Can't Get It Out of My Head

Shuffle Off #2: Mellow out, dude

2008-04-02T02:08:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I was feeling a wee bit stressed out for various reasons, and thought it might be nice to fill the car CD player with relaxing music. It was also kinda cold, as I recall, so I went for sounds from warm climes. Here's the rundown:

1. Various artists, Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Masters: Instrumental Collection. Picked this up in a giveaway bin at a past job around the time it came out in 1995; I tend to pull it out every few years and give it a spin or two, think to myself how pleasant it is, then put it back. Certainly does the trick in terms of calming jangled nerves, although in larger doses it's a bit too slack for my taste, so I actually took this out of the rotation first. I attribute the slight Muzak-y tendency to the fact that the label, Dancing Cat, is a subsidiary of Windham Hill. The only names I recognize on the lineup are Keola Beamer and Sonny Chillingworth, although I admit that I know next to nothing about the genre.

2. Kaouding Cissoko, Kora Revolution. Another freebie, and another disc that I play once or twice every few years. (Confession time: what first caught my eye was the cover art, and, believe it or not, the typography. 'Cuz I'm weird like that.) Interestingly, I tend to think of this as an instrumental album, but it turns out there are vocals all over it (the lyrics of which are translated and contextualized in the detailed CD booklet). That's a testament to the power of the kora playing here, which is incredibly lovely even if I don't get the "revolution" part. Cissoko has appeared on albums by Baba Maal and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and if you like those guys, odds are good you'll enjoy this.

3. Various artists, Putumayo presents Cape Verde. I'm going to assume that if you know any musician from this series of islands off the coast of Senegal, it's Cesaria Evora. (If you don't know her stuff, better get busy.) Evora has one track here, but there are eleven other performers as well, and just about all of them sound fine in my book. Putumayo compilations can be hit-or-miss, but this seems pretty solid, steering clear of the label's Easy Listening for Sipping Espresso and/or Shopping tendency.

4. João Gilberto, João voz e violão. A really strong (if too-brief) collection of songs, most of which Gilberto has recorded elsewhere. The twist here, which I'll attribute to producer/protege Caetano Veloso, is that the sound is totally stripped down--nothing but JG's super-quiet voice and unaugmented guitar. Of the three or four Gilberto albums I've heard, this is an excellent starting point. Unlike discs 1-3 above and #5 below, I play this one fairly often; in fact, it took up residency near the bedroom CD player for about two or three years as a quiet-time staple.

5. Caetano Veloso, Orfeu. Speaking of Caetano, here he is in soundtrack-composer mode, creating new music for a remake of Black Orpheus, alongside covers of songs from the original. Some of this is orchestral instrumentals, some features vocals, and the range of tempos and textures is all over the map. I wouldn't recommend this as an introduction to Veloso, but it has many interesting moments. (Bonus: handsome booklet, with lyrics in both Portuguese and English plus stills from the movie that make me want to see it someday soon.)

6. Voodoo Child/Moby, The End of Everything. Sure, people give Moby a hard time for his ambient/instrumental projects (hell, some people give him a hard time just for being Moby), but I happen to like this a great deal: it's fairly low-key, with some majestic moments now and then, the whole of it bearing real emotional weight. I had this on as background as a party once and at least two people bought copies the next day. My only beef: what's the point of having a pseudonym if you're going to announce who you are on the album cover? So much for the anonymity of electronic music. (This being a Moby album, there is one of his characteristic mini-essay rants in the booklet, though it's mighty short and can be summed up in its final line: "Animals are not ours to eat, wear, or experiment on.")

Shuffle Off #1: Synthetic sounds redux

2008-02-01T02:06:00.001-05:00

I have no shortage of ideas for recurring features for this blog; my only problem is making the time to make them happen. So I'm gonna strike while the iron is hot and launch one mere hours after it occurred to me. Inspired very indirectly by this popular garden-blog ritual/meme and by the way some people include what they're "Currently Listening To" in forums and blog posts, I thought it would be fun to share with you what's in heavy rotation on my car's 6-disc CD changer every now and then.

Ever since we got this car with such a ludicrous amount of audio options (there is also a plug for an iPod), I've been having fun curating various combinations of albums: an all-Paul Simon set, all-Van-the-Man, all-Janis, all-Radiohead ... and then some looser ideas, like a mishmash of indie-rock and earlier Americana (Matt Pond, My Morning Jacket, Music from Big Pink, etc.) and later a tribute to psychedelia (Hendrix, Big Brother & the Holding Co., etc.). Then I hit "shuffle" and let the fun begin.

At the moment, I'm on an electronic music kick (I hate the term "electronica"--much prefer "synthetic," since that's the general feel of the stuff) for the first time in years, prompted in part by listening to that Burial album all sorts of unlikely people seem to love (me, I'm finding it kind of repetitive and annoying) and an Autechre EP I'd been looking for for years and finally found used in a Toronto record store. So I decided to pull out a semi-random colleccion of stuff I acquired about 10 years ago (can it be? yikes!) when I discovered that instrumental electronic music was ideal accompaniment for writing, proofreading, driving to work, and all sorts of other mundane activities.

So here's what's in the car as of the beginning of February 2008:

1. Autechre, Gantz Graf. This duo is still probably tied with Aphex Twin as my all-time favorite purveyors of unlistenable noise. And I mean that as a high compliment; they have a brilliant (and frequently quite witty) way of balancing rhythm and chaos, although this particular EP dates from the height of their mostly-chaos period. I find myself fast-forwarding through the 3 tracks when one of them pops up--only to discover that it sounds almost exactly the same in fast-forward as it does at regular speed! (Value added: the flip side of the disc contains a trio of nice videos. But I'm not really sure this was worth the $13 Canadian I shelled out, since it's basically a glorified single.)

2. Kosheen, Resist. Bought this used shortly after it came out in 2001 on the strength of the single, "Hide U," and the freaky Natural History Museum cover art. I was fairly disappointed with most of the other 15 tracks and put it aside for years, but now it's turning out to be the standout of the current shuffle mix. I don't normally care for vocals in drum-and-bass-y stuff--to me the deathknell of the synthetic non-revolution of the late 90s was the widespread addition of singers and/or samples of singers--but I gotta say, Kosheen's Sian Evans has a fine voice, and the lyrics are a bit less silly/disposable than most in the genre.

3. Land of the Loops, Bundle of Joy. If you ask me, this is one of the great lost albums of the 1990s, ripe for rediscovery 20 years from now. One-man-band Alan Sutherland put together a wonderful collection of catchy melodies, weird sound bites, lovely ballads, and brief snippets that sound less like filler than like connective tissue. Secret weapons: guest vocalists Heather Lewis, Simone Ashby, and Meadie Ballenger. So, yeah, maybe I'm not as anti-singers-in-synthetic-music as I think I am. But only when they sound this good.

