ODYSHAPE

It might blow up, but it won't go pop.

[odyshapemusic]

Announcing: 2014 EW Pazz & Jop

Hey everyone. Nicky here. Finishing up my last term of grad school. Enjoying a beer now that I've finished one of three papers, listening to the new Iceage album because I hate my life, and writing this post to remind you that Odyshape.com is hosting this year's Expert Witness Pazz & Jop poll. 

The rules and procedures are enumerated below: 

1. Submit your ten favorite albums from 2014. Albums that debuted late-2013, like Beyoncé's self-titled debut, will be considered for qualification. Albums you personally discovered in 2014, like Sgt. Peppers or Philosophy of the World, will not. 

2. Rank these albums from 1-10, from best to slightly less best. 

3. Divide 100 quality points among those ten albums. No album can garner more than 30 points, and no album is worth less than 5 points. You are permitted to assign negative point values only in the unlikely event that the FKA Twigs album appears on your list. 

4. Submit your ten favorite songs from 2014. Like albums, songs that debuted in late-2013 qualify. Songs new to you, like Kissed By A Rose, do not. 

5. Do order these songs from 1-10, or from best to slightly less best. 

6. Do not assign point values to these songs. We don't care. 

7. Do include glib commentary, like quotes and summaries, along with your ballots. The funniest, most insightful, most ridiculous - these I will highlight in the concluding post. 

8. Submit ballots to [email protected] beginning December 26, 2014, or Boxing Day for you Canadians and miscellaneous foreigners we allow to hang around (looking at you, Brad and Graham). 

9. Polling closes New Year's Eve, right around the time the ball drops. 

10. Disregard any of the preceding rules at your own peril. Remember, I know where you live. 

I will do my best to publish the results by New Years Day, permitting general health and sobriety. 

[odyshapemusic]

The Pause Button

THE PAUSE BUTTON  

by Michael Tatum

 I wasn't exactly lost, because my mother knew precisely where I was.  That's why when she approached the mall's security guard for help, she was less hysterical than matter-of-fact when she asked him: "Where's the nearest record store?"  The guard was no doubt dubious that a five-year-old would wander from his mother in search of the now-defunct Oz Records in Birmingham, Alabama's Eastwood Mall -- who could resist the siren call of that long and winding yellow brick road beckoning you in to rows and rows of the newest 33 1/3rds?  And yet there I was, probably flipping through Elton John, Paul McCartney, KISS, the Sweet, and all of the other mainstream pop-rock I adored as a little boy.  It was absolute paradise -- I was just as fascinated gazing at the colorful covers as I was immersing myself in the catchy music when I got home.  In fact, I was probably the only kid at Rocky Ridge Elementary who had an extensive vinyl collection independent of his parents (which I was not allowed to touch unsupervised).  I've often thought of collecting all of the CD reissues of the records that I had at that age -- Caribou, Destroyer, Band on the Run, Steve Miller's Greatest Hits, and dozens of others -- and put them in a little box, to take out from time to time.  That black and white MCA label 45 for "Crocodile Rock" (backed with "Elderberry Wine," look it up) -- I sure do miss holding it in my hand, spinning it on a Coke bottle and watching it turn.  It was so scratched I couldn't listen to it on my antiquated phonograph.  

It shouldn't surprise anyone that I was music-obsessed from an early age.  But I was also, even more unusual still, enamored of words, language, putting pen to paper, hacking away at my junky manual typewriter, a dull aquamarine monstrosity that came with its own protective cover that snapped at the base.  According to my parents, I went from being a strangely mute baby, which had them worried, to speaking in complete sentences, which I'm sure was even stranger.  At the age of five I wrote my own Hardy Boys mysteries ("The Mystery of the Blue Light," about an airplane that lands with the titular object tied to its wing), and "published" my own periodical, Clown's Magazine, serving a total of one subscriber, my sixth-grade neighbor Paige.  Later, in elementary school I corralled friends into performing in my plays: No Such Thing as a Vampire (a three page horror-comedy), The Sinister Theft (a sort of rip-off of the The Great Muppet Caper), and Triple Threat, the latter which included my spoofs of Star Trek, Poltergeist, and my own classroom.  I dreamed of writing for Saturday Night Live, a show I had never seen but was obsessed with regardless.  I was also enamored of Shakespeare, whose plays I never actually read until I was in junior high, but I was nevertheless fascinated that there was someone who lived centuries ago that composed works that were still regarded almost universally as "the best."  How in the world did he do it?  Like most young people in love with language, I eventually became attracted to puns, eventually taking a stab at a story-length project that I never completed, "Blind Dates are for People Like Stevie Wonder" (yes, I know), in which every line contained some sort of wordplay, like: "He turned on the T.B. set, but turned it off after he began to cough violently."  The protagonist's names were "Strawberry Mannilow" and "Mario Speedwagon."  Ah, juvenilia.  

Unfortunately, because I was always told what an exceptional writer I was by my teachers, parents, and peers, I got a chip on my shoulder about it, and didn't really realize how much even "natural talents" had to cultivate themselves if they wanted to grow.  When I was twenty-five I got an idea for a multi-partite novel based somewhat on my college years (really about my love life -- it would evolve as I got older).  It was then that it occurred to me that for someone in love with literature, I had done a pretty good job of avoiding it, even as a putative studier of the stuff at UCLA.  So for the first time I began to explore the canon, by magic or by luck somehow gravitating to novelists who reflected my interests in playing with form and language: Philip Roth, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis, and Vladimir Nabokov were among my first discoveries in this personal renaissance.  By the time I reached my mid-thirties I felt confident that I had absorbed enough that I could possibly move on with my ambitions, writing a hundred pages that have since laid waiting for me in a folder on my desktop.  That was about five years ago.  

