BELL BOTTOMS!

no more of this addressing brooklyn & p-fork drivel - WHAT THE HELL WAS JON SPENCER GOING ON ABOUT? Why was the first track on Orange (I think it was jsbx's 'commercial' breakthrough) an ode to Bell-bottoms? Except for the brief pop-disco revival that happened in the mid-90's (though maybe it was limited to Phx or even just Royal Palm Jr. High), have Bell-bottom pants ever been revived as cool?

Well regardless, more interesting to me is the not the Blues Explosion, but the Blues Brothers. The Akroyd/Belushi SNL duo backed by SNL band & soul luminaries such as Steve Cropper & Duck Dunn that spawned a movie, a couple of albums, a tour and a revival of interest in 50's & 60's R&B & Soul. Can you imagine such a (maybe shallow but) reverent movie about early Rock'n'Roll & Soul being made today? The movie featured James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker as well as other Major Major Soul/Blues artists. Apparently Peter Guralnick (in Sweet Soul Music - his book about Memphis Soul) disses the movie, and there is some stink of exploitation, but it honestly seems like Belushi/Akroyd started the Blues Brothers out of love for the music, and as SNL comedic performers it probably seemed like a reasonable way to do it. (Akroyd later went on to start the House of Blues) It's not reverent or deferential or stale, instead it's living, blasphemous, funny and a damn good time. And this seems totally in the spirit of the music itself, which was irrevent, salacious, slapstick, silly, serious, vulgar, sanctimonious, and wierd all at the same time. Why shouldn't a second order appreciation be any different?

Obviously they are two white (insider) guys copping the moves and sounds of (mostly) black musicians. Obviously they tread a dangerous line of co-opting, or attempting to bask in, the "authenticity" of soul music, or soul musicians, or the down-trodden lives of soul musicians. The whole thing of beauty created in the shadow of oppression. Importantly though I don't think 1) this is the story soul musicians tell of themselves, 2) this is not the story the music tells and 3) that's an even reasonable story to tell. Yes, the conditions of blacks in America (then and now) are lamentable and need to be addressed, but this doesn't make them victims. The dialog of authenticity says more about guilt and the position of the privileged than it does about soul musicians themselves.

What the Blues Brothers do is more sincere, and true to the form (in a limited way), than what any Blues or Soul archivist can do. And more to the point, Don't you think Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Ray Charles wanted to be in a Hollywood picture?

And damn it, the movie is a FUN TIME, that lets the music BE, but also has the great mainstream 80's comedy (Landis, Ramis, et al) feeling of fun & silliness & irreverence.

(The unspoken thing here being trying to understand, position my own tastes in 60's soul and funk. I'd think it fair to be on the same side as Elwood and Jake.)

Excepter Heart Parappa the Rapper?

from pitchfork review of excepter 12" "burgers":

After seven minutes of "'Burgers", the half-assed funk drumming and woozy bell tones that at first sounded silly become disorienting and weird; Fell's mechanical back-and-forth with female chorus of Clare Amory and Lala Ryan about flipping burgers ("Flip those Burgers" / "Turn the patty over") ...

Does the reviewer not know these are lyrics from a song on Parappa the Rapper 2?
Specifically Bread Burger Masters A Parappa Town Tradition? Did the members of excepter encounter Parappa from through the same source as me - one Ike Turner (its definitely possible)? How much does this make me want to 1) like Excepter and 2) write/record a response song "Noodles"?

just give me some Truth

To pull back from the Sophomoric Philosphizing abyss a bit, let's get back to ROCK (of a sort). A common argument/discussion amongst overwrought rock nerds is "Who is the best Beatle?" These days my answer is a pretty solid John. (It used to be a precarious Paul or John) How can it not be? He was obviously the coolest. Though a matter of subjective taste (how could it be otherwise), John's Beatles songs are stronger and numerous, his bad Beatles songs are fewer, and really, is there any comparison between the solo careers? You can argue how much McCartney contributed to John's Beatles songs or vice versa, or how the various members skills made the songs happen in the manner that they did, or how John's political and artistic pretensions were overwrought, undercooked and silly, or even that Paul had actually more sophisticated art/music/political taste, or George was dissed the whole time, or that Ringo is the best person (as if that's knowable by you or me) but in the end I think any discussion has to begin and end with John. It's like if you argue about who is the best baseball player of all time (Babe Ruth), it is impossible to have any discussion of it with out including Ruth, which, you know, says something.