4. Howie B., Turn the Dark Off. Mr. B was the go-to guy for U2 and other rockers who wanted to dip their toes in synthetic music for a while there. Witness the spoken-word cameos by Robbie Robertson here, sounding nothing like his Band incarnation and a lot like a cross between Laurie Anderson and David Byrne.

5. Freaky Chakra vs. Single Cell Orchestra. I either paid a buck for this or got it for free, and I've always enjoyed it, although a friend of mine heard two minutes of it once and said it gave her a headache.

6. Aphrodite, Aphrodite. Another free or buck find, and a good illustration of what I was just saying about how annoying I find vocalists in this kind of music. Oh, no, wait: the only thing more annoying than singers in drum-and-bass? Rappers in drum-and-bass. That was the death knell.

I just wasn't made for these times

2007-12-27T00:45:00.000-05:00

My, my, this is an eclectic group of party animals, is it not?

When I first saw a (different, much more stiffly posed) photo on the cover of the TV supplement in this past Sunday's Buffalo News, I thought "who is that stone-faced man standing alongside Francis Ford Coppola, Diana Ross, Martin Scorsese, and Steve Martin?" Then I realized the bearded, bespectacled man was not FFC (he is really pianist-conductor Leon Fleisher, duh) and the stone-faced guy was none other than Brian Wilson. This motley crew was to be honored during the 30th annual "Kennedy Center Honors," so naturally I made a point of watching the broadcast tonight.

For the record, I think Scorsese's brilliant in small-to-medium doses, never really found Martin all that funny, never heard of Fleisher until now, and am one of the few homosexual men of my generation who finds La Ross tremendously overrated. She has her moments, from "Someday We'll Be Together" to her recent career in crime, but she's never really done that much for me as a pop diva, a camp icon, or anything else. I mainly tuned in for Brian. (Here's his official site's page on the event, with plenty of links.)

I'm really, really tempted to trot out that overused William Carlos Williams chestnut about the pure products of America going crazy, because this was one surreal assemblage of talent: the five honorees sitting next to each other and Lord and Lady Bush, Diana blowing kisses every few minutes, Scorsese looking slightly embarrassed, and Brian mostly off in that safe place he goes to when things get scary (which is to say 95% of every day since January 1, 1964). The announcer for the show was Carl Kasell, direct from NPR and my favorite game show. Apparently public radio does not pay its most highly regarded voice that well, because here he was picking up a little extra cash shilling for CBS, reduced throughout the evening to saying things like "The Kennedy Center Honors ... sponsored by: the Bristol-Meyers-Squibb-Sanofi Pharmaceuticals partnership."

Art Garfunkel did the intro to the Wilson segment, and people laughed when the first words out of his mouth were "I love rock and roll," thinking he was being sarcastic--when, as we know, Garfunkel does not do sarcasm. This was followed by a film bio which managed to compress most of the key plot points into 3-4 minutes, paying as little attention to the other Beach Boys as possible. I couldn't help wondering how Brian felt hearing this tidy, relatively perky trip through the most painful events of his life: abusive father, clueless record label, career-crushing depression, yadda yadda yadda. Hey, guys--you left out the brother who died of cancer, the one who drowned, the decades of lawsuits with the cousin, and the cult-leader psychiatrist. What gives?!

But no matter, for it was on to the musical performances, each more surreal than the last:
1. Lyle Lovett performing a truly touching slowed-down version of "In My Room" (the surreal note here was that I had just seen him parody exactly this sort of gala tribute near the end of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story to hilarious effect).
2. Hootie and the Blowfish, all dressed in matching blue Pendleton shirts, doing a cover-band medley of "I Get Around" and "California Girls" that inspired Brian to bounce around a bit in his seat, a move that Diana picked up on and began to exaggerate in her groove-y diva way, which in turn made Brian nervous again. Several elegantly dressed women in the audience leapt to their feet to dance, until, in that time-honored ritual repeated at every dive bar and suburban wedding across this great land since the early 1960s, their male companions grudgingly joined them. Soon the President and First Lady joined in, and for one brief and shining moment, a room full of wealthy, mostly white people was united in arhythmic hopping and bopping, clapping merrily against the beat. Even Leon Fleisher, whom we had just learned 20 minutes earlier has lost the use of his right hand--a tragedy that ended his career as a pianist and nearly destroyed him--was clapping away, visibly wishing he was somewhere else. A Christmas miracle!

This would all have been quite enough, but no:
3. "Ladies and gentlemen, Libera," says Carl Kasell, and out walk 9 boys in white choir robes (very Polyphonic Spree--and boy, wouldn't they have been a cool choice?). The littlest, cutest boy says in his best Oliver Twist voice, "Mr. Wilson, we were born a long, long way from your 'California beaches,' but the sunlight of your music can be felt every day on our streets in South London." Brian looks taken aback by this news flash, then smiles, and the boys sing a churchy choral version of his late-period solo non-hit "Love and Mercy," a wonderful song whose anti-war message surely sails directly over the head of our Commander in Chief (whose fave BB hit is BOUND to be "Kokomo," you just know it). The 9 moppets are joined by approximately 75 more boys; this new batch has clearly hit puberty so they have to stand farther back. All these underage kids chanting somberly about "standing in a bar" is a jarring image, but also lovely in its way. Brian closes his eyes; he and his wife Melinda look like they're going to cry, Diana dabs her eye, and it is quite powerful--until the kids reach the climax of the song, and--can it be? no, it can't! yes, it can!--dozens and dozens of beach balls fall from the ceiling onto the heads of the audience, who begin batting them around as if they are on spring break. Yee-ha!

Kasell takes us to another commercial break, then out comes host Caroline Kennedy, fresh from her recent notoriety as the inspiration of Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline," to wish us all a good night. (This is a total digression, but does it strike no one else as slightly creepy and restraining-order-y that she was 13 years old when he wrote that song?)

Writers' strike or no writers' strike, TV does not get much better than this, folks.

Eldorado

2007-12-15T02:32:00.000-05:00

I wish I could provide as detailed a review of Carlos Diegos's 1984 film Quilombo as this one or this one, but the simple truth is, I kinda napped through long stretches of it as I watched it tonight. I was more awake during the willfully eccentric making-of featurette (which looks like something Godard might make if he was hired to shoot promos for HBO) that I watched first; it not only encapsulates the plot (17th century slaves escape their Portuguese owners and create utopian societies in the wilds of Brazil, eventually leading to armed guerrilla warfare) but spells out the mythology behind various scenes that might otherwise be baffling to those of us not versed in Candomblé. You also get to see Gilberto Gil at work on the soundtrack, which is cool.

That soundtrack appears to be the most controversial aspect of the film in the eyes of many folks who've written about it on IMDB. One such reviewer describes Gil's music as "cheesy pop rhythms best left to the disco or bad cops [sic] dramas." A defender, on the other hand, draws a parallel to the intentionally anachronistic classic rock anthems in A Knight's Tale. Me, I liked it; I'm pretty sure I've got the title song on some compilation or other, and all the music is both catchy and evocative of a certain tone. I also appreciated the chance to learn more about Zumbi, leader of the rebellion, who gets name-checked by all sorts of Brazilian musicians. (I could be way off base with this analogy, but I feel like an outsider to US culture who keeps hearing about this guy "Malcolm X" in all these rap and soul songs, then rents Spike Lee's movie of the same name to find out what the hell they're all talking about.)