The beginning of "A Downloader's Diary" coincides not merely with Robert Christgau's Mark I firing from MSN in June of 2010, but also with something curious that happened to me that same summer.  I brought the first ten or so pages of another novel I was planning on starting, one that I thought would be easier to complete than my autobiographical opus, one based on observation and imagination, to my father to help me edit.  What he said to me was this: "Picasso's father made him draw a chicken every day of his childhood, because he saw his genius.  Every day, over and over, until one day he stopped, because he said he no longer had anything to teach him."  After which, he brutally tore apart what I wrote, often with great accuracy and cutting insight, though in a manner characteristically brusque and almost smug.  To say the least, I was a little catatonic from the experience, and resolved to put away what I wrote and think on it for a while. One of the interesting side effects from blogging is that you further cultivate a personal style, something that became especially key after the Great Man himself returned to writing capsule reviews for MSN -- I was ecstatic he was returning to the ring swinging, but I had to develop my own approach to writing about music that reflected my own writing philosophy and highlighted my own quirks.  I had to keep people interested, after all.  It happened in March 2010 or so, round about column eight, and I remember it proudly.  I began to take weird tangents, as when I reviewed a mediocre Decemberists record and discussed the history of trillium and ivy in America, a completely ridiculous and pretentious footnote of a point that highlighted how ridiculous and pretentious that record was.  I incorporated more wordplay, as in this put-down of James Blake: “'Torch songs,' sez Pitchfork. Oh yeah, torches and pitchforks are something like it — don’t stop storming the castle until we’ve tossed this con artist into the moat."  I also began cannibalizing chunks of my personal life, as when I "connected" to Britney Spears: "Soon, halfway through track three, about a bad boy Spears can't give up because he's the only one who's been able to make her come, I've metamorphosed into the stereotypical stupid guy at the lip of the bar, whiskey sour in hand, zeroing in on all the things we have in common despite protests from my better judgment -- Daddy issues ("Britney, it wasn't our fault"), bipolar disorder ("Tegretol and Lexapro -- you?"), and, er, child genius burnout putting his/her all into a full court press comeback."  The reviews started getting longer and denser, which some people liked and some didn't, but I always felt I was getting closer and closer to pouring everything out of my head and not losing a grain of sand in the creative process.  The castles might have been lumpy and misshapen, but I got a kick out of building them, and my forty columns in four years have  been great pleasure to both write and even to re-read.  And although it was never as popular as "A Downloader's Diary," I liked the dozen or so "Hall of Records" essays even more -- they suited my prose much better than the capsule-style review, of which there really is only one master.

But while rock criticism has fulfilled me creatively, enabled me to perfect my craft, meet some smart and talented people, and have fun in the process, I've never made any money off of it, and have failed to make much of a dent culturally (sub-sub-sub culturally, maybe), both of which were always my endgame, or, as we used to say, "my dream."  Unlike most of my peers at Odyshape, I don't have a fulfilling "day job," and have always seen my various retail jobs as means to an end, easy ways to make money while I work on my creative endeavors in my spare time.  As I get older, I realize I don't have very much time left to finish what I started and make my mark in the world of fiction, which is why, for the time being, I'm taking a long, extended break from writing rock criticism -- probably not a permanent one, though I don't yet know for sure.  I'll miss "A Downloader's Diary" and may return to it eventually -- I think of this break as me hitting the pause button on a VCR and going to another room to finish another task around the house, to return and finish that film at a later date. 

I'm grateful to anyone who read me, said kind words, gave me encouragement during a period I desperately needed it.  Thanks to Cam, Nick, and Jason for finding me worthy, and for writing such delightful, challenging, and entertaining pieces these last few months.  Thanks to Robert Christgau for not laughing in my face, to Tom Hull for being my mentor and giving the DD its first home, where I imagine I will keep the entire series archived.  Thanks always to Wendy, and my family.  Hey, what do you know -- I've mastered the chicken: wings, beak, flurry of feathers, its cocky strut, the jerky movements of the head.  Time to draw something else.

 September 4, 2014

[odyshapemusic]

The Pause Button

THE PAUSE BUTTON

by Michael Tatum

I wasn't exactly lost, because my mother knew exactly where I was.  That's why when she approached the mall's security guard for help, she was less hysterical than matter-of-fact when she asked him: "Where's the nearest record store?"  The guard was no doubt dubious that a five-year-old would wander from his mother in search of the now-defunct Oz Records in Birmingham, Alabama's Eastwood Mall -- who could resist the siren call of that long and winding yellow brick road beckoning you in to rows and rows of the newest 33 1/3rds?  And yet there I was, probably flipping through Elton John, Paul McCartney, KISS, the Sweet, and all of the other mainstream pop-rock i adored as a little boy.  It was absolute paradise -- I was probably just as fascinated gazing at the colorful covers as I was immersing myself in the catchy music when I got home.  In fact, I was probably the only kid at Rocky Ridge Elementary who had an extensive vinyl collection independent of his parents (which I was not allowed to touch unsupervised).  I've often thought of collecting all of the CD reissues of the records that I had at that age -- Caribou, Destroyer, Band on the Run, Steve Miller's Greatest Hits, and dozens of others -- and put them in a little box, to take out from time to time.  That black and white MCA label 45 for "Crocodile Rock" (backed with "Elderberry Wine," look it up) -- I sure do miss holding it in my hand, spinning it on a Coke bottle and watching it turn.  It was so scratched I couldn't listen to it on my antiquated phonograph.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that I was music-obsessed from an early age.  But I was also, even more unusual still, enamored of words, language, putting pen to paper, hacking away at my junky manual typewriter, a dull aquamarine monstrosity that came with its own protective cover that snapped at the base.  According to my parents, I went from being a strangely mute baby, which had them worried, to speaking in complete sentences, which I'm sure was even stranger.  At the age of five I wrote my own Hardy Boys mysteries ("The Mystery of the Blue Light," about an airplane that lands with the titular object tied to its wing), and "published" my own periodical, Clown's Magazine, serving a total of one subscriber, my sixth-grade neighbor Paige.  Later, in elementary school I corralled friends into performing in my plays: No Such Thing as a Vampire (a three page horror-comedy), The Sinister Theft (a sort of rip-off of the The Great Muppet Caper), and Triple Threat, the latter which included my spoofs of Star Trek, Poltergeist, and my own classroom.  I dreamed of writing for Saturday Night Live, a show I had never seen but was obsessed with regardless.  I was also enamored of Shakespeare, whose plays I never actually read until I was in junior high, but I was nevertheless fascinated that there was someone who lived centuries ago that composed works that were still regarded almost universally as "the best."  How in the world did he do it?  Like most young people in love with language, I eventually became attracted to puns, eventually taking a stab at a story-length project that I never completed, "Blind Dates are for People Like Stevie Wonder" (yes, I know), in which every line contained some sort of wordplay, like: "He turned on the T.B. set, but turned it off after he began to cough violently."  The protagonist's names were "Strawberry Mannilow" and "Mario Speedwagon."  Ah, juvenilia.  

Unfortunately, because I was always told what an exceptional writer I was my teachers, parents, and peers, I got a chip on my shoulder about it, and didn't really realize how much even "natural talents" had to cultivate themselves if they wanted to grow.  When I was twenty-five I got an idea for a multi-partite novel based somewhat on my college years (really about my love life -- it would evolve as I got older).  It was then that it occurred to me that for someone in love with literature, I had done a pretty good job of avoiding it, even as a putative studier of the stuff at UCLA.  So for the first time I began to explore the canon, by magic or by luck somehow gravitating to novelists who reflected my interests in playing with form and language: Philip Roth, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis, and Vladimir Nabokov were among my first discoveries in this personal renaissance.  By the time I reached my mid-thirties I felt confident that I had absorbed enough that I could possibly move on with my ambitions, writing a hundred pages that have since laid waiting for me in a folder on my desktop.  That was about five years ago.

