched only in “pop” by Marc Almond’s similar schizophrenic vocals on Soft Cell’s “Soul Inside”) and a completely unexpected bitonal brass chart, quite reminiscent of that used on Jan Garbarek’s Dis, but with Barrow’s near-demonic turntable screeching always threatening to mutate the music into Peter Maxwell Davies’ Songs For A Mad King (there is a periodic secondary – root - bass line which sounds like a tuba, though none is credited. Another Curtis Mayfield connection here – listen to late ‘60s Impressions tracks such as “We Must Be In Love” where the bass line actually is played by a tuba). Segun’s vocals sound like Johnny Mathis having been pressganged into appearing on Escalator Over The Hill – and indeed, after a pause, the track concludes with a mournful, unresolved brass lament which could have come straight out of Carla Bley’s “Slow Dance (Transductory Music).” To my knowledge, no one (except for Spring Heel Jack in a different context) has EVER followed up or developed this aesthetic strand.
“Infinite M.” is a relatively lighthearted canter – generally Mau reminds me of where somebody like Justin Warfield could have gone had he not decided that rickety prototype nu-metal was the place to be, or even that completely unacknowledged visionary dC Basehead had he kept it up. Though even this is subverted by a sad guitar sample (Bill Frisell?) – credit due to the hitherto unacknowledged other half of Earthling, T Saul, whose programming and arranging throughout are entirely creditable.
“You said it’s easier to tell your secrets to someone that you can’t see” Mau’s alter ego says to him halfway through. A brief Bontempi organ appears then rebounds into nothingness before merging into the album’s one concession to “social realism” “Planet of the Apes” (as in the female protagonist “only wants to watch Planet of the Apes” which one supposes is an advance from Public Enemy’s “She Watch Channel Zero”). “The name Ergo makes ‘er go crazy.” A story of someone leaving home and descending into prostitution, and perhaps over-literal, but the necessary anchor for the flights (imagined or otherwise) embarked upon elsewhere in the album (cf., again, “Stay Positive”). The sudden judder into a heartbeat-wrecking bassline at 4:11 articulates the horror which was only previously hinted at.
Moni returns for “By Means Of Beams.” Again the vocal performance is rather ruinous – lyrically this is a UFO romance which vaguely presages the Beta Band’s “Gone,” another song I find too painful to listen to at the present time for personal reasons. The mutated muted trumpet riff – Lorca’s horseman, again, resignedly approaching death in Corboda – would have been enough. But “will you be there in 100 years? Will you be there to tell me that you don’t care?” Couldn’t they have got Beth Gibbons, or even Kristin Hersh, to sing this?
“Freak Freak” is again another socially friendly, Fender Rhodes-driven romp: “Lee Perry-onically driven.” The Spider-Man theme song makes an appearance, only to be concluded by the warning “you can’t see the flies!” (King Lear? – “as flies are to wanton boys” etc. &c.). The groove eventually converges onto one note (the heartbeat on an ECG machine stopping?) and moves into the finale “I Could Just Die,” a return to the graveyard shift of the opening track, a dope-fuelled procession to the grave, a pretence of ecstasy which hides the real nihilism. A Johnny “Guitar” Watson sample tries to lend some humanity but this is denied. “I want to move my head/but I’m too relaxed to try.” At the advice “please control your daughter” the drum track doubles up and Barrow decorates Mau’s suicidal ideations with cumulo-curlicues of scratches. As life, and the album, end, this doesn’t have the shocking immediacy of the ending of Notorious BIG’s Ready To Die, though the crematorium organ takes us out of the front door, so that we don’t have to smell the burning flesh.
. . .