Great costumes, nice touches of what my friend Ed Cardoni calls "blatant artifice," intriguingly low-key (and thus quite effective) battle scenes. I drifted a lot, and apparently slept through all the key moments in which various orishas manifest themselves that looked so cool in the featurette, but I didn't feel the urge to rewind and watch them.

Welcome to the rat race

2007-12-04T00:04:00.000-05:00

Those of you who have been following this blog since its inception--all three of you--may be wondering what happened to the Brazilian music content, which was one of its original themes.

The short answer is, as predicted in my very first entry here way back in June 2004, the initial obsession waned. I still love the music and culture of Brazil and I still intend to write about it here when it strikes my fancy, but I'm not seeking out new albums and artists quite as compulsively, not doing as much research into it as I once did, not throwing myself into the endeavor with as much passion at the moment.

And yet: when I learn about something like this--

--a conceptual art project by Finnish-born, German-based Kristofer Paetau, in which five transsexual models in Rio wear "fake Chanel fashion accessories made out of taxidermised rats: a rat-bra, a rat-slip, a rat-handbag, a rat-handkerchief, and a pair of high heel rat-shoes"--well, attention must be paid. (I have Warren Ellis's always-provocative blog to thank for learning about the piece.)

Bringing it all back home

2007-12-01T22:45:00.000-05:00

In my ongoing effort to revitalize this long-neglected blog, I've been slowly but surely restoring the ginormous links list I had built up before Blogger 2.0 came along and wiped the whole slate clean. At the rate I'm going, it's going to take me months to finish. But in the meantime, while updating the list, I've come across some interesting stuff, like:

1. Loronix, a mindboggling blog (mindbloggling?) archiving over 1500--that's FIFTEEN HUNDRED--hard-to-find-in-Brazil/impossible-to-find-in-the-States albums, ranging from obscure stuff you might seriously want to hear (Ivan Lins, Elizeth Cardoso, Gal Costa, and what appears to be some of Joao Gilberto's long-out-of-print early recordings) to obscure stuff like this--

--an album the Loronix-master describes as "instrumental rock renditions of Brazilian and international well-known Christmas songs. Very dancing and tiny session with only 26 minutes running time. Do not wait for Christmas time, you will have a lot of fun with Feliz Natal, they make me laugh out loud with the arrangements created for these tunes." Needless to say, I downloaded it immediately.

2. Loronix also led me to Bossa Brasileira, a blog devoted to detailed mini-essays (in Portuguese) about vast multitudes of Brazilian musicians, many from the pre- and early-bossa nova eras. While I can't read the text, I can still groove on the gorgeous album art and vintage photos, and the wealth of ultra-obscure video footage, including this chestnut, in which Perry Goddam Como sings an English translation/easy listening version of “Manhã de Carnaval” from "The Black Orpheus" [sic] with its composer, Luiz Bonfa, on guitar.

Extra-musical highlights:
Como's best line, "Louie, I don't speak Brazilian, but ..." (followed by an incredibly condescending attempt at ESL)
and Bonfa's scripted comeback, "Your English is worse than mine."

3. Speaking of awesome album art, I've started a new section of links devoted to cool sites like LP Cover Lover, where you can find oodles of images like this:

to cite an example which manages to combine my obsession with Brazilian music, my admiration of graphic design, and my fondness for wetsuits as fetish apparel. It's win-win-win! Note: the albums on the site are by no means all from Brazil, which explains why it is also able to offer us another seasonally appropriate LP:

If Christmas looked anything like this at my home, I think I'd move, pronto.

4. Still speaking of albums and art but not necessarily album art, the website of The Wire tipped me off to the cleverly named Graphic Design on the Radio (not to be confused with a certain buzz band I enjoy in small doses). Here you will find audio interviews with Neville Brody and several other designers whose names are not as familiar to me, in which they face the challenge of discussing entirely visual work via streaming audio, punctuated by bits of their favorite rekkerds. I haven't actually listened to any of these yet,but if I waited to do that I would never ever post anything here, ever ever.

Ring my bell

2007-11-28T01:10:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, normally I write here about music I'm obsessed with, and this subject absolutely does not qualify, but I'm gonna post it anyway. Given my recent track record as a blogger, you should be grateful that I'm writing anything.

Very interesting NPR story tonight on the popularity of rapper T-Pain as an, ahem, "ringtone artist." (Whoops, I've just opened the door to everyone googling "T-Pain+ringtones." Welcome, one and all--you will not find what you are looking for here, I assure you, but feel free to stick around and discuss Autechre, the Beach Boys, and bossa nova with us.) There is a related story here.

What I found most interesting about the piece was the analogy to Bing Crosby, who became a hit on early recordings because his crooning sounded good on Victrolas. The theory is that Mr. Pain's voice (as the Times surely calls him) has the same effect on the tiny speakers of cell phones. It's probably the only time Der Bingle and T-P have been mentioned in the same sentence.

As for the specific quality of his voice that's causing all the attention, it's the product of a vocoder, we are told--as if he's the first guy who ever sang through one of those devices. So much for Joe Walsh, Peter Frampton, Madonna, Cher ... Anybody wanna try "Rocky Mountain Way" on a phone?

Me, I'm sticking with my simple little flutelike sound, short and sweet and reminds me of H. R. Pufnstuf. No strippers involved.

The Year in Music: 2007 edition

2007-11-22T02:33:00.000-05:00

Moving right along.

ALBUM OF THE YEAR: I was tempted to give this to In Rainbows, just because, but instead there shall be a tie. One winner is incredibly unhip and the mere mention of his name will cost me valuable credibility points among the cognoscenti, but those will be regained by the revelation of the other winner. Just watch:

Paul Simon, Surprise.

As a soft rock lover from my youth, I was a huge Simon & Garfunkel fan, and followed both their solo careers longer than most right-thinking people did, but they both lost me sometime in the early 1980s. Graceland, which is the one Paul Simon album it's probably cool to like, did nothing for me, and the ones after that left me cold, too. Until this year, when 60something Paul joined forces with 60something Brian Eno. The end result is just kind of great, if you ask me: beautiful production, moving and funny lyrics, catchy melodies. I listened to it over and over again when I first got it early in 2007, and think I will do so again, very soon.

Jens Lekman, Night Falls Over Kortedala.