The beginning of "A Downloader's Diary" coincides not merely with Robert Christgau's Mark I firing from MSN in June of 2010, but also with something curious that happened to me that same summer.  I brought the first ten or so pages of another novel I was planning on starting, one that I thought would be easier to complete than my autobiographical opus, one based on observation and imagination, to my father to help me edit.  What he said to me was this: "Picasso's father made him draw a chicken every day of his childhood, because he saw his genius.  Every day, over and over, until one day he stopped, because he said he no longer had anything to teach him."  After which, he brutally tore apart what I wrote, often with great accuracy and cutting insight, though characteristically brusque and almost smug.  To say the least, I was a little catatonic from the experience, and resolved to put away what I wrote and think on it for a while. One of the interesting side effects from blogging is that you further cultivate a personal style, something that became especially key after the Great Man himself returned to writing capsule reviews for MSN -- I was ecstatic he was returning to the ring swinging, but I had to develop my own approach to writing about music that reflected my own writing philosophy and highlighted my own quirks.  I had to keep people interested, after all.  It happened in March 2010 or so, and I remember it proudly.  I began to take weird tangents, as when I reviewed a mediocre Decemberists record and discussed the history of trillium and ivy, a completely ridiculous and pretentious footnote of a point that highlighted how ridiculous and pretentious that record was.  I incorporated more wordplay, as in this put-down  of James Blake: “'Torch songs,' sez Pitchfork. Oh yeah, torches and pitchforks are something like it — don’t stop storming the castle until we’ve tossed this con artist into the moat."  I also began cannibalizing chunks of my personal life, as when I "connected" to Britney Spears: "Soon, halfway through track three, about a bad boy Spears can't give up because he's the only one who's been able to make her come, I've metamorphosed into the stereotypical stupid guy at the lip of the bar, whiskey sour in hand, zeroing in on all the things we have in common despite protests from my better judgment -- Daddy issues ("Britney, it wasn't our fault"), bipolar disorder ("Tegretol and Lexapro -- you?"), and, er, child genius burnout putting his/her all into a full court press comeback."  The reviews started getting longer and denser, which some people liked and some didn't, but I always felt I was getting closer and closer to pouring everything out of my head and not losing a grain of sand in the creative process.  The castles might have been lumpy and misshapen, but I got a kick out of building them, and my forty columns in four years have  been great pleasure to both write and even to re-read.  And although it was never as popular as "A Downloader's Diary," I liked the dozen or so "Hall of Records" essays even more -- they suited my prose much better than the capsule-style review, of which there really is only one master.

But while rock criticism has fulfilled me creatively, enabled me to perfect my craft, meet some smart and talented people, and have fun in the process, I've never made any money off of it, and have failed to make much of a dent culturally (sub-sub-sub culturally, maybe), both of which were always my endgame, or, as we used to say, "my dream."  Unlike most of my peers at Odyshape, I don't have a fulfilling "day job," and have always seen my various retail jobs as means to an end, easy ways to make money while I work on my creative endeavors in my spare time.  As I get older, I realize I don't have very much time left to finish what I started and make my mark in the world of fiction, which is why, for the time being, I'm taking a long, extended break from writing rock criticism -- probably not a permanent one, though I don't yet know for sure.  I'll miss "A Downloader's Diary" and may return to it eventually -- I think of this break as me hitting the pause button on a VCR and going to another room to finish another task around the house, to return and finish that film at a later date. 

I'm grateful to anyone who read me, said kind words, gave me encouragement during a period I desperately needed it.  Thanks to Cam, Nick, and Jason for finding me worthy, and for writing such delightful, challenging, and entertaining pieces these last few months.  Thanks to Robert Christgau for not laughing in my face, to Tom Hull for being my mentor and giving the DD its first home, where I imagine I will keep the entire series archived.  Thanks always to Wendy, and my family.  Hey, what do you know -- I've mastered the chicken: wings, beak, flurry of feathers, its cocky strut, the jerky movements of the head.  Time to draw something else.

September 4, 2014

[odyshapemusic]

The Pause Button

THE PAUSE BUTTON  

by Michael Tatum

 I wasn't exactly lost, because my mother knew exactly where I was.  That's why when she approached the mall's security guard for help, she was less hysterical than matter-of-fact when she asked him: "Where's the nearest record store?"  The guard was no doubt dubious that a five-year-old would wander from his mother in search of the now-defunct Oz Records in Birmingham, Alabama's Eastwood Mall -- who could resist the siren call of that long and winding yellow brick road beckoning you in to rows and rows of the newest 33 1/3rds?  And yet there I was, probably flipping through Elton John, Paul McCartney, KISS, the Sweet, and all of the other mainstream pop-rock i adored as a little boy.  It was absolute paradise -- I was probably just as fascinated gazing at the colorful covers as I was immersing myself in the catchy music when I got home.  In fact, I was probably the only kid at Rocky Ridge Elementary who had an extensive vinyl collection independent of his parents (which I was not allowed to touch unsupervised).  I've often thought of collecting all of the CD reissues of the records that I had at that age -- Caribou, Destroyer, Band on the Run, Steve Miller's Greatest Hits, and dozens of others -- and put them in a little box, to take out from time to time.  That black and white MCA label 45 for "Crocodile Rock" (backed with "Elderberry Wine," look it up) -- I sure do miss holding it in my hand, spinning it on a Coke bottle and watching it turn.  It was so scratched I couldn't listen to it on my antiquated phonograph.  

It shouldn't surprise anyone that I was music-obsessed from an early age.  But I was also, even more unusual still, enamored of words, language, putting pen to paper, hacking away at my junky manual typewriter, a dull aquamarine monstrosity that came with its own protective cover that snapped at the base.  According to my parents, I went from being a strangely mute baby, which had them worried, to speaking in complete sentences, which I'm sure was even stranger.  At the age of five I wrote my own Hardy Boys mysteries ("The Mystery of the Blue Light," about an airplane that lands with the titular object tied to its wing), and "published" my own periodical, Clown's Magazine, serving a total of one subscriber, my sixth-grade neighbor Paige.  Later, in elementary school I corralled friends into performing in my plays: No Such Thing as a Vampire (a three page horror-comedy), The Sinister Theft (a sort of rip-off of the The Great Muppet Caper), and Triple Threat, the latter which included my spoofs of Star Trek, Poltergeist, and my own classroom.  I dreamed of writing for Saturday Night Live, a show I had never seen but was obsessed with regardless.  I was also enamored of Shakespeare, whose plays I never actually read until I was in junior high, but I was nevertheless fascinated that there was someone who lived centuries ago that composed works that were still regarded almost universally as "the best."  How in the world did he do it?  Like most young people in love with language, I eventually became attracted to puns, eventually taking a stab at a story-length project that I never completed, "Blind Dates are for People Like Stevie Wonder" (yes, I know), in which every line contained some sort of wordplay, like: "He turned on the T.B. set, but turned it off after he began to cough violently."  The protagonist's names were "Strawberry Mannilow" and "Mario Speedwagon."  Ah, juvenilia.  