Monday, September 02, 2002
THE CORTEGE: AN AALIYAH TRILOGY
Part 1: Birth
It is, of course, retrospectively one of the most frightening beginnings to a record ever. Out of an atonal electronic fog, a bell tolls. A voice calls: “Aaliyah, Aaliyah! Wake up! Heh heh (she smirks – Mingus: “there were flames a’blazin’ – I saw the Devil with his grin”). You’ve just now entered into the next level –” continues Missy Elliott in her only lead vocal in the intro on One In A Million, the second album by Aaliyah. Of course, what she means is (as she climaxes) “-into the new world of FUNK!” a quantum leap from her 1994 debut Age Ain’t Nothin’ But A Number (an adequate if average slice of by-the-rote mid-‘90s R&B; exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a juvenile paramour of R Kelly). What we now selfishly interpret it as being is an augur of what actually did happen five years hence, rather than the crudely signposted transition from youth to young woman that it actually was.
And Timbaland is now on board (albeit only for 8 of the album’s 17 tracks). If One In A Million is to be deemed the most influential record of the’90s, the justification lies in three of the first four songs on the album, all Timbaland/Elliott-written/produced/arranged. “Hot Like Fire” burns slowly but sensuously as no other mainstream black pop was doing at the time, with the exceptional male exception of D’Angelo. But if the latter is the Picasso of nu-soul, then Timbaland is the Rothko; endless spaces of differing degrees of colour, heat expressed as coolness. You can be simultaneously turned on and refreshed. A keyboard fragment which on its own could have been lifted from that unrecognised template for all subsequent pop music, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol 2, is blended exquisitely with the undemonstrative yet clearly offbeat beat. The Fairlight-mangled squeals of the 17-year-old which take the track out.
Then, above all, the title track “One In A Million,” the track which made possible all pop architecture which came after it, from Britney to Beyonce; and yet what seduction its successors have lacked. “Your love goes on and on and on…” (a refutal of Lydon’s “on and on and ON!” suicide note in PiL’s “Theme”). There is humility in Aaliyah’s voice, an eagerness, a curiosity which is yet to be overwhelmed by recognition of one’s real role in society. A blissful ignorance of what waits in her future to harm or uplift her (those subliminal squiggles which surface, almost naively, right at the end of the fadeout).
But not for long. Others have commented on her completely dispassionate and almost a-emotional vocal delivery on “If Your Girl Only Knew.” She certainly views the subject with indifference verging on hate (or is this all hiding an essential love?). The possibilities of the man being “left alone” and the other woman “cursing him out” although she is “crazy to put up with you” do not seem to work up any passion in her at all. He’s another option, I depend on me – but listen to that angular Portishead organ chord which surfaces at 2:34. Doubt!
Or maybe she’s just playing with options. It’s difficult to assess because, unfortunately, the album then descends into an exceptionally grim and dull succession of identikit and utterly conventional ballads; all too typical of the absurd formatting into which most R&B albums still fall. The only animation comes in a “Billie Jean”-drum track driven reworking of Marvin Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up” – in that tortured and incomplete man’s original version, another addition to the strange “depersonalisation” of 1977 pop. Gaye is scarcely on his own record, almost reluctant to make himself known above the party noises (as opposed to his very evident need to be heard on “What’s Going On?”). When he swoons “this is such a groovy party” over the almost unbearably poignant chord changes in the middle eight, he seems ready, like Camus, to vanish into the text and reappear only if you (or Anna Gordy’s lawyers) will him to do so. Aaliyah (with Slick Rick’s additional pep) spices it up and makes herself the cynosure of the whole song, thereby altering its emotional state entirely. Apart from that, though, it’s R Kelly-land by the numbers, even with the Timbaland-produced ballads, the latter of which are distinguishable only by the strange little details which Timbaland and Elliott put into them – listen to the unexpected backing vocal harmonic notes halfway through “4 Page Letter” or the first appearance of the four-drum “falling down the stairs” effect on “Ladies In Da House,” echoed by Aaliyah’s brilliant “p-p-p-playa” vocal aside, with Timbaland’s salivating Greek chorus (sonically, almost a B-boy Orson Welles!), the off-kilter guitar chordings, the strange mid-synth wobbling, Elliott’s closing rap a hall of mirrors in itself.
