music reviews
Best Albums of the Decade
Dec/12/2009 *
permalinkage
NPR's music
team has posted a provocative list of their
"50 Most Important Albums of the
2000s", with different
critics of diferent genres weighing in, hence the
rock albums alongside classical alongside jazz
(reviews and samples from the albums are
found here). Note that these
picks aren't the BEST of the 2000s, but instead
representative of some important trend or defining
moment in music over the past decade. I am very
happy to see several non-obvious choices on their
list by artists that have inspired, challenged and
sustained me over the past decade: Burial, Bon
Iver, The Bad Plus, Iron & Wine, Yo-Yo Ma.
Radiohead is the only band with two albums on the
list -- can you guess which two?
Carey Brownstein's Monitor Mix blog at NPR has a lot of thoughtful essays, quizzes, timelines and whatnot about the past 10 years of music too.
I'm also enjoying studying the lists of "The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s" over at Pitchfork -- I always get a bunch of new musical leads to track down reading their various staff lists of this and that. They also rate the worst album covers and best musical videos of 2009.
Carey Brownstein's Monitor Mix blog at NPR has a lot of thoughtful essays, quizzes, timelines and whatnot about the past 10 years of music too.
I'm also enjoying studying the lists of "The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s" over at Pitchfork -- I always get a bunch of new musical leads to track down reading their various staff lists of this and that. They also rate the worst album covers and best musical videos of 2009.
Neil Young's Archives Vol. I
Jun/06/2009 *
permalinkage
In the wake of Bob Dylan's successful 1985 expanded anthology Biograph, it seemed like every rock artist of note was lining up for CD box-set canonization. And true to his reputation as a futurist, David Bowie tried to outdo them all with 1989's Sound + Vision, which supplemented the usual greatest-hits-plus-rarities format with a bonus disc of visual content that would showcase the glorious new CD-Video format. There was only one problem with his attempt to revolutionize the box set: no one knew what the hell a CD-Video disc was, let alone owned any kind of device that would allow one to view it.
It was around this same time that Neil Young started talking up an ambitious career-retrospective project called Archives, and given the amount of unreleased songs Young routinely dusted off in his concerts, fans had come to expect nothing less than a parallel-universe repertoire every bit as rich and deep as his official one-- a Decade to last for decades. But as gleaned by anyone who's gone to a Neil Young show expecting to hear the hits but treated to an hour of Greendale instead, being a Neil fan requires a certain amount of patience. Twenty years since its first public mention, Archives has gone on to usurp even Chinese Democracy as the ultimate lost-album punchline. But the long-delayed arrival of this first volume seems less a matter of archeology as technology. And like the Bowie box, there's some confusion about how exactly you're supposed to use the thing.
Neil Young is an odd sort of perfectionist, favoring a raw immediacy in his recordings that often means leaving the mistakes in for purity's sake, but he's obsessed with making sure those mistakes are mixed and mastered to sometimes unattainable standards of fidelity. (He refused to release arguably his finest album, 1974's On the Beach, on CD until 2003 for this reason.) So it appears that the advent of Blu-ray HD audio technology was the missing piece that has allowed Neil to realize his multimedia masterplan for Archives. What little public comment he's made about Archives' release has taken the form of evangelical praise for the medium, urging fans to adopt the new technology like a Best Buy salesman working on commission.
The first volume of Archives arrives as a 10-disc set, spanning the first 10 years of Young's career and, somewhat confusingly, three different formats. For the most ardent audiophiles, there's the $300 multimedia-enhanced Blu-ray edition that includes six compilation discs; the previously released Live at the Fillmore East and Live at Massey Hall; an additional solo concert recorded in 1969 at the Riverboat coffeehouse in Toronto (though it boasts a tracklist similar to last year's Live at Canterbury House set, also included here as an unlisted bonus throw-in); the first DVD release of Young's infamous tour-documentary-cum-existential-road-flick, Journey Through the Past; plus online-update capabilities through which users will have access to more material.
For equally fervent fans with inferior home-entertainment set-ups, there's a $200 version boasting all of the above musical and multimedia content in a DVD format. And for those who just want some Neil on-hand in the car to soundtrack future road trips forevermore, there's a basic eight-disc $100 CD box with all the tunes but none of the extras. (All versions come with mp3 download codes, though we all know how Neil feels about iPods.)
Regardless of the format, each version of Archives makes the same convincing case: For Neil Young, the years of 1963 to 1972 were marked by a rapid maturation and a series of successful stylistic reinventions that rivaled the Beatles. Starting out as the surf-rockin' frontman for Winnipeg garage combo the Squires, he quickly transitioned into the folkie busker cutting early demos of "Sugar Mountain" for Elektra Records in 1965; the wide-screened psychedelic visionary in Buffalo Springfield; the savage electric warrior of 1969's Crazy Horse debut, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere; the heroic hippie wingman for Crosby, Stills and Nash; and then the country-rock traditionalist of 1970's After the Gold Rush and 1972's Harvest. On top of summarizing a tidy 10-year span, Archives Vol. 1 ends symbolically with Neil at his commercial peak, before a growing disillusionment with rock stardom and the death of close friends would usher in a more darkly compelling phase of his career......
But while they're
paying the least amount of money, the CD-box
purchasers may feel the most short-changed, as
Archives is not quite the vault-clearing revelation
that fans may have been hoping for. Of the advertised
43 unreleased tracks, most take the form of alternate
mixes or live versions of familiar material, ranging
from the subtle (a cavernous mix of "Helpless" that
enhances the song's hymnal qualities) to the
substantial (early stripped-down versions of
"Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" and future On the
Beach track "See the Sky About to Rain"). But as
Archives attests, the lack of true, unheard rarities
can be explained by the fact that Neil's been pulling
from his mythical stash of lost songs since the
mid-60s, padding his 70s and 80s releases with songs
("Winterlong", "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown",
"Wonderin'") written during this early era.
So in a purely musical sense, Archives' real selling point isn't so much the tracklist as the remastering. And make no doubt about it: Next to the budget-line CD issues that Reprise rushed to the market in the late 80s, the new versions sound spectacular, breathing new life into these old warhorses. (The swirling symphonics of Harvest's "A Man Needs a Maid", in particular, beg for a big pair of headphones and an easy chair.) However, one can't help but question why these remasters can only be accessed via an expensive box set rather than through individual album reissues. With so many songs here already familiar to even the most casual classic-rock radio listener, the most illuminating moments on Archives come from the less celebrated tracts of his career. For one, the Squires tracks provide not just a time-capsule snapshot of Neil's first recording forays; rather, songs like the wonderful "I'll Love You Forever" provide glimpses of an unrealized future as a Beatlesque balladeer. (Alternately, the twangy instrumental "Mustangs" could pass for vintage Meat Puppets.) And if the turn-of-the-70s triumvirate of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, and Harvest became the go-to soundtracks for America's post-hippie hangover, Neil's comparatively overlooked 1969 self-titled debut feels all the more contemporary for being excluded from that classic-rock holy trinity, boasting a soft-rock lushness that-- in light of psychedelic successors like the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, and Sparklehorse-- has proven as influential as any album in his canon.
But as Archives' multitude of newspaper clippings and radio interview excerpts explain, it was Neil's dissatisfaction with that first album's textured production and mastering that made him go folk/rock (not to be confused with folk-rock), and though they're already been released, the Massey Hall and Fillmore sets still represent this era's purest manifestations of those acoustic/electric extremes. The 1969 Riverboat disc, however, is less about what Neil does during the songs (acoustic readings of his first-album and Springfield catalogues) as between them: he talks. A lot. So much so that the these between-song "raps" constitute their own bonus feature on the Riverboat disc-- perhaps inspired by one-time tour-mate Thurston Moore's similar verbal deconstruction of a Venom live album-- with a stream of amusing anecdotes about groupies, drugs and The Guess Who. In the same sense, Archives is ultimately less interesting when seen as a compilation of music than as a digital storehouse of a man's complete life and work.
Taken individually, the reams of extras that accompany every track on the DVD/Blu-ray editions-- candid photos, original handwritten lyric sheets, radio-promo spots, newspaper clippings, tape-box doodles, and so on-- may not seem like a compelling reason to pony up for Archives' enhanced options. But cumulatively, they chart an evolution as intriguing as that heard in the songs. Given that Neil's become rather media-shy in his old age, Archives provides an opportunity to track his transformation as a public figure through the many newspaper articles and radio-interview clips gathered here, from the wide-eyed teenager promoting his club night in the Winnipeg daily to the disgruntled Buffalo Springfield exile trashing Jimmy Messina's mixing job on that band's last record (early evidence of Neil's notorious audiophilia) to the self-described "rich hippie" contemplating the peculiarities of fame just as Harvest is about to make him a superstar.
And the (mostly hidden) video teases sprinkled throughout the set-- like CSNY performing "Down By the River" on a David Steinberg-hosted teen dance show, or rare glimpses of the long-gone Riverboat-- culminate with a treasure trove of footage on Archives' final disc. Here we get a series of intimate interviews conducted during Harvest's farmhouse recording sessions, as well as Archives' most amusing easter egg find: a 15-minute sequence where Neil discovers CSNY bootlegs during a record-shopping trip circa 1971, sparking a heated argument with the store employee that culminates in Neil walking out of the shop, bootlegs in hand, without paying for them. (The sequence is especially resonant in light of Neil's recent endorsement of Warner Music Group pulling all their artists' videos off YouTube.)
Taken together, Archives' musical and visual material form as complete a picture of Neil Young's early years as the most die-hard fan could hope for. But therein lies the fundamental flaw of Archives on DVD-- you can't take them together. Each track is housed in a virtual file folder that allows you to play the audio track or scour the bonus content; there is no way to do them simultaneously. So your options are either to let the music play uninterrupted (while your screen displays serene film loops of spinning record players and reel-to-reel machines), or exit "play" mode and silently sift through the extras-- without being able to actually listen to the song those extras are meant to contextualize. It's like being told that your computer can run iTunes, or your web browser, but you have to shut down one to use the other. It means you end up spending as much time fiddling with your DVD menu controls as enjoying the material you're trying to access. You have to spring for the Blu-ray to access different pieces of media simultaneously.
Brian Eno was recently quoted as saying that if the practice of selling music in physical form is to continue, the emphasis will have to shift from the content to the form, to enable a unique user experience that can't be replicated with the click of a mouse. Archives constitutes a bold step towards this new paradigm, where the delivery system is as much in service to the supplemental materials as the music that ephemera serves to canonize. And for all its multimedia chicanery, Archives ultimately seeks to reassert an old-fashioned mode of attentive listening and engagement that's been mostly lost as music becomes a WiFi-streamed soundtrack to some other activity. But if Neil expects his fans to retain their enthusiasm for future volumes (particularly when the focus shifts to his erratic 80s output), he'll need to make that immersion process more fluid, less disruptive. Certainly Archives' first volume contains enough audio and visual stimuli to keep a Neil Young fan busy till the next edition arrives (presumably) in 2029. But that's as much a comment on the impractical, time-consuming interface as the content itself.
— Stuart Berman, June 17, 2009
So in a purely musical sense, Archives' real selling point isn't so much the tracklist as the remastering. And make no doubt about it: Next to the budget-line CD issues that Reprise rushed to the market in the late 80s, the new versions sound spectacular, breathing new life into these old warhorses. (The swirling symphonics of Harvest's "A Man Needs a Maid", in particular, beg for a big pair of headphones and an easy chair.) However, one can't help but question why these remasters can only be accessed via an expensive box set rather than through individual album reissues. With so many songs here already familiar to even the most casual classic-rock radio listener, the most illuminating moments on Archives come from the less celebrated tracts of his career. For one, the Squires tracks provide not just a time-capsule snapshot of Neil's first recording forays; rather, songs like the wonderful "I'll Love You Forever" provide glimpses of an unrealized future as a Beatlesque balladeer. (Alternately, the twangy instrumental "Mustangs" could pass for vintage Meat Puppets.) And if the turn-of-the-70s triumvirate of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, and Harvest became the go-to soundtracks for America's post-hippie hangover, Neil's comparatively overlooked 1969 self-titled debut feels all the more contemporary for being excluded from that classic-rock holy trinity, boasting a soft-rock lushness that-- in light of psychedelic successors like the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, and Sparklehorse-- has proven as influential as any album in his canon.