Unfortunately, because I was always told what an exceptional writer I was my teachers, parents, and peers, I got a chip on my shoulder about it, and didn't really realize how much even "natural talents" had to cultivate themselves if they wanted to grow.  When I was twenty-five I got an idea for a multi-partite novel based somewhat on my college years (really about my love life -- it would evolve as I got older).  It was then that it occurred to me that for someone in love with literature, I had done a pretty good job of avoiding it, even as a putative studier of the stuff at UCLA.  So for the first time I began to explore the canon, by magic or by luck somehow gravitating to novelists who reflected my interests in playing with form and language: Philip Roth, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis, and Vladimir Nabokov were among my first discoveries in this personal renaissance.  By the time I reached my mid-thirties I felt confident that I had absorbed enough that I could possibly move on with my ambitions, writing a hundred pages that have since laid waiting for me in a folder on my desktop.  That was about five years ago.  

The beginning of "A Downloader's Diary" coincides not merely with Robert Christgau's Mark I firing from MSN in June of 2010, but also with something curious that happened to me that same summer.  I brought the first ten or so pages of another novel I was planning on starting, one that I thought would be easier to complete than my autobiographical opus, one based on observation and imagination, to my father to help me edit.  What he said to me was this: "Picasso's father made him draw a chicken every day of his childhood, because he saw his genius.  Every day, over and over, until one day he stopped, because he said he no longer had anything to teach him."  After which, he brutally tore apart what I wrote, often with great accuracy and cutting insight, though characteristically brusque and almost smug.  To say the least, I was a little catatonic from the experience, and resolved to put away what I wrote and think on it for a while. One of the interesting side effects from blogging is that you further cultivate a personal style, something that became especially key after the Great Man himself returned to writing capsule reviews for MSN -- I was ecstatic he was returning to the ring swinging, but I had to develop my own approach to writing about music that reflected my own writing philosophy and highlighted my own quirks.  I had to keep people interested, after all.  It happened in March 2010 or so, and I remember it proudly.  I began to take weird tangents, as when I reviewed a mediocre Decemberists record and discussed the history of trillium and ivy, a completely ridiculous and pretentious footnote of a point that highlighted how ridiculous and pretentious that record was.  I incorporated more wordplay, as in this put-down  of James Blake: “'Torch songs,' sez Pitchfork. Oh yeah, torches and pitchforks are something like it — don’t stop storming the castle until we’ve tossed this con artist into the moat."  I also began cannibalizing chunks of my personal life, as when I "connected" to Britney Spears: "Soon, halfway through track three, about a bad boy Spears can't give up because he's the only one who's been able to make her come, I've metamorphosed into the stereotypical stupid guy at the lip of the bar, whiskey sour in hand, zeroing in on all the things we have in common despite protests from my better judgment -- Daddy issues ("Britney, it wasn't our fault"), bipolar disorder ("Tegretol and Lexapro -- you?"), and, er, child genius burnout putting his/her all into a full court press comeback."  The reviews started getting longer and denser, which some people liked and some didn't, but I always felt I was getting closer and closer to pouring everything out of my head and not losing a grain of sand in the creative process.  The castles might have been lumpy and misshapen, but I got a kick out of building them, and my forty columns in four years have  been great pleasure to both write and even to re-read.  And although it was never as popular as "A Downloader's Diary," I liked the dozen or so "Hall of Records" essays even more -- they suited my prose much better than the capsule-style review, of which there really is only one master.

But while rock criticism has fulfilled me creatively, enabled me to perfect my craft, meet some smart and talented people, and have fun in the process, I've never made any money off of it, and have failed to make much of a dent culturally (sub-sub-sub culturally, maybe), both of which were always my endgame, or, as we used to say, "my dream."  Unlike most of my peers at Odyshape, I don't have a fulfilling "day job," and have always seen my various retail jobs as means to an end, easy ways to make money while I work on my creative endeavors in my spare time.  As I get older, I realize I don't have very much time left to finish what I started and make my mark in the world of fiction, which is why, for the time being, I'm taking a long, extended break from writing rock criticism -- probably not a permanent one, though I don't yet know for sure.  I'll miss "A Downloader's Diary" and may return to it eventually -- I think of this break as me hitting the pause button on a VCR and going to another room to finish another task around the house, to return and finish that film at a later date. 

I'm grateful to anyone who read me, said kind words, gave me encouragement during a period I desperately needed it.  Thanks to Cam, Nick, and Jason for finding me worthy, and for writing such delightful, challenging, and entertaining pieces these last few months.  Thanks to Robert Christgau for not laughing in my face, to Tom Hull for being my mentor and giving the DD its first home, where I imagine I will keep the entire series archived.  Thanks always to Wendy, and my family.  Hey, what do you know -- I've mastered the chicken: wings, beak, flurry of feathers, its cocky strut, the jerky movements of the head.  Time to draw something else.

 September 4, 2014

[odyshapemusic]

Listening Notes, Ultra-Brief: So Long

This is just a great big thank you to anybody and everybody who took some time to seek out or simply stumbled upon what I've been posting on a regular basis since the summer of 2011, when I moved my semi-regular old blog Cerebral Decanting over to Cerebral Decanting on Tumblr and began focusing less on essays and more on short (original) reviews and aggregation of interesting (non-original) essays, later bouncing everything over to this great Odyshape project with a group of talented and committed music writers.

My Wednesday music reviews feature "Listening Notes, Ultra-Brief" in particular took off in a way I'm quite proud of, eventually encompassing 140 columns, starting with the truly ultra-brief entry for late June 2011 (recs for Lee Perry/Bill Laswell, a sneer for Chad VanGaalen - still seems right to me), and all the way to early August's #140 (a solid rec for Paul Shapiro and no sneers at all, sneers having come to seem far less important in the grand scheme of things over the past few years). The column didn't really come into its own until about #13 (September 2011, recs for Withered Hand and a David Rodigan mix), and started to reap serious dividends come late summer 2012 (#58, in which Dirty Projectors were cheered), at which point non-blog work started to slowly trickle my way (starting with SPIN, eventually moving over to Rhapsody). What began as a mental diversion for a full-time parent became a regular gig for a (still) full-time parent. Funny how these things work out.