She had a lot to learn. So she went away for five years. Well, why not, she’s in for the long haul…
Part 2: Death
…except of course she wasn’t.
No it wasn’t intended as a memorial album. The damn thing had already been out two months before the plane crashed. And now it’s hard to look at it as anything other than a death album, because that is how we, as simple-minded consumers, assimilate works of art without the untidy business of actually caring about the people who created it.
The sleeve is blood red, for a start. Well, OK, more orange if you look at it in the daylight. The way she raises her sunglasses on the rear booklet shot to look as though blood is coming out of her forehead. The pose on the satin sheets whilst cradling a snake. Anyone can make five out of two plus two if they’ve a mind to do so. I will stay with the unutterable sadness of looking at pictures of a growing woman, still maturing, but with no more maturation to come. Cut short. That’s all you get. Don’t tell me how sad that is. No need to tell me. None at all.
And I will stay with the sheer frustration at knowing that the eponymously-titled third album by Aaliyah has grown to be a very, very great album indeed. Timbaland largely absents himself this time round, responsible for just 4 of its 15 tracks (one of which, “Try Again,” had already been around for a year apropos the Romeo Must Die soundtrack). Concerns that Missy was getting most of his innovations are immediately tempered by the jaw-dropping first track and first single, “We Need A Resolution.” Ostensibly vaguely Middle Eastern in its general ambience, the escalating keyboard staircase is more reminiscent of the ghost of Bach pounding the aisles in the capricious caverns of Koln Cathedral. Representing something that is no longer there…even if it’s only an affair. “I’m tired of arguing, girl” smirks Timbaland. But this is a galaxy leap from anything on One In A Million. Conflicting arguments rumbling around in her head; self-doubt as well as accusation of the other: “You’ve got issues/I’ve got issues (background ad lib: “ha, YOU’VE got issues?”).” The crisis of the self: “Am I supposed to change/Are you supposed to change/Who should be hurt?/Who should be blamed?” The almost backward incantations of “where-were-you?” Rather crassly adopted as a harbinger of 9/11 (again, after the event), possibly due to the similarly warped lyric “What-was-in-your-head” which some misheard as being “World wars in your head.” Well, if that’s what you choose to want. It is a skeleton rattling around in a song. It redefined the parameters of pop, and we’re only just realising it. “Revolutionary Road” set to music. Note, incidentally, how Timbaland’s “cut the crying, cut the coughing, cut the wheezing…” is echoed and counterpointed by Aaliyah’s “no more”s on “I Refuse” at the other end of the album.
“More Than A Woman.” How desolate and forlorn can an apparently upbeat pop song be? The squirt bass (and you need to brush up on your Miami Bass history to understand where that originates from – try Dave Tompkins’ superb Primer in this month’s Wire) set against deliberately tinny, early-‘80s synths; the Scandinavian sadness of Spears at her finest (after all, what are Max Martin’s songs if not the logical fruit of the essential despair underlying Abba?). She’ll be more than a lover. All the promise which cannot possibly be fulfilled. Even if the singer hadn’t been killed, you just KNOW that something is going to go wrong from the contours of the song alone. It can make you feel more alone than any other piece of music.
Producers Bud’da and Rapture take care of the rest of the album. “Never No More” would in less pliable hands be an utterly routine ballad to go with the half-dozen ones on One In A Million, but the punctum here is provided by an unusually close and impacting drum track; like little emotions exploding from each side of your head (this is definitely an album which requires headphones).