Much of what I just said about Surprise's strengths applies to this album, too, only its creator is almost 40 years younger. I'm a bit conflicted about giving this Album of the Year status because I've only been listening to it for the last 3 weeks or so, but it's so incredibly good that I'm gonna go with my gut. The guy does sound a great deal like Stephen Merritt, Jonathan Richman, and my main man Don Lennon, but he's also some kind of wild production genius--no album by any of those fine individuals sounds anywhere near this sonically complicated. I'd love to hear all the stuff he samples in its original form, because I don't recognize any of it, and because I suspect that he has transformed it all so thoroughly as to be unrecognizable. It's also hard to tell what comes from somewhere/someone else and what he generated himself, with or without other musicians. His voice (like Simon's, actually) is a bit limited, but he does a great job writing for it. It may take some getting used to. I suspect this is one of those love-it-or-hate-it affairs. Chalk me up as a lover. "Shirin" is easily the most beautiful song ever written about an Iraqi hairdresser operating an illegal salon in her apartment.

Runners-up:
The Flight of the Conchords, Songs from the First Season (or whatever it's called)
Matt Pond, PA, Last Light

CONCERT OF THE YEAR: Lucinda Williams at Artpark (Lewiston, NY). At first I was drawing a blank; this was not a stellar year for live shows, at least not those that I managed to catch. But then I remembered what a magical evening this was: great set list, cool new songs, best of the 3 times I've seen her since the mid-80s. Duet with opener Charlie Louvin was icing on the cake.

Runners-up: Before I remembered Lucinda, I was thinking of giving this one to 3 shows I saw in about 2 weeks, 2 by Ani DiFranco and 1 by Andrew Bird, all at Ani's new venue, Babeville, which immediately made my list as Best Concert Venue in Buffalo. But I felt kind of weird about that since I have had a work connection (tenuous in Bird's case) to both artists and it felt like nepotism or something similar. But hell, they were all great shows.

ARTIST OF THE YEAR: Think I'm going with a tie here. The new car in our household has a 6-CD player, and I've been enjoying cooking up retrospectives and supersets and such, and the best one by far thus far consisted of six recordings by, you guessed it, Mr. Paul Simon. It's not just the new album (see above); I also got several CD reissues of his earlier works that came out a few years ago, each with 2-3 bonus tracks (usually demo versions of key songs, sometimes with very different lyrics or arrangements) that really do hold up. The second best superset came from Radiohead, and while I don't think they've singlehandedly sparked a revolution or anything, that was a pretty damn cool stunt they pulled with their latest album, and the album itself is even cooler.

Runners-up: See "Album of the Year" runners-up.

SONG OF THE YEAR: Amy Winehouse, "Rehab". I know, I know, she is currently on the fast track to becoming the new Lindsay Lohan, better known for actual stints in rehab than for her art, but that is still one damn catchy song. Sort of reminds me of Ray Charles releasing songs like "Busted" when he was busted and "Let's Go Get Stoned" when that was something he tended to do quite a bit. I'm not super-crazy about the entire album, but as singles go, that one is a doozy.

Runner-up: Because this blog is called "Can't Get It Out of My Head," attention must be paid to the many times that Feist's "1-2-3-4" got stuck in my brain, thanks in part to that ubiquitous Apple/iTunes commercial and thanks in larger part to the song itself. I'd give the video "Video of the Year" if I had such a category, which I don't, because videos don't exist anymore, as we all know. The whole Feist album is terrific, btw.

That's all, folks. See you in November 2008!

The Year in Music: 2006 edition

2007-11-22T02:13:00.000-05:00

You will have noticed by now that I am neither very prolific nor very prompt when it comes to this whole blogging business. Take, for instance, the Ehmke(e) Awards, an annual ritual of mine for the last, god, at least 15 Thanksgivings. (This 2004 entry tells you all you need to know about the basic concept.) I never quite got around to announcing the 2006 winners, and now it's already time to reveal the class of 2007. I made some notes a year ago about who won what, and I even had pictures to accompany some of them, but now I don't know where the notes are and I don't want to take the time to find the photos, a process which would only remind me about a whole bunch of other posts I never posted here during my various extended absences.

So in the interest of moving on to 2007, I'm giving you the 2006 winners off the top of my head. Maybe I'll remember the missing ones later, or find those damn JPEGs, but if I were you I wouldn't hold my breath.

SONG OF THE YEAR: Believe me, this shocks me way more than it's going to shock you, but the award went to ...
Justin Timberlake (and, really, Timbaland) for "SexyBack". As proof that I made the right choice, I can still stand to listen to this thing a year later, now that it is a staple on the wedding-reception circuit. Thanks to the lo-fi vocal mix and the deliberately abrasive effects throughout, I'm pretty sure it's one of the weirdest-sounding songs to be a smash hit in a long time (although a lot of hiphop has been sounding pretty weird for a while now). Neko Case was runner-up for "Margaret vs. Pauline," which was stuck in my head for a long time, along with a lot of other lovely stuff from the Fox Confessor album.

CONCERT OF THE YEAR: This was very easy to pick. Pet Shop Boys at Hummingbird Centre, Toronto. I'd never seen them live, and it was one of the most brilliant shows/performance pieces I've ever seen, starting with the multiple faux PSBoys who began the show, then that incredible stage (an enormous and enormously malleable light cube), those dayglo outfits, the wonderful backup singers/dancers, and the set list. I'd catch them again in a heartbeat--and I have a feeling that, while the songs would be pretty much the same, the staging would be quite different.

Here's a video from a different stop on the same "Sodom and Gomorrah Show" tour, promoting a new concert DVD I just learned about. It looks fairly representative, in a super-condensed form, of what unfolded onstage in Toronto:

ALBUM OF THE YEAR: Uh oh, I don't remember. Maybe I'll find the notes and add this later.

ARTIST OF THE YEAR: Drawing another blank.

This is what I get for waiting 365 days to post. But fear not: the gap between 2006 and 2007 will be much shorter. Behold!

Merry go, merry go, merry-go-round

2007-10-13T00:54:00.000-04:00

Just watched Derailroaded, a 2005 documentary about Larry "Wild Man" Fischer. I'd never heard of the movie until the Sundance Channel aired it a few months ago, though I was vaguely familiar with Fischer, mainly from his association with Frank Zappa (a musician I have never really seen the appeal of, no matter how much I feel I should) back in the late 1960s. As the film reveals, they had a pretty major falling out the night Larry threw a bottle that landed very near the head of young Moon Unit Zappa, which almost ended the life of the future "Valley Girl" singer.

All the movers and shakers of the "outsider music" scene make appearances, with the curatorial/sane perspective provided by Irwin Chusid, Dr. Demento, Barnes & Barnes (I had completely forgotten that my childhood surrogate Billy Mumy was half of the "Fish Heads" duo), Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, and Weird Al Yankovic, while there are also brief glimpses of Daniel Johnston and Wesley Willis. (No word from the Legendary Stardust Cowboy.)