But as Archives' multitude of newspaper clippings and radio interview excerpts explain, it was Neil's dissatisfaction with that first album's textured production and mastering that made him go folk/rock (not to be confused with folk-rock), and though they're already been released, the Massey Hall and Fillmore sets still represent this era's purest manifestations of those acoustic/electric extremes. The 1969 Riverboat disc, however, is less about what Neil does during the songs (acoustic readings of his first-album and Springfield catalogues) as between them: he talks. A lot. So much so that the these between-song "raps" constitute their own bonus feature on the Riverboat disc-- perhaps inspired by one-time tour-mate Thurston Moore's similar verbal deconstruction of a Venom live album-- with a stream of amusing anecdotes about groupies, drugs and The Guess Who. In the same sense, Archives is ultimately less interesting when seen as a compilation of music than as a digital storehouse of a man's complete life and work.
Taken individually, the reams of extras that accompany every track on the DVD/Blu-ray editions-- candid photos, original handwritten lyric sheets, radio-promo spots, newspaper clippings, tape-box doodles, and so on-- may not seem like a compelling reason to pony up for Archives' enhanced options. But cumulatively, they chart an evolution as intriguing as that heard in the songs. Given that Neil's become rather media-shy in his old age, Archives provides an opportunity to track his transformation as a public figure through the many newspaper articles and radio-interview clips gathered here, from the wide-eyed teenager promoting his club night in the Winnipeg daily to the disgruntled Buffalo Springfield exile trashing Jimmy Messina's mixing job on that band's last record (early evidence of Neil's notorious audiophilia) to the self-described "rich hippie" contemplating the peculiarities of fame just as Harvest is about to make him a superstar.
And the (mostly hidden) video teases sprinkled throughout the set-- like CSNY performing "Down By the River" on a David Steinberg-hosted teen dance show, or rare glimpses of the long-gone Riverboat-- culminate with a treasure trove of footage on Archives' final disc. Here we get a series of intimate interviews conducted during Harvest's farmhouse recording sessions, as well as Archives' most amusing easter egg find: a 15-minute sequence where Neil discovers CSNY bootlegs during a record-shopping trip circa 1971, sparking a heated argument with the store employee that culminates in Neil walking out of the shop, bootlegs in hand, without paying for them. (The sequence is especially resonant in light of Neil's recent endorsement of Warner Music Group pulling all their artists' videos off YouTube.)
Taken together, Archives' musical and visual material form as complete a picture of Neil Young's early years as the most die-hard fan could hope for. But therein lies the fundamental flaw of Archives on DVD-- you can't take them together. Each track is housed in a virtual file folder that allows you to play the audio track or scour the bonus content; there is no way to do them simultaneously. So your options are either to let the music play uninterrupted (while your screen displays serene film loops of spinning record players and reel-to-reel machines), or exit "play" mode and silently sift through the extras-- without being able to actually listen to the song those extras are meant to contextualize. It's like being told that your computer can run iTunes, or your web browser, but you have to shut down one to use the other. It means you end up spending as much time fiddling with your DVD menu controls as enjoying the material you're trying to access. You have to spring for the Blu-ray to access different pieces of media simultaneously.
Brian Eno was recently quoted as saying that if the practice of selling music in physical form is to continue, the emphasis will have to shift from the content to the form, to enable a unique user experience that can't be replicated with the click of a mouse. Archives constitutes a bold step towards this new paradigm, where the delivery system is as much in service to the supplemental materials as the music that ephemera serves to canonize. And for all its multimedia chicanery, Archives ultimately seeks to reassert an old-fashioned mode of attentive listening and engagement that's been mostly lost as music becomes a WiFi-streamed soundtrack to some other activity. But if Neil expects his fans to retain their enthusiasm for future volumes (particularly when the focus shifts to his erratic 80s output), he'll need to make that immersion process more fluid, less disruptive. Certainly Archives' first volume contains enough audio and visual stimuli to keep a Neil Young fan busy till the next edition arrives (presumably) in 2029. But that's as much a comment on the impractical, time-consuming interface as the content itself.
— Stuart Berman, June 17, 2009
Pearl Jam's "Release"
Apr/04/2009 *
permalinkage
For nearly 20 years and running, I've been listening to Pearl Jam's album "Ten." There's a good chance you have been too. "Ten" has become on of the 30-something generation's touchstone albums, defining of your "young adulthood," a time when many of us are opening up to the power of music in new ways. The records we hear in this fertile period tend to stick with us over the long haul, becoming emblematic and representative of something larger than itself. Pearl Jam's debut album "Ten," along with "Nevermind," "Blood Sugar Sex Magic," "Ritual de lo Habitual" and "Badmotofinger."
The song "Release" is the closing track, winding things down after 10 tracks of unbelievably passionte and driving rock 'n roll. It started a tradition of P. Jam ending most of their album with a seriously smoldering slow jam that highlights the pleading sincerity of Eddie Vedder. We bring it to your attention now because P. Jam have recently released a remastered/remixed version of "10," with new renditions of oldish classics handled by Brendan O'Brien, their long-time producer. I'm curious to hear which version you like the best, and to make things more interesting, I've tossed in 2 live versions too. If you have any feedback on the different takes on "Release," or on P. Jam and "Ten" in general, leave yer thoughts in the comments.
Release (1992)
Release (2009)
Release (Live in Chicago 2003)
Release (Live at Bonaroo 2008)
(Click to play)
e worldAnd
here's a bonus track, also from the "Ten" release set
-- great counterpoint to four listens of "Release":
Breath and a Scream (1992)
Release : Lyrics by Eddie Vedder
Father...ooh...oh...oh...
I see the world, feel the chill
Which way to go, windowsill
I see the worlds on a rocking horse of time
I see the verse in the rain
Ohh...ohh...ohh...ohh...
Oh, dear dad, can you see me now
I am myself, like you somehow
Ill ride the wave where it takes me
Ill hold the pain...
Release me...
Ohh...ohh...ohh...ohh...
Oh, dear dad, can you see me now
I am myself, like you somehow
Ill wait up in the dark for you to speak to me
Ill open up...
Release me...
Release me (3x)
Ohh...ohh...ohh...ohh...
Breath and a Scream (1992)
Release : Lyrics by Eddie Vedder
Father...ooh...oh...oh...
I see the world, feel the chill
Which way to go, windowsill
I see the worlds on a rocking horse of time
I see the verse in the rain
Ohh...ohh...ohh...ohh...
Oh, dear dad, can you see me now
I am myself, like you somehow
Ill ride the wave where it takes me
Ill hold the pain...
Release me...
Ohh...ohh...ohh...ohh...
Oh, dear dad, can you see me now
I am myself, like you somehow
Ill wait up in the dark for you to speak to me
Ill open up...
Release me...
Release me (3x)
Ohh...ohh...ohh...ohh...
Looking back...
Dec/12/2008 *
permalinkage
Favorite Jams of
2008
as selected in an alley by members of the SBWS
DJ Fundi
Top 10 Tier
Fleet Foxes "Sun King" + self-titled
Al Green "Lay It Down"
Gnarls Barkley "The Odd Couple"
Stephen Malkmus "Real Emotional Trash"
Erykah Badu "New Amerykah"
Cat Power "Jukebox"
Flying Lotus "Los Angeles"
Girl Talk "Feed the Animals"
Bon Iver "For Emma, Forever Ago"
Q-Tip "The Renaissance"
Second 10 Tier
DJ/rupture "Uproot"
"The Very Best" mixtape by Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit (available for free download at http://www.myspace.com/theverybestmyspace.)
The Roots "Rising Down"
Jamie Lidell "Jim"
Dusk + Blackdown "Margins Music"
The B-52's "Funplex"
Bob Dylan "Tell Tale Signs" (B-sides, outtakes, rarities, etc.)
Toumani Diabate "The Mande Variations"
Neil Young "Sugar Mountain : Live at Canterbury House 1968"
Quantic "Flowering Inferno"
Honorable mentions: Orchestra Baobab, Santogold, Amadou & Mariam, Nina Simone boxset
Best concert experiences of 09: Bassnectar in B'ham, Fleet Foxes at WWU, Horning's Hideout bluegrass festival in OR, John Scofield in Vancouver
Biggest disappointments: Beck, My Morning Jacket, Thievery Corporation & Michael Franti
Click here to listen to a Rhapsody playlist based on the SBWS Favorite Songs of 2008 lists.
More lists after the jump...
as selected in an alley by members of the SBWS
Robin Pecknold of the Fleet Foxes at WWU.
DJ Fundi
Top 10 Tier
Fleet Foxes "Sun King" + self-titled
Al Green "Lay It Down"
Gnarls Barkley "The Odd Couple"
Stephen Malkmus "Real Emotional Trash"
Erykah Badu "New Amerykah"
Cat Power "Jukebox"
Flying Lotus "Los Angeles"
Girl Talk "Feed the Animals"
Bon Iver "For Emma, Forever Ago"
Q-Tip "The Renaissance"
Second 10 Tier
DJ/rupture "Uproot"
"The Very Best" mixtape by Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit (available for free download at http://www.myspace.com/theverybestmyspace.)
The Roots "Rising Down"
Jamie Lidell "Jim"
Dusk + Blackdown "Margins Music"
The B-52's "Funplex"
Bob Dylan "Tell Tale Signs" (B-sides, outtakes, rarities, etc.)
Toumani Diabate "The Mande Variations"
Neil Young "Sugar Mountain : Live at Canterbury House 1968"
Quantic "Flowering Inferno"
Honorable mentions: Orchestra Baobab, Santogold, Amadou & Mariam, Nina Simone boxset
Best concert experiences of 09: Bassnectar in B'ham, Fleet Foxes at WWU, Horning's Hideout bluegrass festival in OR, John Scofield in Vancouver
Biggest disappointments: Beck, My Morning Jacket, Thievery Corporation & Michael Franti
Click here to listen to a Rhapsody playlist based on the SBWS Favorite Songs of 2008 lists.
More lists after the jump...
Mr. Keeney
Vampire Weekend/Vampire Weekend
Beck/Modern Guilt
Kings of Leon/Only by the Night
Orchestra Baobab/Made in Dakar
Girl Talk/Feed the Animals
Death Cab for Cutie/Narrow Stairs
The Tings Tings/We Started Nothing
Ray LaMontagne/Gossip in the Grain
Ladytron/Velocifero
Michael Franti/All Rebel Rockers
Thievery Corporation/Radio Retaliation
Sons and Daughters/This Gift
Foals/Antidotes
Panic at the Disco/Pretty. Odd.
Q-Tip /Renaissance
Belle and Sebastian/The BBC Sessions
Deerhunter/Microcastle
TV on the Radio/Dear Science
Elivs Costello/Momofuku
The Helio Sequence/Keep your eyes ahead
Comments
1) Vampire - yes they have been played to death but I have to say they were my most listened to album, such happy up beat (literally strum upwards on guitar like SKA) - we need more music like this.
2) Beck - not my fav Beck (Paper Tigers) but I appreciate the happy grooves.
3) Kings - they are now taking over indie radio but they are one of those bands that is growing with each new album - kinda like how Coldplay grew outta KEXP to mainstream...I just hope they still get the airplay on KEXP.
4) Orchestra - talk about happy, West African guitar....this is party music in my book.
5) Girl Talk - Kinda like a Soduku puzzle, listen and try to figure out all the cuts...it blows your mind. He has taken the torch from Danger Mouse...just hope it doesn't end the same...lawsuit.
6) DCFC - honestly I am tired of this album but I have to give credit to it being in my rotation for a period of time. The tune Cath has a sound like their earlier albums which I dig.
7) The Tings Tings - dig deeper than 'That's not my name' and will discover the refreshingly low budget punk/dance sound. Even better live as most acts are....
8) Ray - perhaps a tad too high on the list, but I am still blinded by his earlier albums - this has grown on me, had to adjust to the different sound. Still a brilliant crooner.