The astonishing “I Care 4 U,” another Timbaland work. The self-obsessed dispassion noted in “If Only Your Girl Knew” has disappeared. Now the voice caresses. The man has been hurt – she is offering him her life, her love, his salvation. Truly the word “baby” in the lyrics points to the sort of love she wants to give him, the maternal care he needs now, more than ever, and I am driven to thinking of
Sam Taylor-Wood
“It’s just that there are a lot of highly distressed, lonely and anxious people in your work. There’s not much happiness.”
specifically her 2001 video piece Pieta, in which she is seated on a set of steps. She is cradling an apparently dying and nearly lifeless Robert Downey Jr in her arms. On closer inspection she is in fact carrying him, suspending him in mid-air. The physical difficulties of doing this are obvious, but she is intent on doing it, and her face betrays no tiredness, pain or effort – just limitless compassion. I stood in the Hayward Gallery in April 2002 with my sometime lover, watching this, and realising that this was fundamentally what I wanted – salvation, care, compassion, the deepest and most selfless love imaginable. With the pain of the last twelve months I have the desire to be the carried rather than the carrier.
because it is a hymn of compassion.
That having been said, it would be wrong to take the lady for granted. In the next track “Extra Smooth,” powered by an almost vaudevillian descending melodic segment, as if Fagin’s about to pick a pocket or two. “He’s got big brown eyes/so he built lies/comin’ on strong/six pack showin’/he’s too cool for his own shoes.” Or to put it another way, that don’t impress her much, but the lack of impression is more impressive than that of Shania.
An increasing scepticism makes itself apparent in the bossa nova hoedown of “Read Between The Lines.” Interesting to note how more sophisticated the adoption of bossa nova is than, but how unchanged the sentiments from, something like James Chance and the Contortions’ “Disposable You” from 21 years previously. By the time of “U Got Nerve” the turnaround is complete. “You took my kindness for some kind of weakness” (an exact echo of Isaac Hayes’ “Phoenix”). “Who do you think you are now?” exclaims the chorus. “Your qualities are less than pleasing,” Aaliyah opines, dangerously close to Beyonce-land. “Get your skeletons out of my closet!” The rhythm track punches like a demon (that crematorium organ is still there, though, buried in the furnace of the mix) and this would in itself count as a superlative electroclash track.
Next comes the self-consciously epic “I Refuse,” lyrically more or less a parallel to Blige’s “No More Dramas” and a “November Rain”-type epic, starting with thunderclaps, quiet synthesised flute and piano. Slightly too smug in its own recognition as a “major” piece, this builds up rather predictably and is only saved by J Dub’s asymmetrical rhythm patterns (horses’ hooves?). When the squealing guitar makes itself dimly apparent on the horizon. The synth orchestral crescendo is slightly reminiscent of a House track without the rhythm…obviously striving for “I Will Survive”-type immortality, but it just tries too hard and ends up with a bump next to Enrique Iglesias.
The subsequent ballad “It’s Whatever” is relieved only by the carrot-crunching rhythm – yes, we’re essentially back in ballad hell. “I Can Be” picks up a little, but again the guitar crunches grate – you really want this song to, er, beat it. With the regretful piano chords, this actually might have worked better as a straight ballad. But the Neptunes really have negated this whole thing. “Caught Out There” this isn’t. Now she is happy to be the girl who “if she only knew.” “I can be the other lover in your life” she now pleads. Guitar and bass undulate accordingly over a looped “all right” though this suddenly ceases. So she’s not convinced.
“Those Were The Days” is a goodbye song with what is now back to a dispassionate vocal; it actually sounds as though it were punched in syllable by syllable. Note, however, the “those were the day-ay-ay-ays” hiccup which parallels and reflects “p-p-p-playa” in “Ladies In Da House.”
And then, an extraordinary finale which actually justifies the use of the guitar on this album. Out of some Oval-style electronic burping comes what is, it has to be said, a Killing Joke guitar chord (“Change” I think), emerges the climactic song (and original album closer) “What If.” Here J Dub and Rockstar wipe out the memory of “I Refuse.” The words here are scarcely audible under the stammering thrash (piccolo synthesiser mimicking the upward guitar scrawls) though they seem to constitute another “Caught Out There”-type scenario. Looking at possibilities of love, of life, searching increasingly frantically for some kind of order – and then Aaliyah suddenly exclaims, with audible relish, “We’ll burn you! We’ll gut you!” It isn’t quite “You’re Holding Me Down” but as an exit to a record it is despairing and undeniably nihilistic, beyond revenge or redemption. Her voice finally merges with the guitars and synths, one identifiable howl. Brief Morse code synth at the fade out again. The end?