All that's to preface a recent my recent personal discovery that not only is John's Plastic Ono Band a good album, but so is his second Imagine. Like a lot of Beatles songs, feelings about the title track, being the first of a few Lennon solo tracks that most have heard, are difficult to disentangle from all the cultural/historical morass that enmeshes it. Get past that and there are some good tunes. I could do without the juvenile Paul-diss of "How do you sleep?" but the closing one-two punch "Oh Yoko", as heard in Rushmore, and my current favorite Lennon jam "How?" is fucking great. The Lennon's confessional style can get to be a bit much and contrived (he's a serious artist!) but most of the time, it hit's right on. And with these two albums Lennon easily trumps any and all of George, Ringo and Paul's solo output. Add up John's guitar work on Ono's album and Ono's pre-kraut, pre-no wave of her Plastic Ono Band & Fly and FUCK these two were smoking in those early 70's. Forget Eno's love of ambient Harmonia, the Ono/Lennon/Voorman/Starr band was picking up on the BEAT big before everyone else was hip to it.

Put me in Lennon's camp.

(Sorry this isn't a post how I rediscovered previously maligned late John or Paul or George and tapped into their unappreciated depth. I know Imagine and POB are the crit faves, but fuck are they good.)

TRUTH I say TRUTH

So of course on the heels of killing over an hour in the afternoon reading the 3 parts of that Errol Morris essay/blog about truth in photography, I go to see Rashomon at the Castro yesterday evening.

Morris, in responding to some of the comments to his original pieces, talks about Rashomon briefly. Asserting that it is not in fact about Truth, as commonly quick-crit-hit will tell you, but about human weakness /inability to see or tell truth. That is to say, something did happen in the grove btw the bandit, woman & samurai and that is the Truth. The physical evidence and stories could all be put together to reveal this Truth of what happened. The conflicting stories of the four different eye-witness accounts only reveal how people try to skew and hide and manipulate the Facts to their own ends.

Later he extends this when discussing "post-modernists"

That “step further” you refer to is a significant difference. I do not believe — contra the postmodernists — that truth is socially constructed. There are big differences between each of the following claims:

(1) Truth is socially constructed or, worse yet, subjective;

(2) Truth is in principle absolute but we cannot know it; and

(3) Truth is knowable, but there are endless impediments to knowing it. (One of the greatest impediments is that people tend to ignore it or reject it even when presented with it.)

I am a proponent of the third view.

Is this just Morris' "God doesn't play dice" or is he just being a stick-in-the-mud? How can something be both knowable but knowing endlessly impeded? Perhaps he means seemingly endless, or just sort of endless, but not really, but if endless=infinity doesn't that = unknowable? In the end I think he's trying to make one point, Sontag's interpretation of Truth in photography by making a lesser related, but not identical point Sontag was stretching when she used the 'posing' of early photography to make a point about the Truth of photography. Why go to the Crimea when all you really wanted to say was something about how Photography (like All representation) has no truth value other than that assigned to it by a frame? Why determine, or try to determine, whether one photo came first? The only product is that it concretely shows the point that what we see in the photograph is determined by our perspective.

Erg. So my laziness leads to more confusion and no real point other than I think Morris is relying on the "hard work = validity, worth" crutch to make a not to solid or interesting point about how he doesn't feel comfortable with the destabilization of Deterministic Truth.

Oh, what to do when wasting time at work...

Read this LONG essay by Errol Morris about cannonballs, war, criticism, photography and Truth.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

More

Highly recommended.