There's no way to resist comparing the film and its subject to The Devil and Daniel Johnston, which I wrote about here. Both depict men suffering with mental illness and obsessed with pop music who are embraced--some would say exploited--by "real" hipster musicians who help them release albums and send them on a bumpy road to cult stardom before their charm wears off and they become extremely difficult to deal with. Both men veer from moments of club-circuit notoriety to periods of near-total breakdown. You're never quite sure whether to laugh at or cry over what you see onscreen (well, sometimes it's easy to know), and you're forced to think about the huge gulf between observing these eccentric people from afar and actually having them in your life, calling you several times through the night every day for seven weeks until you have to change your phone number. There's even a Brian Wilson-inspired moment in each film; in Derailroaded, it's Fischer's awkward, moving cover of "In My Room," a song whose dark subtext he clearly understands. By coincidence--or one of Larry's wild conspiracies--both films came out in 2005, so it's hard to say one is ripping off the other. They're more like variations on the same theme.

I feel uncomfortable ranking them, but I must say that Devil strikes me as the stronger film, just as there seems to be more depth to Johnston's music and visual art than Fischer's. (On the other hand, the latter's "Merry-go-round" song is pretty damn catchy.) Both are worth your time, if you're interested in issues of creativity and mental illness, or in the music industry's ability to make a spectacle out of pretty much anything, no matter how tempting it might be to look away.

The Rainbow Connection

2007-10-11T23:30:00.000-04:00

Try to forget, whydoncha, that it has been a mere 10 months since my last post here. Believe it or not, I've been trying all spring and summer to find some appropriate occasion to relaunch this blog, reasoning that once I start this thing up again, it will be that much easier to return to it, and while there have been plenty of possibilities--concerts, album purchases, holidays, going-out-of-business sales, and so on--none of them have managed to stick. So I'm choosing The Day After the Release of the Latest Radiohead Album. Sure, a lesser blogger might adopt something as pedestrian as the actual release date, and plenty of 'em did, but you expect more from me by now, and I accept the challenge. Now that everyone else has moved on to something else, I am here to weigh in on this whole crazy phenomenon:

1. First and foremost, I really like the album, based on two and three-quarters listens. I like it a lot.
2. I would be excited about a new Radiohead album even if it were just coming out as a plain old CD in the plain old way. When Hail to the Thief came out, I was right there at my favorite store at midnight, a 45-year-old in a sea of 20somethings.
3. Even so, this whole pay-what-you-want approach is just pretty damn brilliant. I love the questions it raises about art and commerce, for starters. A performance group I am part of strives to provoke similar discussions when we charge "your hourly wage" for our shows--but then we are reaching about 30 people a night, not several million. This is one case where the bigger the canvas, the more interesting the artwork.
4. A friend of mine who is not a Radiohead fan but does know a thing or two about the music industry views the pay-what-you-want experiment as purely a marketing gimmick that has nothing to do with art. I beg to differ: it may well be a publicity stunt (and an effective one at that), but it also works as a conceptual art piece, and is wholly of a piece with the band's M.O., not only in terms of business (I am reminded of the time they toured with their own big-top tent as a portable venue rather than deal with traditional arenas), but also the thematic content of their music (lotsa lyrics about the fate of the individual in a soulless corporatized environment; recurring juxtaposition of samples and electronic beats/noises with Thom Yorke's achingly human voice).
5. Another friend and I found it amusing that neither of us knew the titles of any of the songs yet, so we had to say things like, "I like track 4 a lot" and "Yeah, tracks 1 and 2 are so bombastic that track 3 really comes as a change of pace."
6. Lots of folks who don't really follow music have been hearing about this album via tech podcasts, business publications, news stories, and the like. I've been wondering what the hell they're going to make of such weird noise when they seek it out.
7. To all those netnerds who downloaded the album for free, then bitched about the low bitrate: this is how you say thanks when somebody gives you a present?
8. Then there's the snarkier-than-thou attitude that sneers at the whole idea of everybody listening to the album and then posting "insta-reviews" to their blogs, but I kinda like that part. As a guy with zero interest in Harry Potter, I've been missing out on the chance to experience the same pop culture artifact at the exact same time as everybody else. (I've always been intrigued by stories about the day that Sgt. Pepper came out and was played on a whole bunch of radio stations around the world in its entirety.) And I'm digging the notion that everybody--professional critics, self-appointed critics, megafans, casual listeners--was on a level playing field on Day One.
9. Fun bonus feature: Check out this handy track-by-track collection of videos documenting concert performances of the new songs.
10. Did I mention I like the album a lot?

OK, now that I've broken my silence, I'll do my best to get back into the virtual swing of things. Plenty to say, in due time, about what I've been up to when I haven't been up to blogging here, what I'm listening to, and all that jazz. For now, digging that album.

Radio radio

2007-01-06T12:49:00.000-05:00

I've been a huge fan of Pandora for close to two years now; actually my obession with it tends to wax and wane, but it's always there when I want it. If you've never checked it out yourself, give it a try--practically guaranteed to change your music-listening life--and if you're already hooked, you might want to investigate this list of 15 ways to get more out of Pandora. (Mac alert: many of these are PC-only, but the comments section of the post contains plenty of Mac-friendly variations.)

I found this item from LifeHacker, a long-established site I just recently discovered. I thik of it as a kind of "Hints from Heloise" for the tech generation. Today, for instance, there's a tip on wrapping headphones so they don't get tangled (although many commenters seem to prefer this method). Here's a quick link to LifeHacker's music-related tips.

Back to Pandora for a sec: as a soft-rock afficonado, one of my favorite stations out of 14 I've created is a salute to quiet pop mostly from the mid60s through the mid70s, but with a few more recent choices (since Pandora is built not around chronology or genre but the actual sound of a song). It's anchored to two bands: the Association and the Free Design. I call it ...

... Free Association.

While the Association and I go way back to my childhood (when my older sister somehow convinced me that "Windy" was about an owl), the Free Design (those current hipster darlings who emerged from Western New York in the late 60s) is much newer to me, and the station is a great way of working through their fairly large discography one song at a time.

In addition to the two namesake groups, this one plays songs by artists I already knew I liked (Badfinger, Wings, Andy Kim, Art Garfunkel and his sometime pal Paul, the Zombies, the Carpenters, Spanky & Our Gang, Todd Rundgren, Jim Croce, the Beach Boys, America, Steely Dan, and even the Velvet Undergound and Brian Eno) plus some I know but kinda cringe about (the New Christy Minstrels, Pure Prairie League, Showaddywaddy, the Anita Kerr Singers). But the real thrill is the growing list of acts I've never heard of till now. Some are solo performers old and new (Bob Dileo, Richard Swift, Pat Shannon, Sandy Salisbury, Jf Robitaille, Samantha Juste, Stan Rogers) and some are recent bands I've heard a teensy bit about (Ollabelle, Maritime). And then there's a steady stream of groups whose very names evoke a long-gone era I can't get enough of(Friends, Jon & Robin, Owl & the Pussycat, the Ivy League, Titus Groan, the Millenium, the Roosters, the Brokedown, Lady & Bird, Scene, Fancey, the Castaways, Gandalf). It's like a trip down somebody else's memory lane, and I dig it, man.