“New friends were often invited to pause at the National Gallery, to inspect Guercino’s “The Incredulity of Thomas,” a painting whose fascination he found inexhaustible. He had no time for the church and its orders of service, still less for the history of religious schism, which merely exasperated him; he preferred to argue out his need for faith in private. Most religious imagery he found too sentimental; yet this single pictorial moment seemed to satisfy him. As he admitted, a believably strong Christ was one of its attractions. For Williams, visions of personal redemption, whether religious or emotional, involved his being gathered up and made safe in someone’s arms. It seems never to have happened to him in life.”
(Russell Davies, from the Introduction to The Kenneth Williams Diaries)
There is a trapdoor, though sadly not for Aaliyah, in track 15: “Try Again,” added on to the album as an extra. It does the song no disservice to say that this was one of the greatest singles of 1982; if the Human League or Depeche Mode had indeed come out with this in 1982, it would have caused a sensation. Bookended by a reminder of one of the most etiolated pop records of the last 20 years, Eric B and Rakim’s “Follow The Leader,” Aaliyah is urging her potential lover to keep his options open. If she doesn’t want to be kissed or fucked at their first date, just keep on trying. Let things develop. You’ve got a chance. Don’t rush me. Don’t be fooled by my apparent lack of passion. It’s there; it just needs the right key to unlock it.
Strange how she should have died after shooting a video for possibly the least distinguished song on the album, the very routine “Rock The Boat.” Her suitcases bulging with jewellery were too heavy and brought the craft down; the ‘plane was substandard but cheap; there are any theories but no resurrection.
Or was there?
The 38-year-old widower sits, quietly sobbing, in a deserted churchyard in Oxford on a balmy late summer evening. It is getting dark. He has been there for some hours. He has returned out of choice, to try to clear his head of the demons to which he has now been tethered for a full 12 months. He wants to be under the soil, not necessarily under her soil, but just under some soil, some solace. Or water if no soil is forthcoming. Music is as distant to him at this moment as London, or love, or life. However, he slowly makes his way back to the main road at Headington and embarks on the first coach back to London. It was his choice. It was his bravery or cowardice. How does resurrection make itself apparent to eyes still blinded by grief?
But just suppose. After one had gone, another came. Someone who almost chose to exit this world voluntarily, rather than, as Aaliyah had done, accidentally or neglectfully. Someone whose first public statement tells you exactly this.
Part 3: Resurrection?
It starts with a blissful sighing vocal/electric piano/running water reverie, and the voice rises out to speak freely, as though to enter into a new world:
“What to say? I remember when it started – and the exact time it ended. My life was in shambles – so much commotion and no place to mend it. A handful of pills and a Plan B. I wanted nothing to do with life or what was to become of me. I loved no more. Every door shut, I felt, I heard. I just wanted to sail away, float away…to the sounds of a Southern hummingbird.”
This is the voice of Charlene Keys, otherwise known as Tweet, and this is how her debut album Southern Hummingbird, produced by Timbaland and Missy Elliott, begins. Edging her way nervously out of the abyss, she settles into the surrender of the first song proper “My Place.” A ballad but with distant guitars and closer rhythm chewing away at its roots, waiting for love, welcoming love, pleading for love to come her way, to give her an excuse not to devour these pills.