I've now reached the point where my paying writing gigs swallow up most of the time and mental bandwidth I used to set aside for pleasure blogging. Which means it's time to reclaim some of that time and mental bandwidth by setting aside the pleasure blogging for a while. This is quite bittersweet.

Again, thanks so much for reading - it always made my day (or week) to hear from somebody who wanted me to know they'd read something of mine the other day or the other week or even last month. The pleasure has been all mine. And you'll still see my thoughts appearing here and there in the pop crit landscape. 

[odyshapemusic]

Notable Jazz Recordings Of The 1980s (Pt. 3)

The third and final installment of my summer-long series investigating top-quality jazz albums of the 1980s (Part One and Part Two, if you missed them) considers ten more 1980-1989 releases, once again easily dominated by the Soul Note / Black Saint labels. One could rightly criticize my leaning so heavily upon two affiliated Italian labels, although I think the quality of releases speaks for itself. A series like this needn't be interpreted as any kind of canonical hierarchy - one could easily find thirty other albums from the same period worthy of attention. The point is simply a gentle reminder that the pleasures of any decade's offering are there for the taking if you do a tiny amount of digging.

  Julius Hemphill Quartet, Flat-Out Jump Suite      (1980)      (Black Saint)

Here’s where the Fort Worth-born, Saint Louis-based, former Ike Turner bandmate, Black Artist’s Group founder, eventual World Saxophone Quartet member, and future Tim Berne/Marty Ehrlich instructor dashed the expectations of those who’d thrilled to the indie down-home funk of Dogon A.D. (1972), the energy blues of ‘Coon Bid’ness (1975), and the trio madness of Raw Materials and Residuals (1977). Not so much fronting as deferring to his quartet, Hemphill opens this becalmed and abstract album-length exploration of mood on airy flute (“Ear”) before handing over the entirety of “Mind [1st Part]” to Olu Dara’s muted trumpet and Warren Smith’s fluttering cymbals. Even Abdul Wadud threatens to outshine the leader, plucking and scraping his cello lines like some frustrated country blues ragtimer. Yet Hemphill’s compositional certitude guides all, as does his patience, his composure, his unerring sense of pace and direction.  Just when you’ve finally grown accustomed to Side A’s empty spaces, the pulse-quickening directives and sensual groovery of Side B’s “Heart” and “Body” flood your mainline. Tossing aside the flute and swaggering up to the mic, within seconds the saxist schools everybody on who’s the boss, each slithery tenor phrase reminding all within earshot that Hemphill was ever-cognizant of the mysterious ways of the funk.  

 George Russell Sextet, Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature     (1980)      (Soul Note)

Superlatives almost don’t do George Russell justice. An icon of modal jazz whose fingerprints are all over Kind Of Blue, his 1947 composition "Cubano Be, Cubano Bop" helped direct Dizzy Gillespie’s sharp turn towards Cubano bebop, all following in the footsteps of Russell’s own heady music theory gauntlet, the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, a reconfiguration the man worked out after tuberculosis forced him from Charlie Parker’s band. Much later, in 1968, he gave the world his Electronic Sonata, a Gil Evans/Soft Machine/Anthem Of The Sun prototype featuring a pre-schmaltz Jan Garbarek on tenor sax and Red Mitchell on bass - an avant-garde electro-acoustic feast for the headphones. Twelve years on, Russell revisited the piece with a separate sextet, two long sonic excavations (“Events,” he called them) of funky bass, electric organ jabs, guitar skronk courtesy of Victor Comer, and general ambient haze. Side two kicks off with a melody drenched in Wurlitzer swirl nearly afro-funk in feel, before Moog farts and trumpet blats swerve into churning gutbucket blues, a bit of Stockhausian jazz-concrète before the whole joint fades out. The ’68 version is looser, woolier, more of its psychedelic day. But the ’80 edition burns through the changes. How wonderful that we needn’t choose between them. 

 John Carter Octet, Dauwhe     (1982)     (Black Saint)

Maybe the good folks at Mosaic will someday see fit to focus their energies on bringing the late-career vision of Texas/West Coast clarinetist John Carter back into print, his 1982-1990 5-part compositional series Roots And Folklore: Episodes In The Development Of American Folk Music having vanished from the marketplace. Like a certain Pulitzer-winning jazz oratorio, Carter’s vision involves tracking the ways African culture formed American culture via a grisly baptism of blood and genocide. Like the #BAM-wielding Nicholas Payton, Carter rejects efforts by Western supremacists to define the art form’s terms. But his “episodes” prove far more abstract than the linearity of Marsalis, and Carter’s label “American Folk Music” highlights the inclusiveness common to any culture dependent upon both assimilation and appropriation. And this complexity is central to his vision - why else might the most explicitly African installment of the series also lean heavily upon that notably Western mode of chamber music expression, the brass octet? Buried deep within the collective spirit of Bobby Bradford (cornet), James Newton (flute), and Charles Owens (soprano, oboe), the blues smolder on, third stream conversing with the elders, melancholic yet always swinging. And when gentle tuba and clarinet flurries make way for Luis Peralta on waterphone, it summons a general nod in the direction of inspiration/peer Henry Threadgill, whose own hubkaphone raised similar questions about accessing the past while making a new kind of noise.

 Pat Metheny, Rejoicing      (1984)      (ECM)

Forceful broadside against Kenny G notwithstanding, too much of Metheny’s career has been spent dispensing smooth pabulum, although even his frothiest efforts betrayed impressive musical intelligence beneath that wild shock of hair. In the early to mid-80s, Metheny hit three high points – his successful integration of luminaries Dewey Redman, Michael Brecker, and Jack DeJohnette into his own folksy ways on 80 / 81, and the career zenith of 1985’s Song X, a meeting with Ornette Coleman showcasing the guitarist as Ornette’s equal firing partner. In between came this more modest offering, but in its own calm way, it served as a footpath to Song X, with Ornette three songs featured alongside Coleman’s classic rhythm section, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins. Haden/Higgins offer superb support, but Metheny rises to the occasion, aptly demonstrating his wide knowledge of jazz repertoire. There’s the dreamy acoustic take on Horace Silver’s lovely “Lonely Woman”. There’s the expert muted post-bop lines of Ornette’s “Humpty Dumpty” and “Rejoicing” (one wonders why others are so loath to cover Coleman – the themes alone pay great dividends). And then there’s the ten-minute guitar synthesizer showpiece “The Calling,” which teeters on the brink of cornball, emerging triumphant via its bizarre/lovely melancholy and startling aggression. Too bad Metheny never really saw fit to follow through on this trio of albums – Geffen and Warner Brothers beckoned, and his discography largely falls off my radar.