The Internationally Renowned Boaster
Q-Tip – The renaissance
Ghostland Observatory – Robotique Majistque
The Dutchess and the Duke – She’s the Dutchess, He’s the Duke
Beck -Modern Guilt
Wild Sweet Orange – We have cause to be uneasy
Head Like a Kite – there is loud laughter everywhere
The Dandy Warhols – Earth to the Dnady Warhols
TV on the Radio –Dear Science
Fujiya and Miyagi - lightbulbs
Frightened Rabbit – the midnight organ fight
Mark Pickeral – Snake in the radio
Fleet Foxes
Tokyo Police Club –Elephant Shell
Thievery Corp – Radio Retaliation
The Raconteurs-Consolers Of The Lonely
Roots Manuva – Slime and reason
Lykke Li – Youth Novels
Gnarls Barkley – the Odd Couple
Death Cab – Narrow Stairs
Cheb I Sabbah –Devotion
Sheriff Tim Goodwin
The Storm -- "When the Storm Meets the Ground"The Juno Soundtrack
Lykke Li -- Youth Novels
Wilco -- "Sky Blue Sky"
Natasja -- "I Danmark er jeg født"
What did we miss? Add your favorites and feedback in the comments. Aye.
Flying Lotus
Dec/12/2008 *
permalinkage
Steven Ellison is a tall, soft-spoken twenty-five-year-old who works under the name Flying Lotus. As part of a peer network, with outposts in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Glasgow, Ellison is helping to lead a small group of producers toward a new strain of hip-hop. He has been signed to the highly regarded London-based label Warp, which made a name in the nineties by releasing esoteric electronic recordings by Autechre and Aphex Twin. Ellison and his contemporaries have come up with a fusion of the extreme detail allowed by software programming (fractal spidering of sounds, a backdrop of crackles, and prickling, feverish rhythms no human hands could play) and the bedrock thump of hip-hop, the grounding beat that has bled into almost all pop music in the world. Ellison’s Flying Lotus releases this year—an album titled “Los Angeles” and a series of EPs—are a good index of how one branch of hip-hop is going to move into the next decade, detaching itself from traditional hip-hop rhyming and forming new splinter genres.
To listen to Flying Lotus' "Essential Mix" for BBC Radio One, visit Radio Free Fundi.
To listen to Flying Lotus' remix of Radiohead's "Reckoner, click right here.
In October, I
met Ellison at his apartment, in a small housing
complex in the Northridge area of Los Angeles. Two
levels of apartments faced an interior courtyard
filled with odd metal sculptures and a Roman bust
sitting in what looked like a barbecue. Flames were
painted on one wall. Ellison, wearing an Obama
T-shirt and dark plaid pants, greeted me warmly and
led me up to his studio-cum-home. His setup is
typical of the twenty-first-century musician: a
collection of laptops, keyboards, and processing
units, none of them large and most of them portable.
A series of pharmacy bottles lined the wall behind
his equipment. The clear orange cannisters were
familiar, but not the names on the laser-printed
labels: Grape Ape, Purple Haze. “Medical marijuana,”
Ellison explained. He showed me a water-operated
“gravity bong” made from a bottle—a birthday present.
Ellison began his life as an artist making films in college, and has worked on a documentary about his great-aunt Alice Coltrane, who died last year. (There is a meditative sprawl in many Flying Lotus recordings that is not far removed from the work of the Coltrane family.) The hip-hop producer Ellison is most often grouped with is the late J Dilla, who worked with a wide variety of artists, including A Tribe Called Quest and Erykah Badu. Though Ellison shares J Dilla’s love of placing a hard, simple backbeat inside an indistinct wash of background noise, Ellison’s work is more extreme, pushing toward almost total atomization. His music is both resolutely calm and firmly noisy, and the results are sometimes very Grape Ape, even for the soberest listener.
Several months ago, Ellison was invited to remix “Reckoner,” from Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” album. The result, which can be heard on the Flying Lotus MySpace page, is a perfect example of how Ellison’s generation is trying to combine the musical equivalent of the figurative and the abstract. The voices sound like voices, and the instruments more or less sound like instruments, set in a frame of noise that refers only to itself and unfolds in irregular rhythms that almost, but not quite, get the upper hand over the steady time holding the music together.
The “Reckoner” remix opens with what seems to be brushes or, possibly, handfuls of sand being dropped on an open snare drum. The center of the beat keeps shifting as a lower sound stays central, retaining straight time. Keyboards drift through the mix. Around the original Thom Yorke vocals a louder motif repeats, which could be another keyboard or Yorke’s own voice, doubled up on itself, as if wrapped in plastic. When the beat finally engages, it is not a particularly heavy moment. This music is stoned structurally—you can’t necessarily fix what is supposed to be repeating or not repeating. The mix breaks down to reveal some of the original song, a vocal harmony bridge that plays almost unaccompanied. Then the drums come back in, perhaps now playing a different time signature. This doesn’t remake “Reckoner” so much as let it float, like a liquid suspended in another, heavier liquid. There is an elegant sense of proportion in this remix. As radical as the change of mood is, and as detailed as it manages to be, the track is less than four minutes and never gets too busy.
The Flying Lotus releases work with these same tensions, with varying results. The “Los Angeles” album, which is easier to find than the EPs, is the least successful of the bunch. Here, the Flying Lotus aesthetic stays on the stoned side of the fence too often, and ends up being paired with female vocalists whose voices are far less distinct than Yorke’s. On the “L.A. EP 1 x 3,” though, Ellison strikes a bright, vivid balance between chaos and time. “Interference,” which is less than three minutes long, opens with a small storm of static, and then the song forms around wooden clacks, buzzes, and an electronic voice, all of it encircled by a bell-like melody. Dozens of sounds appear, each for only a moment. “L.A. EP 2 x 3” features remixes from Los Angeles-based collaborators like Samiyam and Nosaj Thing, as well as Mike Slott, a young man from the LuckyMe collective, in Glasgow. (LuckyMe’s recent multiple-d.j. set at Nublu, in the East Village, was sparsely attended but was a glorious, juddering collision of bumptious, harsh bass and sweet, tootling treble.)
What is exciting about Ellison and his friends is not that they execute every track cleanly and perfectly or that they are a hard-charging group set to change the sound of radio. Ellison, like many of the artists in this affinity group I’ve met, has hundreds of unheard tracks on his hard drive, some long, many short. How they deploy all these puzzle pieces ends up being the real connection to his august lineage. Though the laptop and the controller pad are the instruments of choice, this music has the improvisatory, loose feel of jazz.
My favorite Flying Lotus moment this year was a live set at (Le) Poisson Rouge, a club in the West Village, in September. Aside from shouting out a few words of tribute to the Coltrane heritage, Ellison simply stuck to his laptop and to two devices that controlled and modified what was coming out of it: an M-Audio Trigger Finger, which allows the user to bang on a series of satisfying rubber pads, bringing back the physical gesture of the drum, and a Monome, a series of lighted buttons that controls sequences while making elegant patterns of orange-and-yellow light.
The set began with quieter, clattering tracks from “Los Angeles,” like “Camel,” which centers on a placid metal clanking that could be a very organized group of cows crossing the road, and moved into heavier tracks by members of the LuckyMe collective, like Hudson Mohawke’s genuinely loopy “ZooO00oO0m,” a clump of high and low synthesizer lines that seems to be trying to untangle itself and to pogo at the same time. As he played, Ellison bobbed furiously, with an enormous smile on his face, twisting knobs but looking as if he wanted to dance as much as physically possible without abandoning his equipment. The set segued into his own gentle, loopy remix of Lil Wayne’s ubiquitous “A Milli” and then settled into several brutish, heavy tracks from the dubstep genre—rough-cut slabs of bass and drums that bully the listener into dancing. Then Ellison guided the music back through more rapping, and ended with the susurration of the Radiohead remix. At no point did Ellison feel compelled to make sense. At no point did the crowd stop dancing.
-- Sascha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker
Ellison began his life as an artist making films in college, and has worked on a documentary about his great-aunt Alice Coltrane, who died last year. (There is a meditative sprawl in many Flying Lotus recordings that is not far removed from the work of the Coltrane family.) The hip-hop producer Ellison is most often grouped with is the late J Dilla, who worked with a wide variety of artists, including A Tribe Called Quest and Erykah Badu. Though Ellison shares J Dilla’s love of placing a hard, simple backbeat inside an indistinct wash of background noise, Ellison’s work is more extreme, pushing toward almost total atomization. His music is both resolutely calm and firmly noisy, and the results are sometimes very Grape Ape, even for the soberest listener.
Several months ago, Ellison was invited to remix “Reckoner,” from Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” album. The result, which can be heard on the Flying Lotus MySpace page, is a perfect example of how Ellison’s generation is trying to combine the musical equivalent of the figurative and the abstract. The voices sound like voices, and the instruments more or less sound like instruments, set in a frame of noise that refers only to itself and unfolds in irregular rhythms that almost, but not quite, get the upper hand over the steady time holding the music together.
The “Reckoner” remix opens with what seems to be brushes or, possibly, handfuls of sand being dropped on an open snare drum. The center of the beat keeps shifting as a lower sound stays central, retaining straight time. Keyboards drift through the mix. Around the original Thom Yorke vocals a louder motif repeats, which could be another keyboard or Yorke’s own voice, doubled up on itself, as if wrapped in plastic. When the beat finally engages, it is not a particularly heavy moment. This music is stoned structurally—you can’t necessarily fix what is supposed to be repeating or not repeating. The mix breaks down to reveal some of the original song, a vocal harmony bridge that plays almost unaccompanied. Then the drums come back in, perhaps now playing a different time signature. This doesn’t remake “Reckoner” so much as let it float, like a liquid suspended in another, heavier liquid. There is an elegant sense of proportion in this remix. As radical as the change of mood is, and as detailed as it manages to be, the track is less than four minutes and never gets too busy.
The Flying Lotus releases work with these same tensions, with varying results. The “Los Angeles” album, which is easier to find than the EPs, is the least successful of the bunch. Here, the Flying Lotus aesthetic stays on the stoned side of the fence too often, and ends up being paired with female vocalists whose voices are far less distinct than Yorke’s. On the “L.A. EP 1 x 3,” though, Ellison strikes a bright, vivid balance between chaos and time. “Interference,” which is less than three minutes long, opens with a small storm of static, and then the song forms around wooden clacks, buzzes, and an electronic voice, all of it encircled by a bell-like melody. Dozens of sounds appear, each for only a moment. “L.A. EP 2 x 3” features remixes from Los Angeles-based collaborators like Samiyam and Nosaj Thing, as well as Mike Slott, a young man from the LuckyMe collective, in Glasgow. (LuckyMe’s recent multiple-d.j. set at Nublu, in the East Village, was sparsely attended but was a glorious, juddering collision of bumptious, harsh bass and sweet, tootling treble.)
What is exciting about Ellison and his friends is not that they execute every track cleanly and perfectly or that they are a hard-charging group set to change the sound of radio. Ellison, like many of the artists in this affinity group I’ve met, has hundreds of unheard tracks on his hard drive, some long, many short. How they deploy all these puzzle pieces ends up being the real connection to his august lineage. Though the laptop and the controller pad are the instruments of choice, this music has the improvisatory, loose feel of jazz.
My favorite Flying Lotus moment this year was a live set at (Le) Poisson Rouge, a club in the West Village, in September. Aside from shouting out a few words of tribute to the Coltrane heritage, Ellison simply stuck to his laptop and to two devices that controlled and modified what was coming out of it: an M-Audio Trigger Finger, which allows the user to bang on a series of satisfying rubber pads, bringing back the physical gesture of the drum, and a Monome, a series of lighted buttons that controls sequences while making elegant patterns of orange-and-yellow light.
The set began with quieter, clattering tracks from “Los Angeles,” like “Camel,” which centers on a placid metal clanking that could be a very organized group of cows crossing the road, and moved into heavier tracks by members of the LuckyMe collective, like Hudson Mohawke’s genuinely loopy “ZooO00oO0m,” a clump of high and low synthesizer lines that seems to be trying to untangle itself and to pogo at the same time. As he played, Ellison bobbed furiously, with an enormous smile on his face, twisting knobs but looking as if he wanted to dance as much as physically possible without abandoning his equipment. The set segued into his own gentle, loopy remix of Lil Wayne’s ubiquitous “A Milli” and then settled into several brutish, heavy tracks from the dubstep genre—rough-cut slabs of bass and drums that bully the listener into dancing. Then Ellison guided the music back through more rapping, and ended with the susurration of the Radiohead remix. At no point did Ellison feel compelled to make sense. At no point did the crowd stop dancing.
-- Sascha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker
Fleet Fox Mania!!