“Smoking Cigarettes” continues the mood of languidity, though it is rudely subverted by Timbaland-style squelch bass, punctuming the lament like gigantic commas. He is gone and she needs him back to stop her committing suicide by means of lung cancer. A pack a night. But this is the opposite (i.e. interesting) extreme of balladry; this comes from a seductive deep soul as opposed to pleasing the scrubs with convention. Unhurried but always compelling. Al Green explores your punctum. Never screeching. Whispers can be so much louder sometimes. This is what a good slow soul record should be like; its meanings much more elusive to tease out, and therefore more rewarding (and it is about more than just using recognised signifiers; consider her namesake Alicia – I don’t think they are related, but correct me if they are – who certainly has assembled all the signifiers in her music, but there is no signified. Therefore, by definition, it is less than worthless).
“Best Friend”? Now HERE’S a song. A best friend of the opposite sex, always there – “we can talk about anything, that’s why I love you.” A male voice (one Bilal) steps in and concurs. They want to take it further. Their combined falsettos express what words cannot. Oh this is ecstatic in its peace. A point which Aaliyah, for whatever reason(s), never quite reached. “Let me LAA-HAY-HAY with you!” “You give me REEE-A-SON!” Stretching notes out to poeticise emotions. Deep soul and free jazz were never that far apart.
(Does this song have relevance to my personal life? Well, how can it not?)
Next track is “Always Will,” the theme of which seems to be love surviving at a distance, even though (although never explicitly stated) this is the same love affair about which she lamented in “Smoking Cigarettes.” But can the open-minded listener not interpret their own lives in such words. “We can be on separate planets, Mars and Venus/Heart to heart, no space is between us.” I suspect that Ms Keys is engaging in an exercise of self-denial, desperately trying to convince herself that they have the chance of a future.
(But of course it means something completely different to me…long distance friendships, thinking the same thing even though seas and situations may keep us physically separate, spiritually and emotionally we inhabit the same Winter Gardens photograph).
It’s time to go uptempo – “Boogie 2Nite.” She is looking for a party and is looking to pull a partner. That desperation is still evident beneath the superficially lively surface. “Are you READY?” she repeats with increasing intensity. Who knows where this could lead? “Ten Cents A Dance”? (The Hawking-like mechanical intonation “move your hips side to side.” Keys says the word “dance” as if it were to be followed by the words “on my grave”).
But she doesn’t manage to grab a partner – she gets back at quarter to three in the morning and is so desirous of stimulation that she manages to stimulate herself on the single “Oops (My My)” on which Missy cameos as her Other; appropriate as musically this is a decaffeinated “Get Ur Freak On” with sample muezzins oddly reminiscent of prime Art of Noise. She gets pleasure wherever and however she can. Certainly this knocks the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself” into a cocked hat.
“Certainly he seems to have treated masturbation as a considerable play-acting performance, and often a lengthy one (he provides occasional timings). In the imaginative passion of the moment he evn caused himself superficial injuries on more than one occasion. His moments of extreme narcissism, too, will surprise and enlighten those who have always found difficulty in understanding why a synonym for masturbation should be “self-love.” In Williams we see someone who – and this in middle-age – is capable of being so captivated by his own image in the mirror that he must resort at once to “the barclays.” This is self-regard of a rare order…”
(Russell Davies, from the Introduction to The Kenneth Williams Diaries)
There is a strangely retro, minimalist early-‘80s feel (Sharon Redd?) to the track “Make Ur Move” in which Keys is still trying to attract a man. “Tell me what your name is/Damn you should be famous.” But it is still to no avail. She is left alone with her acoustic guitar for the bitter song “Motel” where she witnesses what we assume is her ex going into a motel and enjoying sexual relations with another. Keys shuts the door on the past. “Go to hell baby,” she purrs. “And furthermore, you dummy, the proof was laying in your pants.” A sardonic reference to “Rappers’ Delight” passes in the breeze; more reminiscences of times irretrievable.