Another year over, and a new one just begun

2007-01-01T23:59:00.000-05:00

1. If the blog as a whole looks kinda naked right now (depending on when you're seeing this), that's because I decided tonight was the night to do something I've been putting off for months, namely switching to the new version of Blogger, which apparently entails, among other things, losing certain features you've spent years developing (like my list of a hundred or so music-related links) and spending hours creating new ones (like tags for all posts past and future).

2. Speaking of losing your work, it's kind of a late Christmas miracle that I'm not screaming and hurling objects through the air at this very minute, because I just spent the last, oh, 2 hours composing a lengthy post divulging the winners of the 2006 Ehmke(e) Awards--another task I've put off for the last month--only to have my browser crash before I could save a draft, thus wiping out the whole thing. I guess I'm either in a state of shock or too tired to care at the moment.

Perhaps this was an omen, and the world is truly not meant to know what some guy in Tonawanda, NY thought was the Song of the Year.

Oh well. It'll have to wait for another night now. instead, I'll wish you all a happy new year, and try to forget the staggering waste of time I've just experienced on the last night before a truly overpacked January kicks into high gear. (Oh, sure, I could resolve to turn over a new leaf and post here on a regular basis, but we both know me better than that by now, don't we?)

"James Brown is Dead"

2006-12-27T23:43:00.000-05:00

I"m sure every aging raver in the land did a double take when they heard that phrase for real on Christmas Day. I know I did, and I'm only good for the "aging" part of that particular job description.

Confession: I am actually writing this entry on New Year's Day, a full week after the sad news, and backdating it so it appears that I was a little more on the ball. But no matter when I finally got around to eulogizing the great man, I never could have composed anything as eloquent as the following blog posts:

*At the B Side, this very personal history of Brown's career, and
*this first-person account of the scene around the Apollo Theater this past weekend (both of which include, for the time being, MP3s of JB B-sides).
*The Fresh Air tribute to Brown, including interviews with the Godfather himself, the co-author of his autobiography, Maceo Parker, and Bootsy Collins.

I could swear there were more online tributes I've come across that I wanted to link to, but I'm having trouble remembering what and where they were now. That's what I get for not posting sooner.

Meanwhile, my personal tribute has taken the form of listening not so much to the classic funk stuff (or even to his wild Christmas album, which I kept meaning to pull out this past week, as I usually do every year), but to the 2-disc Roots of a Revolution compilation of earlier stuff. The party line on this material is that he hasn't quite found his unique voice yet, but I have no complaints whatsoever listening to him try and find it through r&b, countryish stuff, novelty songs, you name it. The track that stood out for me on this go-round was a silly/slang-y one called "That Dood It" that is pure fun. Not funk, just fun--and that's enough for me.

Happy Xmas (War is Over)

2006-12-24T23:00:00.000-05:00

Ho, ho, ho, everybody. I am still immersed in way too many projects to count, which cumulatively cut down on my blogging time, but here's a holiday entry to note a few seasonal matters before the season itself melts away like Frosty:

1. From the pages of Entertainment Weekly, here's an interesting chronicle of the song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". I've always been struck by the melancholy tone of this ditty, which is significantly more pronounced in its debut appearance in the film Meet Me in St. Louis. The article points out that the earliest version of the lyrics were even more of a downer (opening line: "Have yourself a merry little Christmas / It may be your last ...") until Judy Garland insisted that lyricist Hugh Martin lighten it up a little. Then Frank Sinatra had to come along and make the thing all happy happy joy joy.

2. For the last few years I've had a great time checking the MP3 blogs listed in that column over there on the right for holiday songs. Didn't get around to it this year till last night, but I found all kinds of stuff at Copy, Right? and Keep the Coffee Coming, plus a trippy extended "X-Mas Mix 2006" at Lemon-Red. Catch them all before they evaporate.

3. Finally, I have Beaucoup Kevin to thank for tipping me off to this sublime (and slightly melancholy) Pet Shop Boys appearance on some sort of Elton John holiday special from the year 2000:

Merry [holiday of choice], one and all!

Ain't it funny how time slips away

2006-11-25T00:07:00.000-05:00

Can it really be two and a half months since my last, essentially placeholding entry here? Dear lord! It's a miracle I haven't been removed from Jen's list of Buffalo bloggers, since a note at the top of that really helpful resource insists that "If you don't update at least once a month, then you're off the list."

(Speaking of Buffalo blogs, here's a new one I am happy to recommend: BolognaSnowflake, which is the work of my onetime student/oft-time collaborator/now longtime friend Katie Young. Check it out--it is the Essence of Katie, in handy online form!)

Do not for a moment believe that I have abandoned this here blog, gentle reader. Far from it--I continue taking pictures and making mental, sometimes physical, notes for entries I plan to write. It's only that I am so fucking busy every goddam day lately that there is no time left in the day to keep up with this thing as often as I would like. (Coming soon: my picks for the 2006 Ehmke[e] Awards, announced every year at Thanksgiving. But not tonight.)

Thought I'd try something different tonight and actually write something here while it's fresh in my mind. (Turns out there are things about music that I can quite easily get out of my head, after all...) I have been listening to a CD I just got in the mail today, DJ Ze Pedro's The Brazilian Remixes. It's a good points/bad points compilation of dance-y versions of songs by the likes of Clara Nunes, Elis Regina, Milton Nascimento, Joyce, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso, Marcos Valle, etc.--in other words, some pretty heavy hitters. Some work (Adriana Calcanhotto's "Jogo Linguistico" is a trippy revelation), others don't (the world simply did not need a gay bar-friendly remake of Caetano's "Eclipse Oculto"), but the whole project is inoffensive, even mildly interesting throughout, and well worth the six bucks I paid for it.

Anyway, in my search for reviews or any other writing about the album or the DJ, I came up nearly empty handed except for this item, from a blog that was brand new to me: Made in Brazil: Contemporary Brazilian Music. (Not to be confused with this "Made in Brazil" blog, which consists largely of beefcake shots of hot Brazilian guys who have forgotten to wear shirts.)

From MIB I learned that ...
*Caetano has a new album out! (It appears to be available only in Brazil at the moment, judging from the price Amazon wants for it.)
*The New York Times ran an interesting story on Lenine back in August! ("American audiences might place his music midway between that of Ani DiFranco and that of Rage Against the Machine"--a weird but interesting comparison since he shares a publicist with Ani and she performed with him in Brazil a few years back)
*These podcasts (in Portuguese, but heavy on the music) are supposedly a really nice intro to recent Brazilian instrumental music!
*Brit DJ Gilles Peterson also has some free podcasts available that I bet are going to sound really great!

All things to check out in the near future. When life is calmer, and I do nothing but check out new music and share it with you nice folks.

The Invisible Man

2006-08-14T19:17:00.000-04:00

Contrary to all appearances, I still exist and will return to the blogosphere with a vengeance any day now. Well, not for at least another week, but then: watch out, world!

If you are inexplicably hungry for posts by yours truly, check the last few weeks of www.infringebuffalo.blogspot.com, thw blog pf the just-ended 2006 Buffalo Infringement Festival. This is the behemoth that (among other, slightly smaller behemoths) has consumed much of my life lately.