Oct/10/2008 *
permalinkage
I've been listening to both Fleet Foxes albums a ton over the past 2 months or so -- especially am fond of the debut EP "Sun Giant," and on that release, I am insatiably hooked on the tunes "Mykonos" and "Innocent Son." I liked this band plenty-- their comforting sound, unique songwriting, creative instrumentation and especially the CSNY-esque vocal harmonies -- but after seeing them live last night here in Bellingham....well, now it is serious. Freekin' A: they sounded good -- strong, clear, rousing, and the power of their harmonies sung live, with the full bellows of their lungs, was almost startling. The venue they played in -- the Performing Arts Center on the campus of Western Washington University -- was designed for the ultimate sound -- it is often used for classical and other acoustic performances. The Foxes filled the whole space -- which was packed to the rafters with mostly students, but folks of all ages too -- with a warm, reverberating sound that I could literally feel resonating in my chest. Because I went to the show solo, I was able to score a seat in the front row center, so was on the front lines of their performance.
They talked quite a bit between songs -- conversations with old friends they knew in the audience, gently poking fun at the Society for Creative Anachronisms (Dungeons & Dragons, but in real life), Bruce Springsteen and college kids -- and mentioned several times they felt uncomfortable playing a college auditorium, as opposed to a club, with the crowd invisible to them because of the lighting.
"I wonder if, like, you're all a college class studying us, and everybody knows it but us," a Fox wondered. From then on, the crowd shouted "A+!" or "extra credit!" when they played a particularly good song or told a good joke.
Another thread of conversation through the performance was the lead singer, who was donning a too-small, uncomfortable-looking red jacket, talking about a wardrobe malfunction. "I'm wearing this red jacket because I lost all of my other clothes," he sighed. Later he wondered aloud, "How did I lose all my clothes?"
Anyways, you can download or stream a live Fleet Foxes concert from this past summer over at the Live Archive (thanks NPR!) I have video of them performing the excellent song "Mykonos" in Bellingham posted at YouTube and a few photos over at Flickr.
The sound on this video is pretty shoddy -- the music was loud, I was in the front row, my camera is cheap -- but the vocal harmonies at minutes 2:00 and 3:25 sound rather marvelous.
This one here features lead singer Robin Pecknold singing s song solo and unplugged. Only problem was that my memory card filled up about halfway through the song! Obviously, my pirating skills need some work -- AAAAaaaaaarrrrrrRRRrrr!
Even more videos and stuff after the jump...
Cool Fleet
Foxes bio from the Sub Pop website
here and a story called
"Fleet Foxes Are Not Hippies: Don't Let the Floppy
Hats, Jesus Beards, and Five-Part Vocal Harmonies
About Rivers, Trees and Sunshine Throw You" from
the Stranger
over
here.
Found these fine homemade videos too:
Fleet Foxes He Doesn't Know Why from Grandchildren on Vimeo.
White Winter Hymnal from Grandchildren on Vimeo.
OK. That is all.
Found these fine homemade videos too:
Fleet Foxes He Doesn't Know Why from Grandchildren on Vimeo.
White Winter Hymnal from Grandchildren on Vimeo.
OK. That is all.
Bill Frisell in Bellingham
Sep/09/2008 *
permalinkage
Can sound take on physical form? Does it have texture? How about temperature? Can one actually taste music?
I expect to answer these questions, and other ones I haven't thought of yet, next week when Bill Frisell sits down to play his guitar in the redwood sanctuary of the Church House.
I've been
dying to get inside of Pat Wickline and Sharon
Streams' renovated-church venue on Mill Avenue in
Fairhaven since they started hosting concerts there
last year. Intimate affairs, their concerts have been
more like living room hootenannys as the intimate
space only accommodates125 people. But my, what a
living room: a former Methodist church originally
built in Fairhaven's 1890 building boom, it boasts
over 3,000 square feet of old-growth California
redwood boards paneling 25 foot-high ceilings that
soar upwards in graceful arcs. "The ceilings looks
like the hull of a ship," Wickline once remarked to
the Herald.
The design of the space and use of natural materials reportedly combine to create a warm, one-of-a-kind reverberation and compression that brings out the best in vocals, acoustic instruments and drums.
Frisell, under these circumstances, seems like a natural fit for the Church House. His penchant for generating ambient abstractions, and the creative ways in which he coaxes a wide range of sonic spectrums from his guitar, leads me to believe he is going the make the whole room sing.
Since Frisell's Valentine's Day 2007 performance with Greg Leisz at the Nightlight Lounge, the Bainbridge Island-based musician has continued with his prodigious output of albums – each one seemingly inventing its own new category of music – his most recent release being the double-CD set History, Mystery. Trying to describe it with a friend the other day, we came up with "americana/soundtrack," "avant-garde jazz" and "postmodern bluegrass chamber music," but we didn't know what it was called when you released a record that contains all of those genres, sometimes in the same song.
Most of History, Mystery was recorded live with a very talented octet including Ron Miles, Jenny Scheinman, Eyvind Kang, Tony Sherr and Kenny Wollesen. Together, they weave across the map of Frisell's many different musical styles. An unusual hybrid of songs that Frisell wrote for various side projects, sometimes they feel like a gesture or a brief thought, maybe a passing mood. Short bridges like the one-minute "Probability Cloud 2" or the 36-second "A Momentary Suspension of Doubt" stitch the larger suite together.
The best model one might look to anticipate what this talented musician might play would be to give a listen to Ghost Town, his 2000 solo release on which he plays acoustic and electric guitars, bass and the 6-string banjo, as well as deftly builds and bends woozy loops of his various instruments. He has a fondness for electronic effects and at performances is often seen twiddling knobs, pressing buttons and tapping foot pedals. Frisell's is the light touch however, and his audial manipulations are typically restrained and subtle, providing depth and mysteries to his compositions.
He'll be playing the Bellingham solo show coming hot off a 5-night stand at the Village Vanguard in New York City, where he'll have performed with his long-time jazz trio with Paul Motian on drums and Joe Lovano on saxophone. Hopefully he'll have time to take a deep breath of the autumn-tinged maritime air in our fair burg before his fall tour launches him to Sao Paulo, Rio De Janeiro, Lisbon, Zurich, Istanbul, Budapest, Zagreb, Rotterdam, London and points in between, all before Thanksgiving.
To say the City of Subdued Excitement is fortunate to host Frisell at the Church House is an understatement. One thing's for certain: he's going to deliver a sermon to remember.
The design of the space and use of natural materials reportedly combine to create a warm, one-of-a-kind reverberation and compression that brings out the best in vocals, acoustic instruments and drums.
Frisell, under these circumstances, seems like a natural fit for the Church House. His penchant for generating ambient abstractions, and the creative ways in which he coaxes a wide range of sonic spectrums from his guitar, leads me to believe he is going the make the whole room sing.
Since Frisell's Valentine's Day 2007 performance with Greg Leisz at the Nightlight Lounge, the Bainbridge Island-based musician has continued with his prodigious output of albums – each one seemingly inventing its own new category of music – his most recent release being the double-CD set History, Mystery. Trying to describe it with a friend the other day, we came up with "americana/soundtrack," "avant-garde jazz" and "postmodern bluegrass chamber music," but we didn't know what it was called when you released a record that contains all of those genres, sometimes in the same song.
Most of History, Mystery was recorded live with a very talented octet including Ron Miles, Jenny Scheinman, Eyvind Kang, Tony Sherr and Kenny Wollesen. Together, they weave across the map of Frisell's many different musical styles. An unusual hybrid of songs that Frisell wrote for various side projects, sometimes they feel like a gesture or a brief thought, maybe a passing mood. Short bridges like the one-minute "Probability Cloud 2" or the 36-second "A Momentary Suspension of Doubt" stitch the larger suite together.
The best model one might look to anticipate what this talented musician might play would be to give a listen to Ghost Town, his 2000 solo release on which he plays acoustic and electric guitars, bass and the 6-string banjo, as well as deftly builds and bends woozy loops of his various instruments. He has a fondness for electronic effects and at performances is often seen twiddling knobs, pressing buttons and tapping foot pedals. Frisell's is the light touch however, and his audial manipulations are typically restrained and subtle, providing depth and mysteries to his compositions.
He'll be playing the Bellingham solo show coming hot off a 5-night stand at the Village Vanguard in New York City, where he'll have performed with his long-time jazz trio with Paul Motian on drums and Joe Lovano on saxophone. Hopefully he'll have time to take a deep breath of the autumn-tinged maritime air in our fair burg before his fall tour launches him to Sao Paulo, Rio De Janeiro, Lisbon, Zurich, Istanbul, Budapest, Zagreb, Rotterdam, London and points in between, all before Thanksgiving.
To say the City of Subdued Excitement is fortunate to host Frisell at the Church House is an understatement. One thing's for certain: he's going to deliver a sermon to remember.
Prince at Coachella
May/05/2008 *
permalinkage
Prince's
desert reign at Coachella
Apr 27, 2008, 07:02 PM | by Chris Willman/Entertainment Weekly
What a difference a day makes. Friday, Coachella had probably the weakest-drawing headliner in its nine-year history, in the form of Jack Johnson. Given the sparse turnout, you started to fear for the future of the festival. Saturday, they had, in Prince, the most potent show-closer the festival has had or likely ever will have. And suddenly, he didn’t look like the only genius around; so, too, did the person who booked him.
Prince and Johnson were both calculated risks, artists with huge fan bases who nonetheless wouldn’t seem to immediately fit in with Coachella’s indie-rock ethos. The big difference: One of them is indisputably one of the great performers of our shared lifetimes, a galvanizing presence with a deep catalog and history of leaving awe in his wake, and arguably even—if you look at the full scope of 20th and 21st century musicianship—the Last of the Great Entertainers. And the other, um, isn’t. (After the jump, get the full scoop on Prince's performance -- and his "no requests" policy.)
Not that there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm right at the front of the stage for Johnson’s climactic performance, where there were a few thousand extremely enthusiastic fans packed tight and, when the overhead screens caught sight of them, cheering wildly; it was just behind them that you saw the kind of wide open spaces that once made the American West so inviting to European immigrants.
Now, it’s altogether likely that these few thousand diehard Johnson fans were people who wouldn’t have otherwise bought a three-day pass to Coachella, given the lack of any other similar band among the 100-plus scheduled acts, so maybe his booking wasn’t a total bust. And you really can’t blame organizers for putting him on the bill…well, you can, given what an utterly lackluster performer he is, but I mean commercially speaking. The guy has sold more albums than anybody this year, and to the extent that he’s seen as kind of a poor man’s Dave Matthews, it’d be easy to assume that Johnson would be the one reliable stadium-filler to come along in rock in the last 20 years. But it’s not clear what Johnson’s ultimate business legacy will be, beyond having given SNL a legitimate reason to keep Andy Samberg employed. He’s an amiable presence who doesn’t deserve a lot of hate, but who's destined to seem underwhelming in anything bigger or less chemically fueled than a smoke-filled 2,500-seat venue. Well, now we all know, right?
Lesson No. 2: If you bill Prince, they will come. But until about 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, even this seemingly self-evident lesson was in doubt. Because up through the late-afternoon set by Death Cab for Cutie, who had the last sunlit mainstage performance of the day, things were still looking a little spooky out there. And after sitting through the okay but ultimately enervating Death Cab set in 100-degree-plus heat (what did anybody ever see in these guys, again? I’m still waiting to have it explained to me), I couldn’t blame anybody who’d bought a three-day pass but decided to just show up around sundown on Saturday.
Once Kraftwerk took the stage at dusk, however, the mainstage crowd instantly swelled to at least three times what it’d been for any other act in the preceding day and a half of music, and any fears that there wouldn’t be a Coachella 2009 immediately subsided. Even Rilo Kiley and Mark Ronson, on the secondary outdoor stage, and Hot Chip and M.I.A. in one of the tents, were suddenly maxing out their limited viewing areas with crowds that looked bigger than the previous mainstage audiences. Portishead, following Kraftwerk, brought still more attendees who sucked in all the angst that Prince would soon wash away. And then, at last, it was time for…the Time!