And for Shits & Giggles, Who thought this was a good idea?

Response to Confusion to Add Confusion

Dan commented on my recent confused (as typically done) post about Reggae. Yes Reggae, outside of Bob Marley, has never charted well in the US (unless you count the relatively recent Dancehall crossover successes), but that really was not my point. I wasn't confused as to the why the general U.S. ear dug or got bewitched by reggae, but particularly why *I* am more into reggae (at least currently) than even u.s. soul or funk, let alone music from other caribbean islands. My limited theory was that the wierd cross breeding fusion with u.s. styles & the pragmatic nature of it's development as a Party music, a sincere Functional music, was more interesting to me than that of those other musics.

(Pragmatic in that Reggae served a purpose in the community that seems more honest, or at least more aware of itself w/o Art pretensions, than any post-60's middle class rock'n'roll can even pretend about. Commercial interests, entwined with cultural identity issues, mixed with POVERTY and EXPLOITATION leads to REVELATION and INVENTION. No, I'm not talking about sufferer Truth, but just the truth of how Culture is made as Pragmatic Truth. As it serves a purpose that doesn't pretend to more. Not that this doesn't happen with U.S. art rock, but I think if we thought about that too much we'd be decidedly disappointed about the function it serves. )

Yes, it had a bigger impact in the UK, but No, there really wasn't a crossbreeding from native UK styles into reggae. The biggest impact of the UK in reggae was as a commercial audience.

Getting into dancehall, it becomes even more confusing. Having developed contemporaneously with Hip-Hop, the cross-breeding, cross-thread nature between NYC & Kingston has been explored A LOT, but is still interesting how Party music in the Bronx v. Party music in JA informed each other, and developed into similar but extremely different end results. And to spin the functional thread, Dancehall was a Rejection of the trend to imperialistic appropration of the JA ghetto truth dialogue by the JA ghetto subjects themselves; as a community, as a market, as a culture, as a dancehall. Fuck you with your white dread rasta bullshit - this is Our music. (Though I tread a slippery slope, being a cosmo whitey reggae listener myself, but... at least I'm trying to be critical, right? right?)

One reason I love Baseball Prospectus...

And no, it's not the fact that they helped me win my fantasy league, but some sane talk on the whole Baseball-Steroids thing.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/unfiltered/?p=720

And relatively sane talk on stats, baseball, etc.

Negation, Affirmation

While driving through Oakland last night listening to my recent tape acquisition (Sleeping Bag's Reggae Dancehall II) I wondered why Dancehall is so weird. I'm passingly acquainted with the history of djing/toasting in Reggae, but that said, the difference btw early US Hip-Hop and Dancehall vocal styles is so huge that it's hard to reconcile the closeness btw US Soul and early Rocksteady & Ska. Most often it seems to be a string of nonsense syllables tied together and then repeated, with a little rude talk thrown in and then repeated. And any narrative or themes or threads seem only happenstance and LOOSE. But maybe I just don't understand it enough to follow. With Rocksteady & most Reggae at least I can understand the vocals which have repetitive verse/chorus/verse parts and are not heavy Jamaican patois.

But besides all that, why is it that Jamaica has such an interesting pop music history from Ska up until now? It's a pretty small place and all and you don't hear as much about Puerto Rico, the DR, Haiti or even really Cuba. Granted Cuba has a STRONG musical history, but nothing that piques US ears as strongly as Jamaica. My passing theory was that because Jamaica it has to do with Jamaica being Anglophone & close to the US that it is so tied into US Black Music and pushed out such a crazy hybrid Soul/R&B/Mento stew. Compared to the probably strong ties to South American music of the other islands (although I don't know what the story is with Haiti, being francophone and war torn). At least something to think think think about.