See you again, soon--promise!

London calling

2006-06-30T00:43:00.000-04:00

Mea culpa.

Mere days after gently mocking the notion that Brazilian singer Cibelle could be lumped in with the "freak folk" movement, I actually listened to her new album, The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves, and I'll be damned if it doesn't kinda fit in after all. It's also pretty gosh-darned great, all around. I was skeptical because her self-titled debut album struck me as perfectly enjoyable but fairly innocuous School-of-Bebel dance-pop. The new one represents a giant step forward--much weirder, more idiosyncratic, and a lot catchier, if you ask me. (Sort of like the evolution from Bjork's days with the Sugarcubes and her first big solo album to the ones that followed.) The production, by Apollo Nove, is full of cool/quirky little touches that tickle your ears and play with your head, although beneath its occasional psychedelic flourishes, it's still a generally mellow affair. Special guests include Seu Jorge and Spleen, and there's a nice Tom Waits cover--in fact, roughly half the songs are in English, if you care about such things.

Given my generally lukewarm response to that earlier disc, I probably wouldn't have gotten around to this one so quickly if it weren't for this brief "Global Hit" spot on The World, focusing on Cibelle's cover of Caetano's "London London." First you hear his original, written during his enforced exile in that city in the early 70s, then her remake, a duet with freakfolk godfather Devendra Banhart celebrating her own time in the same town four decades later. The highly informative interview between the two versions is well worth a listen, despite a slightly confusing moment where it sounds like Cibelle is being put forth as a spokesperson for tropicalia, a movement that surely peaked before her birth. (When she says ""We're all just absorbing each other and playing together and experimenting, and it's all so nice," I have a feeling she's referring to the international scene in 2006, not Brazil in 1966, as the host implies.)

The album is available here to eMusic subscribers, and you can also find it via iTunes. The label, Crammed Discs/Ziriguiboom, is the place to check for several RealAudio samples and a charming video of "London London" as well as one for her cover of Nirvana's "About a Girl," available on an EP. (Watching the "London" video, I would in no way be surprised if Mr. Banhart starts popping up in indie features soon; he's a natural.)

Freaks come out at night

2006-06-20T23:46:00.000-04:00

The freakiest thing about this NYTimes story about the freak folk scene (that I discovered through this Boing Boing item) is its overall premise that this ultramarginal movement is So Two Years Ago and yet is now entering a second wave. I find this freaky because it seems safe to assume that 99% of America has never heard of Devendra Banhart or Joanna Newsom, and here's the nation's newspaper of record performing the twin tasks of
1. telling mainstream readers about those two, and also
2. hinting that they are now old hat, and there's a whole bunch of new superobscure folks to pay attention to instead. (Remind me again: when did the Times become N.M.E.?)

The story has a strong element of instant nostalgia--specifically, nostalgia for a music from 2004 that is itself grounded in a nostalgia for a completely mythologized version of the late 1960s based on records nobody listened to the first time around. Freeeeeaky! I learned a whole lot from the story, including these freaky fun facts:

1. Devendra briefly dated Lindsay Lohan!
2. Vashti Bunyan's lovely, delicate 1969 ballad "Just Another Diamond Day" is now in a T-Mobile ad--making her this year's Nick Drake, only she's still alive!
3. Both Cibelle and Juana Molina can be considered freak folkies (?)! Cibelle even theorizes it's an outgrowth of tropicália! ("It's not about genre, this new state of mind. Even if musicians don't know tropicália by that name, they are still making music that way, by intuition, without rules, following their own uniqueness.")
4. Sellout/backlash alert! "Virtually every major indie-rock label has embraced the style..." (Freak folk, meet emo. Emo, this is freak folk. I'm sure you two have a lot to talk about....)
4. Neil Young digs it, while old punk rockers don't!

As an old punk rocker and Neil Young-digger myself, I am of two minds about this phenomenon. Some of the (admittedly little) FF-identified music I've heard sounds like crap you could have heard at any open mike in a bar over the last 30 years or so and would never have paid a second's attention to without the name "freak folk" slapped on it. Let's just say songcraft is not always a high priority--self-editing, even less so. And, come on, neohippies have been with us since right around the time the original hippies got their first fulltime jobs. (The Times dubs 2006 "Summer of Love 2.0," which I guess means I must have hallucinated all those previous Second Summers of Love, like the one I read about in the mid80s, and then the one at the height of the rave era.)

On the other hand, I am really enjoying some of the stuff I've listened to, like 5-6 songs out of the 20 or so on each Devendra B. album I've heard so far. (God, I am coming across truly snide here, aren't I? I'm sorry, it's just my longstanding neohippiephobia. Though I must remind myself that, as someone in the article points out, true neohippies--the annoying ones--listen to Phish, not this stuff.) And I want to hear more. And a lot of the musicians quoted in the story have smart stuff to say. Oh, and don't miss the really nice slideshow featuring narration by the article's author, Will Hermes, images of several of the artists, and audio clips.

I recognized several of the up-and-comers Hermes mentions (Espers and Vetiver, for instance) from their appearances at Soundlab here in Buffalo over the last couple of years, and I've missed all of them, dammit.

Saturday Night at the Movies (again)

2006-06-18T02:25:00.000-04:00

1. Just watched the movie Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, in which musician Jim White drives around the deep south looking for Guess Who. This entails trips to church services, bars, a prison, several service stations, and lots of swamps. Every several minutes there is a deliberately awkwardly staged musical interlude by someone like Johnny Dowd, the Handsome Family, or David Johansen. The fact that these folks hail from Ithaca, Chicago, and New York City, respectively, is never brought up. White does mention that he is originally from LA and doesn't feel entirely comfortable identifying as a southerner, but that doesn't seem to stop him from pontificating at length on the nature of religion and class below the Mason-Dixon line.

Pardon my skepticism, but the first hour or so is set in my home state of Louisiana, a place I'd like to think I know a thing or two about--although, I must now point out, I have not lived there for the last quarter century, which is one impediment to my own desire to address a camera from the wheel of a moving car spouting wisdom about the area.

This is a very frustrating movie, to put it mildly. The subject matter is fascinating, particularly in this era of supersimplified Red State/Blue State dichotomies (oddly, though, electoral politics is barely mentioned), and I was excited to see and hear all the musicians I named above, including White, and a bunch of locals I didn't know. Plus the film looks pretty. But it's just so damn contrived and condescending, and far too much of the dialogue feels scripted, and the end result feels like a bunch of big-city yankee hipsters slumming in the Exotic South for the amusement of others of their kind. (Hey, it caught my eye.)

2. It is possible that I found the movie even more annoying than I normally would have because I had just finished watching Celebration at Big Sur, a 1971 documentary about one of the many rock festivals that followed in the wake of Woodstock, and as flawed as it is, I still found it extremely moving on many levels. It's dated, in the best possible ways: truly a document of its time, from the headlining acts (Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, CSNY, John Sebastian) to the trippy camera work and editing. There are some really intriguing juxtapositions, like the point when a CSNY number ends, then Steven Stills gets into a near fistfight with a clearly stoned and obnoxious heckler, then there's a cut to someone saying the single word "money," then Stills in a calmer mood explains how wearing a fur coat onstage doesn't make one out of touch with The People.