Yes, Prince’s show
actually began with a “Prince’s protégés”
mini-set, with two songs by the semi-reunited
the Time and one more by Sheila E. Then, with
Sheila still on percussion, Prince launched into
a cover of Santana's instrumental "Soul
Sacrifice." At about this point, attendees may
have been considering the implications of
Prince’s opening remarks, when he promised that
he would get a party underway “under one
condition: that you let me pick the music.” (You
would think that the millions of dollars he’s
rumored to have gotten for the gig would be
condition enough for a party, without any
additional concessions demanded of the
audience.) Other than literally letting the kids
in the front row know that he wouldn’t be taking
requests, did he mean to establish that he’d be
doing one of his jam-oriented shows, light on
the oldies, as opposed to one of his
greatest-hits shows? Because Lord knows, and
fans do too, that you don’t always know which
you’re going to get.
But, happily, this ended up being a pretty crowd-pleasing combination of both kinds of Prince-concert prototypes, with a set list that managed to sate both first-timers and TAFKAP-aholics, if not send them home delirious. After that aforementioned instrumental, Prince launched into “1999” and followed it up with partial or full versions of “I Feel for U,” “Controversy,” “U Got the Look,” “Cream,” the great “Anotherloverholenyohead” (along with “Shhh,” one of only a couple halfway-obscure album tracks), and “Musicology” (the only selection from one of this decade’s Prince albums).
“Little Red Corvette” was a particular highlight, in an extended rendition that had the verses slowed down nearly to an R&B crawl before picking up with the expected tempo for the choruses. Weirdly, he covered Radiohead’s “Creep” but changed the words in ways that weren’t always audible. For much of the song, Prince altered the lyrics to shift them away from the first-person, singing them as “You wish you were special…” instead of “I wish…” And this made a certain amount of sense: Could as renowned an egotist as Prince really sing about feeling insecure or having feelings of self-loathing, right after he interrupted “Cream” to give us an amusingly self-aggrandizing aside about how “I wrote this song while I was looking in the mirror”? But toward the end of “Creep,” he generously changed the pronoun usage again, to make it “we” instead of “you.” Ah, Prince, you shouldn’t have. Then came another extended cover: Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel,” done up as a gospel number, sung entirely by a backup singer that we later learned was Ledisi, the fairly obscure R&B stylist who rose to greater fame when she was nominated for a best new artist Grammy this year. Like the song or not, she killed on it.
Then it was back to Prince—back in canary yellow after a costume change—for a “Seven” that led right into the Beatles’ “Come Together,” followed by the only predictable part of the night: encores of “Purple Rain” and “Let’s Go Crazy.”
One complaint I have at festivals is how little evidence there is among some of the performers that they know they’re at a festival; the bigger the headliner, the more they’re apt to just plow through their usual touring show, without any concessions for the uniqueness of the night. But Prince took advantage of the fact that he was at a “rock festival” to show off his rock & roll guitar prowess at the kind of length I’ve never seen him do before, at least outside of an all-instrumental club set. (The last time I saw Prince, I was standing eight feet away from him at Hollywood’s Hotel Roosevelt as he finished up a jazz-fusion set at about 6 in the morning for the 30 or so of us who remained. This time, there were about 50,000 people between me and him, but I wouldn’t trade either experience.) If the guy had done nothing in his life but aspire to be the lead guitarist in a band, he’d be a Hall of Famer, but there are so many other aspects to his genius that that’s not always the one he favors. But on Saturday night, he didn’t bogart the Stratocaster, interrupting nearly every song—except for the most truncated or medley-ized ones—for an impressive workout, even showing off a couple of times by soloing just with his left hand on the neck while he waved the right around in the air freely, mock-conducting his own virtuosity.
Was it the perfect Prince set? There may be no such thing, since his catalog and capabilities are so vast that diehard fans are likely to come away just a little disappointed by some song or strain he doesn’t get to. If I were to nitpick, I’d say the “Come Together” cover, which sounds ideal on paper, went on a bit too long in its crowd-participatory elements, and was a wan closer for the main part of the set. Also, unlike perhaps 99.9% of the crowd (I'm guessing), I'd rather hear something less rote than “The Best of Purple Rain” for the encore segment.
In the end, though, the only serious drawback was the sound—or lack of it. Just a few hours earlier, we’d marveled at the magnificence of the audio setup during Kraftwerk’s performance, a true showcase of how good the sound can be in this large a setup, and a teaser for how spectacular Roger Waters was likely to sound in his Sunday-night slot. But when Prince came on, the volume seemed diminished by half, and I had to go plant myself right in front of a bank of speakers to feel like I was at a rock show. I doubt that Coachella’s producers meant to deliberately punish us. Prince was scheduled to go on at 10:45, and didn’t actually take the stage till 11:10—which, I can tell you from experience, is awfully punctual by his royal standards. But, supposedly, there’s a midnight curfew for the mainstage. Since some of the acts in the dance tents go on till 2 or 2:30 in the morning, it’s reasonable to surmise that any such curfew has more to do with not tormenting the sleeping residents of Indio rather than following union regulations.
My guess is that, rather than cut the volume at the stroke of 12 and have tens of thousands of people go “What the…,” the festival preemptively turned Prince down from the very beginning. For anyone up close, it ultimately didn’t matter, but the folks who usually watch headlining sets from a distance needed to overcome their claustrophobia and get into the thick of it to have any hope of enjoying the show.
And then it was onto Sunday, and some of us felt just a little ruined, for the moment, for more indie-rock, because it's tough to watch Prince and then see just about anybody else and feel like the musical bar hasn't been set awfully low. But then again, as we said, what a difference a day makes, or the forgetfulness that comes with a night of sleep...
All right, Prince completists. Here’s the full set list (and no, he didn’t perform the dirty new song he’d premiered on Leno just the night before):
The Bird (sung by Morris Day)
Jungle Love (sung by Day)
The Glamorous Life (sung by Sheila E.)
Soul Sacrifice (Santana cover)
1999
I Feel For U
Controversy
Housequake (brief excerpt)
Little Red Corvette
Musicology
Cream
U Got the Look
Shh (from The Gold Experience—yes, I had to look it up)
Anotherloverholenyohead
Creep (Radiohead cover)
Angel (Sarah McLachlan cover, sung by Ledisi)
7
Come Together (Beatles cover)
Purple Rain
Let's Go Crazy
Here's another Prince review from the Wall Street Journal and yet another one from the New York Times.
Apr 27, 2008, 07:02 PM | by Chris Willman/Entertainment Weekly
What a difference a day makes. Friday, Coachella had probably the weakest-drawing headliner in its nine-year history, in the form of Jack Johnson. Given the sparse turnout, you started to fear for the future of the festival. Saturday, they had, in Prince, the most potent show-closer the festival has had or likely ever will have. And suddenly, he didn’t look like the only genius around; so, too, did the person who booked him.
Prince and Johnson were both calculated risks, artists with huge fan bases who nonetheless wouldn’t seem to immediately fit in with Coachella’s indie-rock ethos. The big difference: One of them is indisputably one of the great performers of our shared lifetimes, a galvanizing presence with a deep catalog and history of leaving awe in his wake, and arguably even—if you look at the full scope of 20th and 21st century musicianship—the Last of the Great Entertainers. And the other, um, isn’t. (After the jump, get the full scoop on Prince's performance -- and his "no requests" policy.)
Not that there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm right at the front of the stage for Johnson’s climactic performance, where there were a few thousand extremely enthusiastic fans packed tight and, when the overhead screens caught sight of them, cheering wildly; it was just behind them that you saw the kind of wide open spaces that once made the American West so inviting to European immigrants.
Now, it’s altogether likely that these few thousand diehard Johnson fans were people who wouldn’t have otherwise bought a three-day pass to Coachella, given the lack of any other similar band among the 100-plus scheduled acts, so maybe his booking wasn’t a total bust. And you really can’t blame organizers for putting him on the bill…well, you can, given what an utterly lackluster performer he is, but I mean commercially speaking. The guy has sold more albums than anybody this year, and to the extent that he’s seen as kind of a poor man’s Dave Matthews, it’d be easy to assume that Johnson would be the one reliable stadium-filler to come along in rock in the last 20 years. But it’s not clear what Johnson’s ultimate business legacy will be, beyond having given SNL a legitimate reason to keep Andy Samberg employed. He’s an amiable presence who doesn’t deserve a lot of hate, but who's destined to seem underwhelming in anything bigger or less chemically fueled than a smoke-filled 2,500-seat venue. Well, now we all know, right?
Lesson No. 2: If you bill Prince, they will come. But until about 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, even this seemingly self-evident lesson was in doubt. Because up through the late-afternoon set by Death Cab for Cutie, who had the last sunlit mainstage performance of the day, things were still looking a little spooky out there. And after sitting through the okay but ultimately enervating Death Cab set in 100-degree-plus heat (what did anybody ever see in these guys, again? I’m still waiting to have it explained to me), I couldn’t blame anybody who’d bought a three-day pass but decided to just show up around sundown on Saturday.
Once Kraftwerk took the stage at dusk, however, the mainstage crowd instantly swelled to at least three times what it’d been for any other act in the preceding day and a half of music, and any fears that there wouldn’t be a Coachella 2009 immediately subsided. Even Rilo Kiley and Mark Ronson, on the secondary outdoor stage, and Hot Chip and M.I.A. in one of the tents, were suddenly maxing out their limited viewing areas with crowds that looked bigger than the previous mainstage audiences. Portishead, following Kraftwerk, brought still more attendees who sucked in all the angst that Prince would soon wash away. And then, at last, it was time for…the Time!
Yes, Prince’s show
actually began with a “Prince’s protégés”
mini-set, with two songs by the semi-reunited
the Time and one more by Sheila E. Then, with
Sheila still on percussion, Prince launched into
a cover of Santana's instrumental "Soul
Sacrifice." At about this point, attendees may
have been considering the implications of
Prince’s opening remarks, when he promised that
he would get a party underway “under one
condition: that you let me pick the music.” (You
would think that the millions of dollars he’s
rumored to have gotten for the gig would be
condition enough for a party, without any
additional concessions demanded of the
audience.) Other than literally letting the kids
in the front row know that he wouldn’t be taking
requests, did he mean to establish that he’d be
doing one of his jam-oriented shows, light on
the oldies, as opposed to one of his
greatest-hits shows? Because Lord knows, and
fans do too, that you don’t always know which
you’re going to get.
But, happily, this ended up being a pretty crowd-pleasing combination of both kinds of Prince-concert prototypes, with a set list that managed to sate both first-timers and TAFKAP-aholics, if not send them home delirious. After that aforementioned instrumental, Prince launched into “1999” and followed it up with partial or full versions of “I Feel for U,” “Controversy,” “U Got the Look,” “Cream,” the great “Anotherloverholenyohead” (along with “Shhh,” one of only a couple halfway-obscure album tracks), and “Musicology” (the only selection from one of this decade’s Prince albums).
“Little Red Corvette” was a particular highlight, in an extended rendition that had the verses slowed down nearly to an R&B crawl before picking up with the expected tempo for the choruses. Weirdly, he covered Radiohead’s “Creep” but changed the words in ways that weren’t always audible. For much of the song, Prince altered the lyrics to shift them away from the first-person, singing them as “You wish you were special…” instead of “I wish…” And this made a certain amount of sense: Could as renowned an egotist as Prince really sing about feeling insecure or having feelings of self-loathing, right after he interrupted “Cream” to give us an amusingly self-aggrandizing aside about how “I wrote this song while I was looking in the mirror”? But toward the end of “Creep,” he generously changed the pronoun usage again, to make it “we” instead of “you.” Ah, Prince, you shouldn’t have. Then came another extended cover: Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel,” done up as a gospel number, sung entirely by a backup singer that we later learned was Ledisi, the fairly obscure R&B stylist who rose to greater fame when she was nominated for a best new artist Grammy this year. Like the song or not, she killed on it.
Then it was back to Prince—back in canary yellow after a costume change—for a “Seven” that led right into the Beatles’ “Come Together,” followed by the only predictable part of the night: encores of “Purple Rain” and “Let’s Go Crazy.”