 Ran Blake Quartet, Short Life Of Barbara Monk     (1986)     (Soul Note)

More academic than working musician, Blake’s recorded fairly consistently since the late 1970s after spotty documentation over the previous decade. His general avoidance of quartet settings in favor of solo sets (1985’s Painted Rhythms volumes) or duo pairings makes this traditional four-piece session all the more important. Only three original compositions, but his tributes to Thelonious Monk’s sister and jazz critic Laurent Goddet form an emotional bond that help place his unexpected Stan Kenton exploration and Cole Porter move into context. Two short stabs at a traditional Sephardic tune plus an under-three minute glance at Greek composer Theodarakis round out the performances, which, as the eclectic lineup suggests, is exactly what one wants and expects from a good professor of music – informed, wry, appropriately fond of obscurities, never deliberately esoteric, no doubt smarter than you but humble about it.

 Detail, In Time Was      (1986)      (Circulation Totale)

Cornetist Bobby Bradford occasionally sat in with this trio, joining Norwegian saxophonist Frode Gjerstad, UK drummer John Stevens, and South African bass phenom Johnny Mbizo Dyani for no-rules free improv that often echoed early Ornette  – the stripped-down bop of his Atlantic tenure, the unrestrained minimalism of the Golden Circle performances. No heads or themes, although Bradford tosses out repetitive riffs while the others fall in line. In such freely-structured environments, all voices speak equally, yet Dyani’s upfront bass, whether furiously chorded or foghorn arco, proves a constant highlight even without any foreknowledge that the forty-year-old would die just days after this concert. Along with his passing came the end of this iteration of Detail. Given that loss, plus the death of Stevens in 1994, the relative obscurity of Gjerstad in this country, and an infuriatingly low profile for the likes of Bradford, this release assumes additional weight – a memorable example of geographically-dispersed talent flying by the seat of their pants. Not that they ever sound lost.    

 Mal Waldron / Steve Lacy, Sempre Amore    (1986)    (Soul Note)

Sources disagree on whether this is Waldron’s or Lacy’s date, but that’s a moot point for such duo recordings. Waldron was Lacy’s favored pianist since 1958, and both musicians shared a background in traditional forms (Lacy came out of Dixieland, Waldron bebop) that in no way stymied their exploration of an emerging avant garde. Lacy in particular ventured far afield, eventually devoting nearly a dozen albums to solo soprano sax, an instrument he championed to a degree few others managed. And while even John Coltrane’s soprano excursions eventually bog down into high-pitched flurries, Lacy’s unwavering tone and love for melody stand apart. These qualities are strongly evident on the eight Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn compositions calmly performed here, and for some listeners, the tranquility may prove uninspiring – “Star-Crossed Lovers” is nearly deathly still at times, patient and soft, vast gaps of silence filling each space. Too quiet and modest to repay sustained focus? To cite Coltrane again, his gentle playing on “Central Park West” remains my favorite of his many soprano turns. Nearly every track here reminds me of that peerless performance.

 Anthony Braxton, Six Monk’s Compositions      (1987)     (Black Saint)

Scattered throughout the discography of our most exhaustively documented jazz artist lie plenty of “in the tradition” exercises, but not all are created equal – Braxton’s 1993 Charlie Parker Project starts strong before devolving into farts and rummaging around inside pianos. But here, six spirited performances tackle Monk’s unique canon head-on, discarding post-structuralist tendencies for glorious bebop. Maybe the lack of gristle is due to the magisterial presence of bassist Buell Neidlinger and, especially, pianist Mal Waldron, whose portfolio ranges from backing Billie Holliday to dueling with Eric Dolphy and Steve Lacy (an interesting point of comparison with this record would be Lacy’s all-Monk 1958 Reflections, which shares Waldron, Neidlinger, and four of six songs). Or perhaps Braxton felt kinship with an artist whose compositional skills and staggering intelligence were too often downgraded in favor of his more easily digestible eccentricities. Note the title – not tunes, not songs, certainly not tricky heads to figure out and cast aside. Compositions.

 Billy Bang Quartet, Valve No. 10     (1988)     (Soul Note)

With his passing from lung cancer, a silence fell over the small world of jazz violin, even if Billy Bang himself was as much fiddle player as violinist. Perhaps his woodsy tone sprang from Alabama roots, even though Bang left Mobile for Harlem at a young age. There’s also more than a hint of the classical music of Vietnam and environs, a country he toured not as a musician but an infantryman. Legend has it the radicalized Bang first spotted his instrument of choice hanging in a stateside pawnshop while scoping firearms for revolutionaries, and whatever the circumstances, it’s fair to say any future political dissidence would have paled compared to the very real changes he worked within an evolving black musical culture. On a quartet date serving as quasi-tribute to John Coltrane, the leader occupies a unique voicing between violin and tenor sax, Bang delivering sharp, sawing attacks as Frank Lowe supplies gentle, sweet-voiced nods to pre-modern players. They mesh wonderfully and unexpectedly, and while the skills on display are of the highest order, there’s a hint of shambolic Mississippi Hill Country string band from time to time, especially during opening melodies – not shambolic as in slop, but in risky fun and imperfect ensemble voices. Even the Ode to Coltrane recited aloud over “September 23rd” works, although the quartet best summons Trane’s spirit by closing things with a wrenching 12-minute “Lonnie’s Lament”.

 Either/Orchestra, The Half-Life Of Desire     (1989)     (Accurate Records)

Russ Gershon’s “small big band” Cambridge institution drew deeply from the waters of Mingus, Gil Evans, Sun Ra, but claimed Ellingtonia as raison d'être - you want specifics, look to Charlie Kohlhaus bowing before the spirit of Johnny Hodges on this landmark’s heart-on-sleeve title track. But Duke permeates all, from the way Gershon’s expertly selected talent pool would populate the 90s Downtown scene to the way three saxophones, two trumpets, and a couple of trombones managed to subsume their individuality into one breathing organism. What’s most startling is the offhanded way these cheeky Kierkegaardians showed up their fellow post-70s big bandmates, too many of whom chose the Maynard Ferguson route: tuttis, tuttis, more tuttis. As a former Boston rock club hoodrat, Gershon retained vestigial punk wings and an intolerance for Romantic bushwa, his voracious pop appetite and oddball sense of humor eventually leading him to champion Mulatu Astatke and the world of Ethiopiques long before the Heliocentrics jumped onboard. With Rudy Van Gelder in the producer’s seat, Gershon and co. here drop four originals before pulling out all stops on three gorgeously realized re-interpretations. “Temptation” reconfigures the 1933 Bing Crosby Going Hollywood number as spaghetti western noir, welcoming enough B-movie recitation (“you know, there are many things that a man feels some regrets about”) to suggest intimate familiarity with Red Ingle/Jo Stafford’s “Tim-Tay-Shun” goof. Miles and Duke find themselves loved madly in an eleven-minute mashup of “Circle In The Round” and “I Got It Bad”. And the equally epic closer tackles the 4/4 prog of Robert Fripp’s “Red,” a moody tone poem in which horns assume Frippertonic throb before guitar explosions follow through, a jungle fantasy in black and tan.