The most striking thing about the movie when you watch it 35 years after the fact is the way it documents an event that could and would never happen today: the bands play on the grounds of the Esalen Institute, and the only thing separating the performers onstage from the crowd is ... a swimming pool. The acts hang out in the crowd watching the show when they're not playing, and almost everybody seems to sit in on each other's numbers. You really get the feeling a lot of them are making it up as they go. The whole affair feels more like a big party than a concert or festival. Needless to say, there are no corporate sponsors.

Gospel singer Dorothy Morrison and her group get several numbers; at one point Baez leads them on a mini-parade through the crowd. Seeing Morrison's music so prominently featured--and seeing the film end with everyone onstage singing a trancelike version of "Oh Happy Day"--it struck me that nothing like that would likely happen today, either.

She's my shoo-shoo

2006-06-16T02:18:00.000-04:00

Strangely enough, it was this post at my new favorite Beach Boys news source that alerted me to this interview with Sérgio Dias of Os Mutantes on the website of Light in the Attic Records. (They've got the first 8 Mutantes albums at around $14 apiece! As well as a whole bunch o' Free Design CDs for $10 each!)

The bottom of the OM Q&A page lists several tropicalia-related links, which is how I discovered the many Mutantes videos (mostly TV appearances) available via YouTube right now. Here's the grooviest of the 4 I've watched so far:

Remember, there's plenty more where that came from.

And doesn't this upcoming documentary look like a must-see?

Reeeeeeemix

2006-06-04T01:01:00.000-04:00

The information overload must come to an end!

Until it does, though, I guess I'll just keep sharing the steady stream of incoming data that comes my way--like this podcast mix of baile funk (with a little M.I.A., postpunk, and Os Mutantes thrown in for good measure) courtesy of "Atari" at the blog Reasoner, and this earlier one of other favela faves.

I'm getting a little nervous that this stuff is going to go the way of lo-fi, riot grrrl, drum 'n' bass, IDM, mash-ups, and other grassroots movements of the last 10 years or so: small underground subculture attracts attention of slightly larger hipster crowd, flirts with mainstream recognition/appropriation (which offends the hipsters but never quite blossoms into largescale popularity), provides the soundtrack for a car commercial or two, flames out in a couple of years. But maybe that's not such a bad thing after all, just a condition of life in an oversaturated consumer culture. Here today, gone tomorrow. The high points of the movement become historical artifacts, the rest are forgotten--only to be resurrected for the inevitable revival by a whole new crop of scenesters 10 or 15 years later.

Just can't get enough

2006-06-01T02:00:00.000-04:00

Between podcasts, DVDs by mail, and our pseudo-TiVo setup--on top of the usual range of books, magazines, CDs, and movies--I've been suffering from some major level Information Overload lately.

So I don't know whether to weep or scream upon the discovery of 23 cover versions of "God Only Knows" at an MP3 blog called My Old Kentucky Blog. Haven't heard most of these yet, but the artists involved include some old and new faves: Bowie, Elvis Costello, Petra Haden, Joss Stone, etc. Plus the very nice Mandy Moore/Michael Stipe version from the wonderful movie Saved!--which, by coincidence, I just happened to re-hear earlier in the day on this Coverville podcast.)

There's something to be said for experiencing so many variations on the same thing--part jazz experimention, part conceptual art project. I cherish the cassette a friend made me containing at least 10-12 (often wildly different) takes on "Sweet Jane," even if I can't exactly play it for anyone else without driving him or her out of the room.

Once I've had my fill of Beach Boys tributes, perhaps I will move on to MOKB's oh-so-obsessive collections of 17 "Girl from the North Country" versions (happy belated b-day, Bobby D) and a jaw-dropping 33 covers of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

Life truly is too short, is it not?

Hit that perfect beat #3: The beat of the (rest of the) world

2006-05-25T23:20:00.000-04:00

As promised, here's another installment in my list of audio clips from the "Global Hit" portion of the PRI/BBC program The World. All of these are acts or subjects I'm interested in; some segments I've heard and some I haven't. Remember, there's a lot more where these came from. Happy listening!

Animal Collective + Vashti Bunyan
"Babalu" (history of the song--pretty interesting)
Back-masking in world music
Cape Verde musicians
Cibo Matto
The Clash's London Calling anniversary reissue
Dr. John
Feist
Gilles Peterson's BBC sessions
Gogol Bordello
Juana Molina (#1)
Juana Molina (#2)
Mercedes Sosa
Mulatu Astatqe (from the Ethiopiques series)
Rapa Iti (Tahitian mass choral chanting)
State of Bengal vs Paban Das Baul
Sublime Frequencies record label
Talvin Singh
Tango (a history)
Toronto's underground music scene (as a resident of a U.S. border town, it's fun to see Canadian rock treated as "world music")
Trans-Global Underground

The one on the right is on the Left

2006-05-25T00:05:00.000-04:00

1. From Uncanny, a user-friendly guide to late-breaking Beach Boys news and gossip, word that the National Review has ranked "Wouldn't It Be Nice" as the Fifth Most Conservative rock song of all time. I'm especially interested in the designation of the songs as "most conservative" rather than "the best songs advocating a conservative ideology," if in fact that's what they do, (Not to ruin the suspense, but the Stones are at #3 with "Sympathy for the Devil," a choice that would probably come as a shock to any time-travelling right-wingers from the late sixties.) The full list won't be available for a few more days, but I've got my fingers crossed for Paul Anka and "Havin' My Baby" for the top honors.

2. All of which reminds me that I forgot to post a link to this Bush/Cheney parody set to the tune of the Boys' "Barbara Ann" when my friend first told me about it a few weeks ago. I had a whole lot to say about the video when I watched it, but I've lost the urge to vent for the time being.

What's weird about item #1 is blatantly obvious. (Again, I'm supressing the strong desire to go on about this for several thousand words. Feel free to do so yourself if you like; that's what the internet is for, right?) What's weird about item #2 is that it brings back unhappy memories of the last time I heard "Barbara Ann" become "Bomb Iran," way back during the hostage crisis that gave the world Ted Koppel--only back then it was being used by folks who thought the reworked title phrase was a good idea. In other words, it only had one layer of ironic distance, not two.

And I have to say, I can't really stomach either version. Not because they desecrate a timeless classic; I've always found that song fairly annoying, even more so now that I realize its early and key role in transforming the band from musical innovators into an oldies act. (People do tend to forget that the Beach Boys' rendition was itself a self-conscious/jokey/ironic cover version of an older song that already sounded quaintly dated when they recorded it.) No, the problem is just that the parodies are both so damn obvious, no matter what the agenda behind them and no matter how many levels of irony they invite.