One complaint I have at festivals is how little evidence there is among some of the performers that they know they’re at a festival; the bigger the headliner, the more they’re apt to just plow through their usual touring show, without any concessions for the uniqueness of the night. But Prince took advantage of the fact that he was at a “rock festival” to show off his rock & roll guitar prowess at the kind of length I’ve never seen him do before, at least outside of an all-instrumental club set. (The last time I saw Prince, I was standing eight feet away from him at Hollywood’s Hotel Roosevelt as he finished up a jazz-fusion set at about 6 in the morning for the 30 or so of us who remained. This time, there were about 50,000 people between me and him, but I wouldn’t trade either experience.) If the guy had done nothing in his life but aspire to be the lead guitarist in a band, he’d be a Hall of Famer, but there are so many other aspects to his genius that that’s not always the one he favors. But on Saturday night, he didn’t bogart the Stratocaster, interrupting nearly every song—except for the most truncated or medley-ized ones—for an impressive workout, even showing off a couple of times by soloing just with his left hand on the neck while he waved the right around in the air freely, mock-conducting his own virtuosity.
Was it the perfect Prince set? There may be no such thing, since his catalog and capabilities are so vast that diehard fans are likely to come away just a little disappointed by some song or strain he doesn’t get to. If I were to nitpick, I’d say the “Come Together” cover, which sounds ideal on paper, went on a bit too long in its crowd-participatory elements, and was a wan closer for the main part of the set. Also, unlike perhaps 99.9% of the crowd (I'm guessing), I'd rather hear something less rote than “The Best of Purple Rain” for the encore segment.
In the end, though, the only serious drawback was the sound—or lack of it. Just a few hours earlier, we’d marveled at the magnificence of the audio setup during Kraftwerk’s performance, a true showcase of how good the sound can be in this large a setup, and a teaser for how spectacular Roger Waters was likely to sound in his Sunday-night slot. But when Prince came on, the volume seemed diminished by half, and I had to go plant myself right in front of a bank of speakers to feel like I was at a rock show. I doubt that Coachella’s producers meant to deliberately punish us. Prince was scheduled to go on at 10:45, and didn’t actually take the stage till 11:10—which, I can tell you from experience, is awfully punctual by his royal standards. But, supposedly, there’s a midnight curfew for the mainstage. Since some of the acts in the dance tents go on till 2 or 2:30 in the morning, it’s reasonable to surmise that any such curfew has more to do with not tormenting the sleeping residents of Indio rather than following union regulations.
My guess is that, rather than cut the volume at the stroke of 12 and have tens of thousands of people go “What the…,” the festival preemptively turned Prince down from the very beginning. For anyone up close, it ultimately didn’t matter, but the folks who usually watch headlining sets from a distance needed to overcome their claustrophobia and get into the thick of it to have any hope of enjoying the show.
And then it was onto Sunday, and some of us felt just a little ruined, for the moment, for more indie-rock, because it's tough to watch Prince and then see just about anybody else and feel like the musical bar hasn't been set awfully low. But then again, as we said, what a difference a day makes, or the forgetfulness that comes with a night of sleep...
All right, Prince completists. Here’s the full set list (and no, he didn’t perform the dirty new song he’d premiered on Leno just the night before):
The Bird (sung by Morris Day)
Jungle Love (sung by Day)
The Glamorous Life (sung by Sheila E.)
Soul Sacrifice (Santana cover)
1999
I Feel For U
Controversy
Housequake (brief excerpt)
Little Red Corvette
Musicology
Cream
U Got the Look
Shh (from The Gold Experience—yes, I had to look it up)
Anotherloverholenyohead
Creep (Radiohead cover)
Angel (Sarah McLachlan cover, sung by Ledisi)
7
Come Together (Beatles cover)
Purple Rain
Let's Go Crazy
Here's another Prince review from the Wall Street Journal and yet another one from the New York Times.
"Return of the Rock Lobsters"
Apr/04/2008 *
permalinkage
RETURN
OF THE ROCK LOBSTERS
By Marc Spitz/The New York Times
(Listen to The B-52's live on stage in Montego Bay, Jamaica, circa 1982 and preview their new album "Funplex" over at the Podcast Cafe's Live Archive!)
A harsh wind is blowing around the four members of the B-52s as they view Lower Manhattan from a seventh-floor observation balcony at the New Museum, which rises over a nearby flophouse on a gentrifying stretch of the Bowery. From this height, they can see every newly opened bar, cafe and boutique. “The neighborhood didn’t look anything like this,” said the guitarist Keith Strickland, 54, referring to the late 1970s, when these new wave pioneers from Athens, Ga., first conquered the downtown rock scene. “I walked out this morning and said, ‘Where am I?’ ”
A few minutes earlier, the band, which also includes the vocalists Kate Pierson, 59, Cindy Wilson, 51, and Fred Schneider, 56, had traveled a few short blocks south from the retro-chic Bowery Hotel, which opened on the site of a former gas station last year. Along the way, the four had passed the shuttered storefront of CBGB, the punk club, now defunct, where fans in Fiorucci dresses and vintage sharkskin suits lined up to hear the band’s primal yet lyrically futurist dance-rock. “Oh, CBGBs,” Ms. Wilson said mournfully.
“Kiss it for luck,” Mr. Strickland said to Mr. Schneider.
“I’m not kissing that,” he replied with a mock shudder.
On the eve of “Funplex” (Astralwerks), the band’s first studio release in 16 years, the B-52s are reckoning with a new frontier that barely resembles the one they imagined on optimistic tracks like their 1983 single “Song for a Future Generation.” “We have to jump back into the void we left behind,” Mr. Schneider said. “We’ve gone through three different types of music eras or styles since we put out our last album. People watched MTV. Now everyone’s on the In-ter-net.”
By Marc Spitz/The New York Times
(Listen to The B-52's live on stage in Montego Bay, Jamaica, circa 1982 and preview their new album "Funplex" over at the Podcast Cafe's Live Archive!)
A harsh wind is blowing around the four members of the B-52s as they view Lower Manhattan from a seventh-floor observation balcony at the New Museum, which rises over a nearby flophouse on a gentrifying stretch of the Bowery. From this height, they can see every newly opened bar, cafe and boutique. “The neighborhood didn’t look anything like this,” said the guitarist Keith Strickland, 54, referring to the late 1970s, when these new wave pioneers from Athens, Ga., first conquered the downtown rock scene. “I walked out this morning and said, ‘Where am I?’ ”
A few minutes earlier, the band, which also includes the vocalists Kate Pierson, 59, Cindy Wilson, 51, and Fred Schneider, 56, had traveled a few short blocks south from the retro-chic Bowery Hotel, which opened on the site of a former gas station last year. Along the way, the four had passed the shuttered storefront of CBGB, the punk club, now defunct, where fans in Fiorucci dresses and vintage sharkskin suits lined up to hear the band’s primal yet lyrically futurist dance-rock. “Oh, CBGBs,” Ms. Wilson said mournfully.
“Kiss it for luck,” Mr. Strickland said to Mr. Schneider.
“I’m not kissing that,” he replied with a mock shudder.
On the eve of “Funplex” (Astralwerks), the band’s first studio release in 16 years, the B-52s are reckoning with a new frontier that barely resembles the one they imagined on optimistic tracks like their 1983 single “Song for a Future Generation.” “We have to jump back into the void we left behind,” Mr. Schneider said. “We’ve gone through three different types of music eras or styles since we put out our last album. People watched MTV. Now everyone’s on the In-ter-net.”
New wave’s most unapologetic loons, the B-52s crashed the Billboard chart with their self-titled debut in 1979. On the album cover, the female members wore beehive wigs; Mr. Schneider dressed like an oily used-car salesman, complete with pencil mustache. “It wasn’t like we said, ‘We need an outrageous look,’ ” Ms. Pierson said. “That was what we wore to parties.”
While most rock fans were listening to Billy Joel and REO Speedwagon, the B-52s were harmonizing about giant lobsters, headless space invaders and Jacqueline Onassis. Onstage the band did extinct dances like the mashed potato. Some people got it. Many did not. Occasionally, University of Georgia students pelted the members with garbage. But the B-52s’ unusual mix of the avant-garde (they cite John Cage and Yoko Ono as influences), 1960s fashion (Diana Vreeland is another hero) and party-friendly pop (girl groups, garage rock) eventually struck a nerve, winning fans like John Lennon and a young Kurt Cobain. And every few years they enjoy a high-profile rediscovery. Most recently their first hit, “Rock Lobster,” was the soundtrack for the drunken conception of a baby in the film “Knocked Up.”
By definition, new wavers should never become oldies acts, but the B-52s have been touring clubs and theaters on and off since the late 1990s. While many of their reactivated contemporaries, like the Police, have not recorded new material, the B-52s were growing tired of playing the same songs every night and desired a fresher set list. “I don’t wanna rehash the past,” Ms. Pierson and Mr. Wilson sing on the new “Eyes Wide Open.” “I just want release.” To that end, “Funplex” has a much more modern sheen than its predecessors. The band’s twangy guitar riffs used to be accompanied by cowbell, organ and a steady backbeat. Now songs like “Juliet of the Spirits” have a shimmering electronic feel too. And, Mr. Schneider said, the group moved on to singing “about the year 3000.”
But one thing will never change: When the band embarks on the True Colors tour with Cyndi Lauper and Joan Jett this summer, Ms. Wilson and Ms. Pierson will be wearing their trademark wigs, lest the audience riot. “There are times when I wish we could just be like the Indigo Girls,” Ms. Pierson said with a sigh. “But we’ve got to maintain the hair.”
“I used to think the importance of the band gets lost, or overshadowed, by the hairdos and the outfits,” she added. But now she realizes that “our most important legacy is that people had fun.”
“They come up to us and say, ‘You got us through high school,’ ” she said.
Mr. Strickland befriended Ms. Wilson’s brother, the band’s co-founder and guitarist, Ricky Wilson (who died of AIDS in 1985), at school in Athens in the early 1970s. Ms. Pierson, a New Jersey native, wound up in that liberal college town after vagabonding in the ’60s. Mr. Schneider, also from the Garden State, intended to study forestry at the University of Georgia. According to band lore, the B-52s (named after local slang for their female singers’ signature beehives) formed after sharing a five-strawed Polynesian cocktail at a Chinese restaurant, which led to a jam session at a friend’s house.
The first song they wrote was about killer bees. Their best song was about a beach party gone bloody. By 1977 the band scored a short gig at Max’s Kansas City in New York, where some people in the crowd assumed that the women in the band were drag queens. “We were nervous as hell,” Mr. Schneider said. “Everyone was standing there with their arms folded.”
They were convinced that they’d bombed, but the booker invited them back. By the time “Rock Lobster” was released as an independent single in 1978, the B-52s were drawing the likes of William S. Burroughs, David Bowie and John Cale to their Manhattan shows.
Punk was evolving into the much more marketable and accessible new wave, with bands like the Cars and Talking Heads enjoying hit debuts. A major-label bidding war ensued; the band signed with Warner Brothers and released its debut album, “The B-52’s,” in 1979. The album went gold and the follow-up, “Wild Planet,” cracked the Top 20 in 1980. In 1982 the group even performed the song “Private Idaho” on the CBS soap opera “The Guiding Light.” “That inspired a whole generation of actors,” Mr. Schneider quipped. “Angelina Jolie became an actress after seeing it.”
Their next few albums had only marginal success, which was partly related to the band’s grief over Mr. Wilson’s death at 32. So for “Cosmic Thing,” the group’s sixth album, released in 1989, the band enlisted as co-producer Chic’s Nile Rodgers, who had worked on second-act hits for David Bowie and Duran Duran. “I had them do things on that album that they’d never done before,” said Mr. Rodgers, which included painstaking multiple tracking of Ms. Wilson and Ms. Pierson’s trademark harmonies. “I remember, when I finished, calling the record company and saying, ‘I hope you do the right thing here, ’cause you got a smash on your hands.’ ”
He was right; the record sold four million copies and spawned the B-52s’ best-known hits, “Love Shack” and “Roam.” But the band, whose members still considered themselves outsiders at heart, “wasn’t ready for the bigness of that record,” Mr. Rodgers said. By 1992, when “Good Stuff” was released, the group was floundering.
“We had not had that kind of success before, and everything changed,” Mr. Strickland said. “For me it got too heavy. It just had to stop.”
This decade, during the ’80s revival, young D.J.’s began playing B-52s songs at parties. Geordon Nicol, of the Manhattan D.J. and promotions trio Misshapes, remembers playing “Planet Claire” at a packed party, but to his surprise, “It didn’t go over so well,” he said in an e-mail message. “I couldn’t understand how such an incredible song could go over everyone’s heads like that.” He thinks that there is a certain stigma attached to saying you love the B-52s, at least for those “who think ‘Love Shack’ and ‘Roam’ are all the band has to offer — most people miss out.”