[odyshapemusic]

Sunday Morning Coming Down #Nineteen

• "What Bosley Crowther and his fellow guardians of culture got so wrong was this: that far from being a spoof of Beatlemania, A Hard Day’s Night was Beatlemania. The targets of the film’s satire were the Crowthers of the world: those who regarded the group and its fans as something to be ignored or condescended to when they were acknowledged at all." Charles Taylor celebrates the wit and surrealism of A Hard Day's Night for the L.A. Review Of Books.

• "The interns can collectively catalog about 500 records per day — a Sisyphean rate, as it happens, because Freitas has been burying them with new acquisitions. Between June and November of last year, more than a dozen 40-foot-long shipping containers arrived, each holding more than 100,000 newly purchased records. Though the warehouse was originally the home of his second business — a company that provides sound and lighting systems for rock concerts and other big events — these days the sound boards and light booms are far outnumbered by the vinyl." Zero Freitas has a bigger vinyl problem than you do, as Monte Reel reports for the New York Times Magazine.

• "Friday’s event was structured like a tennis championship: quarterfinals, semifinals, finals. And yet (as in a Memphis jookin battle) each individual match evoked the solemn anger of a formal duel. Dancer A addressed his performance like a furious outburst — confrontationally, at very close quarters — at Dancer B, who watched without losing his cool, or even pretended not to watch." Alastair Macaulay reports on Detroit Jit for the New York Times.

• "The main reason why the industry is moving toward a global street date -- instead of letting each territory pick the day that they feel is best for their respective markets, which is the way it works now -- is to cut down on global piracy." The Industry may shift from Tuesdays to Fridays or they may not, as reported by Billboard.

• "Both videos arrived at a moment when Nashville songwriter Meghan Trainor's "All About That Bass," a body-positive banger about "that boom-boom that all the boys chase," was unexpectedly sitting pretty near the top of the Billboard charts, vindicating Trainor's Timberlakeian proclamation that she'd be "bringing booty back." Just like sexy itself, booty never really has gone away in the club-centric chart pop of the past decade, but this week's triumphant triumvirate has definitely raised higher the freak flag planted in pop music's posterior. I'm pleased to declare it, ladies and germs: Welcome to the Summer of Ass." Carl Wilson debuts a new weekly-plus column at SPIN.

• "Despite being as young or younger than, say, the Slits, Bush seemed Old Wave: she belonged with the generation of musicians who had emerged during the 1960s ("boring old farts", as the punk press called them). Some of these BOFs were indeed her mentors, friends, and collaborators: David Gilmour, Peter Gabriel and Roy Harper. Growing up, her sensibility was shaped by her older brothers, in particular the musical tastes and spiritual interests of Jay, 13 years her senior and a true 60s cat. Punk often sneered at "art" as airy-fairy, bourgeois self-indulgence, but its ranks were full of art-school graduates and this artiness blossomed with the sound, design and stage presentation of bands such as Wire and Talking Heads. Yet Bush's music seemed the wrong kind of "arty": ornate rather than angular, overly decorative and decorous." Simon Reynolds considers Queen of Art-Pop Kate Bush and her fickle critics for The Guardian.

• The 200 Best Pitchfork Articles Of The Decade So Far, courtesy of Zach Schonfeld.

• "'Adolescence was sure tough," says Dee Dee. Adds Tommy, "Especially when you don't grow out of it."" R.I.P. to the great Charles M. Young, who wrote many a fine rock crit piece ("Rock Is Sick And Living In London" ring a bell?), including this August 1976 Ramones feature for Rolling Stone.

• "It’s no secret that Ms. Parton is a patron saint of drag queens. Her look, she has said, is patterned after the bleached hair and red lipstick of the town tramp, whom she admired. It both embraces and mocks the best and worst of high country glamour and feminine features. Ms. Parton likes to joke that if she hadn’t been born female, she would have ended up a drag queen. She even entered a drag contest once in Santa Monica — and lost badly. Over dinner recently, a friend of mine who grew up as a gay teenager in North Carolina talked about how she and her friend, who identified themselves back then as “queer punks,” would drive to Dollywood just to party in the parking lot." The country/gay nexus that is Dollywood, as reported by Kim Severson for the New York Times.

• "I say the James Brown story damn well ought to be disquieting, especially if the disquiet is both eased and complicated by how funny it is. Along with most of the audience, I couldn't help laughing both with and at Brown's audacity, and at the impossible fact that such a man not only existed but could be re-created on the screen." Robert Christgau gets on the good foot praising James Brown biopic 'Get On Up' for Billboard.

• "American and British fans of Jamaican music might think that the island is entirely obsessed with its main exports of tough dub, righteous reggae, and raunchy dancehall, but there's a softer side to Trenchtown as well. "Americans have a general idea that Jamaican music was like an island version of American black music—that it followed the same pathways from jazz (ska) to soul (rocksteady) to hip-hop (dancehall)," writes Jeremy Freeman, owner of Deadly Dragon Sound, the revered reggae record shop on NYC's Lower East Side. "But this isn't really true. There's also this love of harmony and ballads that made groups like Air Supply, REO Speedwagon, and Journey so popular in Jamaican music." As proof of Jamaica's love of vocal harmonies, he offers a crucial example: "There are endless Beatles covers and hardly any Rolling Stones covers."" Jamaica wakes the town for Air Supply, as told by Andy Beta for Deadspin / The Concourse.

•  "Gemütlichkeit is a truly German concept. It’s as central to and descriptive of the mass psychology of the German mind as Wabi-Sabi is to the Japanese. English translations are woefully inadequate, such as “cosiness” and “snugness”. Gemütlichkeit is actually nearer to a state of comfort derived from the world around you being in peaceful order. Neat, organised, spotless, untroubled, static, cool, calm, collected environments produce Gemütlichkeit as much as a favourite duvet. It is the drive in so much of this music too. Kraftwerk’s work oozes Gemütlichkeit from the sound of the snare drum to the stitching on Florian’s shoes. It shines, with a beatific smile from the visionary calm of Popol Vuh. It sits us comfortably at the wheel of the Neu! motor as chords and clusters gently pass by. But this calm also reeks of the aims of the parents of this generation, it turns a blind eye to the atrocities they committed and this is where the great heaps of smashed detritus fall from the ceiling in much of this music." Going beyond motorik, Jono Podmore reviews 'Future Days' for Getintothis.