Baseball Aside:

The A's trade Swisher after trading Haren. All the prognosticators are pointing to this equaling bad baseball in Oakland for the next couple of years. Well, if they weren't watching, except for Haren and Blanton (and Bradley, why'd they trade him again, 'cause Beane's a megalomaniac?), that's what they've been getting. True, the A's probably won't compete for the AL West next year, False, this is a big change from last year and False, this will mean they'll be unwatchable this year. Most importantly, False, that Swisher is sure to be a superstar. I'm sorry 20 hr/80 rbi last year looked more like the norm for Swish than his 30/100 year before that AND he batted under .270!!! Beane could see that Swisher was not a offensive leader, but a crucial support part, which the A's last year was all they had. There was no-one last year who opposing pitchers were scared of every time they came up to bat. What the A's got back from the White Sox was a gold mine too. Three of their top 10 prospects for someone who is projectable AT MOST 30/90/.270 for a couple of years, but probably a decline after that. On top the Haren trade, the A's farm is now packed. Carlos Gonzalez! Brian Anderson! Gio Gonzalez! Learn these names A's fans because in '09 they're winning the AL WEST!

This year they'll finish about the middle of the pack again, with some moments of brilliance interspersed. I guess this is the result of some bad bets (Crosby, Chavez, Harden, Kotsay, Piazza), but count me IN for A's baseball this spring and especially a year from now.

AFRICA MUST BE FREE

Lilith, the questionably legal and questionably russian reissue label, has started reissuing crucial tropicalia and krautrock lp's. So far this has included both Harmonia records, the 2nd and 3rd Cluster records, Faust's first lp (on clear vinyl), 4 Caetano Veloso lp's and Os Mutantes debut lp. Who know's what the future holds? I suspect at least the 2nd and 3rd Mutantes lps and hopefully the early Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa and Tom Ze lps (and is the original tropiclia v/a comp too much to ask for?) and maybe a couple of the other Faust lps and maybe Amon Duul. Perhaps it has something to do with what label they were licensed too in Russian and that's how they got the rights. With all that, it means a lot of record purchasing and hard decisions because all these lps go for $20+ in US record stores. But since they're all CLASSIC, it's a reasonable price to pay.

One of the other threads in my recent listening (besides a 77 punk revival streak- Pagan's 'Shit Street' = great) has been a wandering path through African musics. Besides a little bit of the Awesome African Music Tapes this has been solely a practice of seeing what comes through Amoeba and buying then. Therefore this equals an awesome comp on Portland's Mississippi Records (very cool boutique/bedroom/analog only label) of seemingly random African obscurities, Sublime Frequencies' Tuareg Guitar Revolution (from Sun City Girl's Alan Bishop - i think), and the two recent Afrobeat 3xlp single artist collections from Vampisoul (Munster's soul side?), one I have - Orlando Julius, and one i desire - Tony Allen. Sure there's a bit of voyeuristic exoticism involved, but there's also some ear opening. Really there's not much tying all these together other than a shared continent and the fact that they aren't folkways 'tribal' field recordings. Sure I should be more systematic and more adventurous, but these days I listen/acquire for my own ears and not to prove or share or one-up my fellow listeners. Recommendations for further things to pursue needed! I'm probably going to try to track down the (john atkinson recommended) Indestructible Beat of Soweto next or maybe some of those Ethiopiques or fuck it and finally break down buying boogaloo lps and comps.

As an aside: In conversation I've recently thought about how Damon Albern has been the successful (at keeping his youth cool) where David Byrne had previously failed (and now appeals mostly to World Music (ewwwwwww) Yuppies. Though arguably it's silly to think of twenty something post-napster money-burning world music gourmands (like myself) to be really any different then the less hip thirty something putamayo types. At least it's something to ponder. I'd say something, and do, to defend the way I (we) listen versus the jam band and putamayo types, but my cynicism shoots through any claims to difference. And the stakes are high! So the blood boils to build the wall and broaden the (perceived) schism.

Oh, and Sleeping Bag's Reggae Dancehall II $2 tape = gold. My reggae ear is now starting to favorably hear dancehall.)