What was supposed to be a brief break from recording lasted well over a decade. In that time, Ms. Wilson formed the Cindy Wilson Band, Mr. Schneider became a satellite radio D.J., and Ms. Pierson opened Kate’s Lazy Meadow, a motel in the Catskills with theme suites like “The Annie Oakley” and “The Sakajawia.” Meanwhile, Mr. Strickland learned how to use Pro Tools recording software. “I was listening to a lot of electronic dance music and early rock ’n’ roll,” Mr. Strickland said, “and it occurred to me that I should put these two sounds together with our own sound. That was the magic formula. Then all these ideas started coming out again.”
The band gathered in Athens and upstate New York to jam and quickly decided that it was time to record again. Mr. Strickland suggested the title “Funplex” after a word he’d seen in a newspaper. For the first time, the band’s lyrics are highly carnal. “I am now an eroticist,” Mr. Schneider sings on “Deviant Ingredient.” “I am a fully eroticized being. I have no neurosis.” On “Ultraviolet” he sings, “There’s the G spot/Pull the car over,” which will surely end up in the museum of groaners some day.
“It surprised me,” Mr. Strickland said of his bandmates’ lyrics. “Little did I know they were going to get all sexy” in their 50s.
But the B-52s have always celebrated music’s power to “make you feel a lot better,” as the early song “Dance This Mess Around” proclaims. Its lyrics list 16 dances, like the “shy tuna,” “the hyp-o-crit,” and the “escalator.” The band traditionally performs them live, but as the members get older they admit that it’s getting harder and harder to get them right.
“We can’t do all 16 anymore” Mr. Strickland confessed during a coffee break in the band’s hotel suite.
“I danced in bad shoes so my knees are a little shot,” Mr. Schneider said.
“We’ve entered the phase in our life,” Mr. Strickland said sarcastically, “where we’re talking about our knees.” There was a moment of quiet group contemplation, followed, as usual, by peals of laughter.
Positive review of "Funplex" over at Pitchfork Media: "This overriding theme of Funplex-- temporarily forgetting your troubles and giving over completely to the pleasures of getting down-- underscores the album's two best moments, "Juliet of the Spirits" and "Eyes Wide Open". "Juliet" is the album's ladies-only electro-jam, Pierson and Wilson's voices pushed into a deleriously high register, and asserting on the wide-eyed chorus "I'm not afraid anymore." "Eyes" moves from a dark, claustrophobic verse to an expansive disco-tinged refrain, triggered by Strickland's crisp, echoed guitar: "I don't wanna clash/ I don't wanna rehash the past/ I just wanna release!"
Erykah Badu's "New Amerykah"
Apr/04/2008 *
permalinkage
MONARCH
Erykah Badu transforms the flotsam and jetsam of hip-hop.
by Sasha Frere-Jones/The New Yorker
On a Monday evening in August of 1996, I went to see the Roots perform at the Knitting Factory, in downtown Manhattan. The band had come from Philadelphia for a three-night stand in support of their “illadelph halflife” album. At one point during the set, I noticed a tall woman with an enormous head wrap standing in the front row of the crowd. Toward the end of the evening, the group’s bassist, Leonard (Hub) Hubbard, gestured for the woman to come onstage. The lead rapper, Tariq (Black Thought) Trotter, announced, “This is a friend of ours from Dallas, Texas. Her name is Erykah Badu.”
Erykah Badu transforms the flotsam and jetsam of hip-hop.
by Sasha Frere-Jones/The New Yorker
On a Monday evening in August of 1996, I went to see the Roots perform at the Knitting Factory, in downtown Manhattan. The band had come from Philadelphia for a three-night stand in support of their “illadelph halflife” album. At one point during the set, I noticed a tall woman with an enormous head wrap standing in the front row of the crowd. Toward the end of the evening, the group’s bassist, Leonard (Hub) Hubbard, gestured for the woman to come onstage. The lead rapper, Tariq (Black Thought) Trotter, announced, “This is a friend of ours from Dallas, Texas. Her name is Erykah Badu.”
“I was
skeptical about her jumping onstage,” the band’s
leader, Ahmir (?uestlove) Thompson, told me by
telephone last week. “We kinda looked at singers as
soft, and we thought that most singers looked down on
hip-hop the same way that actors looked down on
rappers-cum-actors.” Badu was different, though.
“Most singers need to pick the key and tell you how
the song goes,” ?uestlove said. “She didn’t need
anything. She was quick.” Dressed in long, draping
clothes that she had made herself, and wearing what
?uestlove described as “the highest platform shoes
I’d ever seen in my life,” Badu looked like a queen.
She was rail thin, with a wide face and terrifyingly
subtle and balanced facial geometry. Imagine the good
monarch from a desert planet, the one you’d consult
for wisdom just as your universe-saving mission
started falling apart.
That night, she sang a song that suggested a vocal comparison that has dogged her, and other singers, in the past decade, though it wasn’t such a common reference point in 1996: Billie Holiday. Badu has astonishing pitch and a broad range, but her voice is slightly nasal, and she was smearing words together with Holiday’s smiling inflection. The song she chose was “Appletree,” a cutesy number with an anachronistic bent: “And if you don’t want to be down with me, you don’t want to be from my apple tree.” The performance was riveting. “We had a friend from Philadelphia in the audience, who was working on a record with us,” ?uestlove recalled. “After she saw Erykah, she literally packed up and went home. She said, ‘There’s no way I can compete with that.’ ”
Badu has long since dropped the Lady Day inflections. Her just released album, “New Amerykah Part One (4th World War),” is a brilliant resurgence of black avant-garde vocal pop, convincing in its doubts and stable in its unmoored ways. This lineage started, roughly, in the late sixties, with Sly Stone, on the West Coast, and, a bit later, Marvin Gaye, in Detroit; continued through George Clinton’s various iterations of Funkadelic and Parliament; and bled into the work of one of the great soul acts of the nineties, D’Angelo, a friend of Badu’s. In fact, “New Amerykah” sounds a lot like an unintended sequel to D’Angelo’s masterpiece (and his most recent album, now eight years old), “Voodoo.” Like “Voodoo”—and like Miles Davis’s “On the Corner,” as several critics have noted—“New Amerykah” is a relatively short record that feels infinitely relaxed, and favors sound and mood over choruses and verses. It is the work of a restless polymath ignoring the world around her and opting for an idiosyncratic, murky feeling that reflects her impulses. (Badu helped construct many of the backing tracks herself, running GarageBand on a laptop.) The success of that sound has resulted in Badu’s best opening week since her first album, “Baduizm,” was released, eleven years ago: both albums débuted at No. 2 on the Billboard charts.
“Baduizm” was one of the first releases to be tagged “neo-soul,” a genre that has little to do with older soul music but does tend toward slow tempos, a pronounced bass line, hushed instrumental moves, like quiet rim shots (“I want a rim shot, hey, diggy diggy,” goes the first song on “Baduizm”), and the use of an electro-acoustic keyboard, most often a Fender Rhodes. This is what the Roots sounded like in 1996 as well, at least a little. (?uestlove, also a producer, has appeared on all but one of Badu’s four studio recordings.)
“New Amerykah” is a swirling, turbid thing, and while it represents a shift in stylistic emphasis, it isn’t a total departure. From the beginning of her career, Badu pushed against the tendencies of neo-soul, no matter how well her music fit into smooth radio formats. Her first hit, “On & On” (1997), for example, wasn’t about any one subject, though there was a specific basis for some of the lyrics: the Nation of Islam of Gods and Earths, a splinter group formed in Harlem by Clarence 13X Smith after he broke with the Nation of Islam, in 1963. Smith’s philosophy holds that only five per cent of the population possess “knowledge of self,” and that they have an obligation to educate the ignorant eighty-five per cent. (The other ten per cent are enlightened but self-interested and creepy.) Smith was murdered in 1969 (the crime is still unsolved), but his teachings found new popularity with New York rappers in the late eighties and early nineties. When Badu sings, “My cipher keeps moving like a rolling stone,” she’s employing Smith’s usage of “cipher”—a ring of people reciting portions of Smith’s teachings. The word eventually became more common in hip-hop, where it is used to describe a group of rappers arrayed in a circle and reciting rhymes. All this undertow is probably imperceptible to most of the three million people who have bought “Baduizm,” but, when Badu refers to “master teachers” on “New Amerykah,” the ghost of Smith is present.
?uestlove was right about Badu: her records may not feature much rapping, but her music is steeped in the sounds and culture of hip-hop. One of the first tracks to leak from “New Amerykah” was “The Healer,” a song that has little to do with any known genre. It begins with a brief snippet from a song by Malcolm McLaren featuring the World’s Famous Supreme Team, an obscure reference that will be instantly recognizable to hip-hop’s faithful—a sort of secular analogue of Smith’s Five Percent philosophy. “The Healer” was produced by Madlib, an independent hip-hop producer who usually works with rappers; the music flirts with total stasis, though it still has an audible beat. Bells, unidentifiable knocks, a lonesome instrument that might be a sitar, or a guitar, and lots of empty space: this is Badu’s backdrop. She starts by chanting a shout-out to a variety of religions: “Humdililah, Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, Dios, Maat, Jah, Rastafari.” The core of the song, which is sort of a chorus, is a spoken series of assertions about hip-hop: it’s “bigger than religion,” the government, and a variety of other things. Badu also sings a dedication to “Dilla,” a reference to the hip-hop producer James (Jay Dee) Yancey, a beloved figure and collaborator of Madlib’s who died, from complications of lupus and a blood disorder, in 2006, at the age of thirty-two.
But if you listen only once to “The Healer” it is clear that the song itself, like the other songs on “New Amerykah,” isn’t so much hip-hop as it is a reorganization of the historical flotsam and jetsam that were recycled and turned into hip-hop. The album’s opening track, “Amerykahn Promise,” demonstrates how widely the album ranges. Over a seventies funk vamp, Badu mumbles; a chorus of female voices sings “American promise”; and a deep male voice intones, in the manner of a corrections officer speaking over a P.A. system, “Excuse me, young lady, excuse me, you’re causing quite a disturbance over here.” (He later asks for a “brain-tissue sample.”) This seventies production is actually from the seventies; it is the backing track from a 1977 album produced by the vibraphonist Roy Ayers, who gave it to Badu to rework. (She is singing over the original master tape.) What the track most recalls is the opening of a Funkadelic record, like “Maggot Brain,” or the moments when George Clinton would let a variety of characters play out paranoid scenarios, and blend explicit political satire into unhinged, improvisatory funk.
The feeling of paranoia is strong on several tracks. “Twinkle,” a remarkably odd track that Badu co-produced with the engineer Mike Chavarria—he is responsible for many of the album’s deep and strange sounds—starts with a sample of what might be film dialogue, and seems to involve a fight. The music is full of dread and uneasiness. Badu raps, “Children of the matrix be hittin’ them car switches, seen some virgin Virgos hanging out with Venus bitches,” and then uses melodic singing to explain what is going on: “They don’t know their language, they don’t know their God.” The song dissolves into humming keyboards as a male voice rants for a minute and a half: “We know the air is unfit to breathe and the food is unfit to eat. . . . I want you to get angry!” After a minute, you realize that it doesn’t just sound like Peter Finch’s rant from “Network”; it is that rant, but with a new score, something like the Art Ensemble of Chicago locked in a room with Brian Eno. Badu has promised that the second volume of “New Amerykah” will be more emotional, which could be just as good. For the moment—a deeply apolitical moment in R. & B.—we should simply be grateful that a verified pop star has quietly brought politics and noise back into black pop. ♦
There's another good review of Badu's new album over at The New York Times.