Then, in the piano-driven ballad “Beautiful” she appears to have found someone, “I have received a love that’s so divine/So innocent and so pure.” But again it’s not made clear whether this is a reality or merely her wishes projected onto the studium of everyday existence. From the next track “Complain” it would appear that the latter remains the case. “I can sing about love lost – but what if there’s no love to lose?” But then again, she still wants the man back, regardless of everything. “If I had you back, I wouldn’t complain at all.” “If my friends were dead and gone, leaving me here alone/Could I depend on some spirit to ease me when my soul’s on its own?” As with the beginning of this album, her life remains at stake.
But no no no (and not Destiny’s Child’s “No, No, No” either). A heartbeat starts. The song is “Heaven.” An ECG machine ticks. An enormous trade wind of steel guitar slides. “Loving me means more than losing you,” she declares. The previous song talked of the relationship’s good points; this song reminds us (her) of the bad points which outweigh it. It’s a sunny day, but the music belies the apparent “freedom,” full of glitches, lining her path like emotional landmines. “Definitely heaven!” she urges us, but can she convince even herself?
If we are to treat this record as a concept album – and there’s no indication why we shouldn’t – I would deduce from the harpsichord-powered song “Call Me” which reanimates some trademark Timbaland tricks (“Get Ur Freak Out” meets “Strawberry Letter 23”) she is sleeping with “her man” but conducting an affair with another, who can give her what the first man cannot. It is unclear which of these is her ex, but from the promise to do some “reminiscing” we can deduce that she has shacked up with a new man but still seeing her ex on the quiet. The sexual promise seems so bloody joyless.
(Alternative explanation: this is a flashback and the real reason for their break-up – her cheating on him?)
And so it proves joyless. A great gulf of strings plunges us into the distended finale “Drunk” which seems like an end to a self-deemed unworthy life. Backward voices sweep in and out like vultures, waiting for the “broke and alone” deserted woman to expire. The exact reverse of the intoxicated bliss of something like Earthling’s “I Could Just Die.” Everything gently drifts out of focus. Marvin Gaye wandering along the beach at Ostend, utterly alone. “This loneliness is killing me…The road’s all lopsided/I only drove a small way.” Reality used to be a friend of hers. “Now my air’s being pumped/And I’m drenched in my tears.”
Then the credits roll. Suddenly joyful, she takes a bow and does her Academy Award thanks over a reprise of the opening theme. But it doesn’t erase what may well be the bleakest end to an album since “Box For Black Paul” helped Cave’s From Her To Eternity stumble to its self-appointed close.
(There are two bonus tracks, “Sexual Healing (Oops Pt 2)” and Elliott’s own “Big Spender,” but they are scarcely relevant to the emotional tenor of the rest of the album, although the former may be a belated reassertion of her faith in love and life. Both excellent in themselves; just out of place, like adding “Wrote For Luck” as a bonus track to Closer).
Envoi
Be patient. You are asking, apart from the involvement of Timbaland and Elliott, what exactly does Tweet have to do with Aaliyah? I am merely asking for an extension of your belief in a good story. I am asking you to believe that a less dispassionate but perhaps more damaged woman arose in the space previously occupied by a far more confident woman and that the song “Drunk” is a belated Kyrie to both their lives, still arising out of the most fundamental vessel for the expression of human grief and suffering – the 12-bar blues – but removing it from its casing of aspic, rather than venerating the casing and blocking out any vision of the actual heart. Or perhaps it’s that life carries on under any circumstances. Perhaps I am yet again merely trying to extend my own experiences to make these works of art fit my perspective. For ultimately our own perspective is the only one which we can properly acknowledge – and why we get so incensed and defensive when other perspectives from other people come to question or overturn our own perspective.
“The Hegelian dialectic was a full-blooded affair. If you started with any partial concept and meditated on it, it would presently turn into its opposite; it and its opposite would combine into a synthesis, which would, in turn, becoming the starting point of a similar movement, and so on until you reached the Absolute Idea, on which you could reflect as long as you liked without discovering any new contradictions. The historical development of the world in time was merely an objectification of this process of thought.”
(Bertrand Russell on Dialectical Materialism, from Freedom and Organisation 1814-1914, chapter 18).
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