That night, she sang a song that suggested a vocal comparison that has dogged her, and other singers, in the past decade, though it wasn’t such a common reference point in 1996: Billie Holiday. Badu has astonishing pitch and a broad range, but her voice is slightly nasal, and she was smearing words together with Holiday’s smiling inflection. The song she chose was “Appletree,” a cutesy number with an anachronistic bent: “And if you don’t want to be down with me, you don’t want to be from my apple tree.” The performance was riveting. “We had a friend from Philadelphia in the audience, who was working on a record with us,” ?uestlove recalled. “After she saw Erykah, she literally packed up and went home. She said, ‘There’s no way I can compete with that.’ ”
Badu has long since dropped the Lady Day inflections. Her just released album, “New Amerykah Part One (4th World War),” is a brilliant resurgence of black avant-garde vocal pop, convincing in its doubts and stable in its unmoored ways. This lineage started, roughly, in the late sixties, with Sly Stone, on the West Coast, and, a bit later, Marvin Gaye, in Detroit; continued through George Clinton’s various iterations of Funkadelic and Parliament; and bled into the work of one of the great soul acts of the nineties, D’Angelo, a friend of Badu’s. In fact, “New Amerykah” sounds a lot like an unintended sequel to D’Angelo’s masterpiece (and his most recent album, now eight years old), “Voodoo.” Like “Voodoo”—and like Miles Davis’s “On the Corner,” as several critics have noted—“New Amerykah” is a relatively short record that feels infinitely relaxed, and favors sound and mood over choruses and verses. It is the work of a restless polymath ignoring the world around her and opting for an idiosyncratic, murky feeling that reflects her impulses. (Badu helped construct many of the backing tracks herself, running GarageBand on a laptop.) The success of that sound has resulted in Badu’s best opening week since her first album, “Baduizm,” was released, eleven years ago: both albums débuted at No. 2 on the Billboard charts.
“Baduizm” was one of the first releases to be tagged “neo-soul,” a genre that has little to do with older soul music but does tend toward slow tempos, a pronounced bass line, hushed instrumental moves, like quiet rim shots (“I want a rim shot, hey, diggy diggy,” goes the first song on “Baduizm”), and the use of an electro-acoustic keyboard, most often a Fender Rhodes. This is what the Roots sounded like in 1996 as well, at least a little. (?uestlove, also a producer, has appeared on all but one of Badu’s four studio recordings.)
“New Amerykah” is a swirling, turbid thing, and while it represents a shift in stylistic emphasis, it isn’t a total departure. From the beginning of her career, Badu pushed against the tendencies of neo-soul, no matter how well her music fit into smooth radio formats. Her first hit, “On & On” (1997), for example, wasn’t about any one subject, though there was a specific basis for some of the lyrics: the Nation of Islam of Gods and Earths, a splinter group formed in Harlem by Clarence 13X Smith after he broke with the Nation of Islam, in 1963. Smith’s philosophy holds that only five per cent of the population possess “knowledge of self,” and that they have an obligation to educate the ignorant eighty-five per cent. (The other ten per cent are enlightened but self-interested and creepy.) Smith was murdered in 1969 (the crime is still unsolved), but his teachings found new popularity with New York rappers in the late eighties and early nineties. When Badu sings, “My cipher keeps moving like a rolling stone,” she’s employing Smith’s usage of “cipher”—a ring of people reciting portions of Smith’s teachings. The word eventually became more common in hip-hop, where it is used to describe a group of rappers arrayed in a circle and reciting rhymes. All this undertow is probably imperceptible to most of the three million people who have bought “Baduizm,” but, when Badu refers to “master teachers” on “New Amerykah,” the ghost of Smith is present.
?uestlove was right about Badu: her records may not feature much rapping, but her music is steeped in the sounds and culture of hip-hop. One of the first tracks to leak from “New Amerykah” was “The Healer,” a song that has little to do with any known genre. It begins with a brief snippet from a song by Malcolm McLaren featuring the World’s Famous Supreme Team, an obscure reference that will be instantly recognizable to hip-hop’s faithful—a sort of secular analogue of Smith’s Five Percent philosophy. “The Healer” was produced by Madlib, an independent hip-hop producer who usually works with rappers; the music flirts with total stasis, though it still has an audible beat. Bells, unidentifiable knocks, a lonesome instrument that might be a sitar, or a guitar, and lots of empty space: this is Badu’s backdrop. She starts by chanting a shout-out to a variety of religions: “Humdililah, Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, Dios, Maat, Jah, Rastafari.” The core of the song, which is sort of a chorus, is a spoken series of assertions about hip-hop: it’s “bigger than religion,” the government, and a variety of other things. Badu also sings a dedication to “Dilla,” a reference to the hip-hop producer James (Jay Dee) Yancey, a beloved figure and collaborator of Madlib’s who died, from complications of lupus and a blood disorder, in 2006, at the age of thirty-two.
But if you listen only once to “The Healer” it is clear that the song itself, like the other songs on “New Amerykah,” isn’t so much hip-hop as it is a reorganization of the historical flotsam and jetsam that were recycled and turned into hip-hop. The album’s opening track, “Amerykahn Promise,” demonstrates how widely the album ranges. Over a seventies funk vamp, Badu mumbles; a chorus of female voices sings “American promise”; and a deep male voice intones, in the manner of a corrections officer speaking over a P.A. system, “Excuse me, young lady, excuse me, you’re causing quite a disturbance over here.” (He later asks for a “brain-tissue sample.”) This seventies production is actually from the seventies; it is the backing track from a 1977 album produced by the vibraphonist Roy Ayers, who gave it to Badu to rework. (She is singing over the original master tape.) What the track most recalls is the opening of a Funkadelic record, like “Maggot Brain,” or the moments when George Clinton would let a variety of characters play out paranoid scenarios, and blend explicit political satire into unhinged, improvisatory funk.
The feeling of paranoia is strong on several tracks. “Twinkle,” a remarkably odd track that Badu co-produced with the engineer Mike Chavarria—he is responsible for many of the album’s deep and strange sounds—starts with a sample of what might be film dialogue, and seems to involve a fight. The music is full of dread and uneasiness. Badu raps, “Children of the matrix be hittin’ them car switches, seen some virgin Virgos hanging out with Venus bitches,” and then uses melodic singing to explain what is going on: “They don’t know their language, they don’t know their God.” The song dissolves into humming keyboards as a male voice rants for a minute and a half: “We know the air is unfit to breathe and the food is unfit to eat. . . . I want you to get angry!” After a minute, you realize that it doesn’t just sound like Peter Finch’s rant from “Network”; it is that rant, but with a new score, something like the Art Ensemble of Chicago locked in a room with Brian Eno. Badu has promised that the second volume of “New Amerykah” will be more emotional, which could be just as good. For the moment—a deeply apolitical moment in R. & B.—we should simply be grateful that a verified pop star has quietly brought politics and noise back into black pop. ♦
There's another good review of Badu's new album over at The New York Times.
Dubstep revealed
Jan/01/2008 *
permalinkage
Evolving
and Mutating, Dubstep Splits Cells and Gives Life to
Dance Floors
By KELEFA SANNEH
You could tell this wasn’t a normal dance party because the music kept doing something strange: stopping. The record would spin backward, the dancers would cheer, the D.J. would pause, and then the song would start again, from the top. This crowd-teasing technique — the rewind — has long been a major element of reggae concerts and parties. And as a few hundred dancers were reminded on Friday night, it also lives on in the reggae-influenced electronic genre known as dubstep, which has sprouted around London over the last few years.
By KELEFA SANNEH
You could tell this wasn’t a normal dance party because the music kept doing something strange: stopping. The record would spin backward, the dancers would cheer, the D.J. would pause, and then the song would start again, from the top. This crowd-teasing technique — the rewind — has long been a major element of reggae concerts and parties. And as a few hundred dancers were reminded on Friday night, it also lives on in the reggae-influenced electronic genre known as dubstep, which has sprouted around London over the last few years.
The location
was Love, a subterranean nightclub in Greenwich
Village. The party was Dub War, a monthly
get-together for the obsessed and the curious. And
Friday’s headliner was D1, a dubstep producer and
D.J. from Fulham, in West London; the gig was billed
as his American debut.
On paper the labyrinth of British dance genres and microgenres can seem hopelessly complicated. But at Love D1 emphasized the basics, and he got a big cheer every time he dropped one of the monstrous bass lines that dubstep is known for. Although “bass line” scarcely seems like the right term: the timbres are scrambled and the tones are obliterated; instead of a melodic groove, you get a huge, serrated blob.
Dubstep is one more aftershock of an explosion that happened in the early 1990s, when British producers drew from electronic dance music and dance-hall reggae to create a furiously syncopated genre called jungle — and, later, drum and bass. Since then the sound has been mutating, spinning off new genres as producers and D.J.s change their priorities: hot declaration versus cool abstraction; voices versus beats; fits and starts versus nonstop dancing.
Earlier this decade grime emerged, with dirty bass lines and sparse beats that left plenty of room for rappers. Dubstep is nimbler and lighter, with skittering beats that hint at 1990s-era syncopation without sounding busy. One dubstep producer, Burial, has converted some American listeners with an excellent pair of murky, melancholy albums that seem designed for bedroom (or iPod) listening.
By contrast, the party on Friday showed off the genre’s gregarious side, thanks partly to those frequent rewinds. The party’s hosts were a pair of D.J.s, Joe Nice and Dave Q, and an M.C., Juakali, who stayed in the booth during D1’s set, providing public-service announcements (“Bass line!”) and hospitable encouragement (“D1!”).
D1 specializes in moody, bittersweet tracks that sometimes emphasize dubstep’s debt to house music. Last year he released “Trial Run” (Tempa), a six-track EP that included “Mind and Soul,” which already feels like a dubstep classic. It’s based on pitched-up snippets of “Give It Back,” by the Atlanta-based R&B singer Gaelle, with brisk drums that keep switching in and out of half-time. (Like many dubstep tracks, this one makes it difficult to say which is the true tempo.)
“Mind and Soul” is light and sublime and (thanks to those sped-up vocals) girly, but on Friday night, D1 mainly stuck to heavier, tougher tracks, which seemed to please the crowd. Often the warped bass lines pulled the tracks toward hard techno, even as Juakali’s patter underscored the link to dancehall reggae. And by the end of the set, the term dubstep was starting to seem too big, or too vague. This is cellular music, and it grows by dividing. How long will dubstep stay whole?
For DJ Edubious' Dubstep Sampler, click here.
Article originally published in the New York Times, January 2008.
On paper the labyrinth of British dance genres and microgenres can seem hopelessly complicated. But at Love D1 emphasized the basics, and he got a big cheer every time he dropped one of the monstrous bass lines that dubstep is known for. Although “bass line” scarcely seems like the right term: the timbres are scrambled and the tones are obliterated; instead of a melodic groove, you get a huge, serrated blob.
Dubstep is one more aftershock of an explosion that happened in the early 1990s, when British producers drew from electronic dance music and dance-hall reggae to create a furiously syncopated genre called jungle — and, later, drum and bass. Since then the sound has been mutating, spinning off new genres as producers and D.J.s change their priorities: hot declaration versus cool abstraction; voices versus beats; fits and starts versus nonstop dancing.
Earlier this decade grime emerged, with dirty bass lines and sparse beats that left plenty of room for rappers. Dubstep is nimbler and lighter, with skittering beats that hint at 1990s-era syncopation without sounding busy. One dubstep producer, Burial, has converted some American listeners with an excellent pair of murky, melancholy albums that seem designed for bedroom (or iPod) listening.
By contrast, the party on Friday showed off the genre’s gregarious side, thanks partly to those frequent rewinds. The party’s hosts were a pair of D.J.s, Joe Nice and Dave Q, and an M.C., Juakali, who stayed in the booth during D1’s set, providing public-service announcements (“Bass line!”) and hospitable encouragement (“D1!”).
D1 specializes in moody, bittersweet tracks that sometimes emphasize dubstep’s debt to house music. Last year he released “Trial Run” (Tempa), a six-track EP that included “Mind and Soul,” which already feels like a dubstep classic. It’s based on pitched-up snippets of “Give It Back,” by the Atlanta-based R&B singer Gaelle, with brisk drums that keep switching in and out of half-time. (Like many dubstep tracks, this one makes it difficult to say which is the true tempo.)
“Mind and Soul” is light and sublime and (thanks to those sped-up vocals) girly, but on Friday night, D1 mainly stuck to heavier, tougher tracks, which seemed to please the crowd. Often the warped bass lines pulled the tracks toward hard techno, even as Juakali’s patter underscored the link to dancehall reggae. And by the end of the set, the term dubstep was starting to seem too big, or too vague. This is cellular music, and it grows by dividing. How long will dubstep stay whole?
For DJ Edubious' Dubstep Sampler, click here.
Article originally published in the New York Times, January 2008.