•  "A friend of mine, an Irish artist named Don Baker, is into blues and he said to me, this is a good time to start investigating blues. So I did, and I instantly fell in love. I’d been aware of blues before then, but I went on a journey. I became very interested in watching live performances on YouTube. I didn’t want to deal with the types of people I would have to deal with in order to stay in the business. It can be ugly — a very vampiric arena. But the blues were a great blessing. It’s all I listen to and all I watch before I go on stage. Howlin’ Wolf became my performing idol. In a way I think there has always been some male artist, like Bob Dylan or Van Morrison or Buddy Guy, who are musical godfathers to me, I suppose is the best way to put it. You can follow them along the road and they keep you alive as a musician." Sinéad O’Connor tells Stephen Deusner who's the boss at Salon.

[odyshapemusic]

Hall of Records: The Best of Joy Division

JOY DIVISION: THE BEST OF JOY DIVISION (RHINO)  

RELEASED: APRIL 28, 2008

  The late Ian Curtis was a people pleaser -- at least, that's how Joy Division bassist Peter Hook sees it.  He compartmentalized the various aspects of his life and personality so rigidly that Hook didn't even know Curtis' wife Debbie had given birth to their daughter during the recording of the band's 1979 debut Unknown Pleasures.  To Hook and the other two members of Joy Division -- drummer Stephen Morris and guitarist Bernard Sumner -- Ian was one of the "lads," chortling when their roadie pointed out a shockingly massive turd left floating in a portable toilet, and who teamed up with the rest of the band in a massive prank on their tour headliners the Buzzcocks, beginning with dumping ten pounds of live maggots into the backstage area in which their crew was monitoring their performance.  To Annik Honoré, the startlingly attractive journalist and tour promoter with whom Curtis conducted an emotionally intense but strangely chaste affair -- his epilepsy medication made physically consummating their relationship impossible -- he was the "cultured" reader and movie-goer that he couldn't be with anyone in his Mancunian orbit (in fact, Hook claims Curtis became more distant with the other band members once she came into the picture).  To Curtis' long-suffering wife Deborah neé Woodruff he was, I suspect, the person that his parents wanted him to be: a respectable family man with a solid nine-to-five job, which in Ian's case was a low-paying gig with the civil service.  Unfortunately, Curtis was miserable, and he took the brunt of his unhappiness out on Deborah, who describes Ian in her remarkable memoir Touching from a Distance as controlling, paranoid, and insecure as often as he could be kind, thoughtful, and generous: in one of many disquieting anecdotes, he threw a Bloody Mary into her face because he was overcome with jealousy when she danced with one of her younger uncles -- at their engagement party.  On another occasion, he forced her into public sex as retribution for dancing in a low-cut dress at her cousin's wedding, but he ignored her on night of their own nuptials.  When I'm feeling contrary about Curtis and Joy Division, I sometimes think that their greatest tragedy is that he/they shoehorned Deborah into a life into which she was forbidden to express herself creatively -- Touching from a Distance is as compelling a piece of writing as anything her husband put his name on.  She abandoned her education in the summer of 1973 -- at the age of 17 -- because Curtis told her he didn't want anyone thinking her was dating a "schoolgirl." 

Yet as I read Hook and Deborah Curtis' separate accounts of those shockingly brief but remarkably productive two years -- from Morris entering the fold in August of 1977, thus cementing their sound, to Curtis' suicide in May of 1980, thus finishing the band's first phase for good -- I began to have sympathy for this troubled man, whose death at twenty-three puts him four years younger than Cobain, Hendrix, Joplin, and his hero Jim Morrison.  To begin with, his disturbing obsession with control -- though not serious enough for the National Front, his Nazi fixation was not purely an art pose, and politically, he voted Conservative -- should be put in context of his frequent self-harming.  Cutting doesn't figure into most generalized accounts of Curtis' life -- these two memoirs were the first I'd read of it -- but according to Deborah Curtis, while experimenting as a teenager with various prescription drugs, Ian would burn cigarettes into his skin or hit his leg with a spiked running shoe, just to see how much pain he could bear in his anaesthetized state.  As with Ian's macabre fixation with death, which began at an early age and reflected itself in his love of such songs as Jacques Brel's "My Death" and David Bowie's "Rock and Roll Suicide," this behaviors do not appear spontaneously.  According to the 2000 text revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, self-harm is often associated with those who have a history of trauma and abuse -- emotional, physical, or sexual -- and can be symptomatic of borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, as well as several other disorders.  Deborah Curtis, who knew him as well as anybody, doesn't mention or even entertain the possibility trauma or abuse in Touching from a Distance, and to the best of my knowledge, his parents have never been interviewed on this subject -- or in any capacity whatsoever.  Which is tragic as it is a thorny prospect for potential exploration -- it would provide a great deal of insight into what drove his self-destructive urges if a little bit more of that curtain were to be lifted.  Ian's epileptic seizures on the other hand, have been well documented, and those in of themselves, combined with the difficulty managing the separate lives he shared with Deborah and Annik, would be overwhelming for any young man, especially for one with an unusual drive for control -- he could keep his record collection in perfect order, but doing the same for the women in his life proved impossible, not to mention cruel to them both.  But another thing that you don't hear very much in accounts of the group is the side effects his epilepsy medication had on him -- aside from keeping him from consummating his relationship with Annik, which certainly would have happened if things had been different, they made him even moodier than usual, which to hear Deborah tell it is saying something.  According to her, before his medication regimen, Ian would "fluctuate between ultra-politeness and blind rage," but his behavior afterward resembled what psychiatrists call "rapid cycling," a form of bipolar disorder in which one shifts from one extreme to the next, euphoria and tearful melancholy, quickly and sometimes with great intensity.  Ian was prescribed Phenobarbitol, an anti-convulsant also utilized for bipolar disorder, which in Ian's case was not closely regulated by his doctor, who should have been closely monitoring his mood for such tell-tale swings. Meanwhile, Ian's copious alcohol intake -- it's a depressant, after all -- could only have been making his condition worse.  Bernard Sumner notes, "I think there was something a little bit special about Ian.  I know people say that, but I really do mean it.  I can't stop saying this...I really do think it was the tablets that killed him.  I really do.  I know it." Having said that, I'm not sure how much this would have brought into focus Joy Division's still-unsettling music, which I'd long admired but never fully appreciated, if Rhino's exceptional 2008 best-of hadn't done the trick first.  Now, songs I once found merely worthy I find absolutely compelling.  Of course, this band, along with their Mark II manifestation New Order, has been compiled to death, but unlike the 1988 grab bag Substance or 1995's poorly selected Permanent, this one keeps it short, and to essentials: fourteen tracks, with the instrumental "Incubation" the only questionable inclusion.  It doesn't bother with their juvenilia, namely the tentative An Ideal For Living EP, nor does it front load the strongest material, choosing to sequence things more or less chronologically, in order of recording date, which honors their aesthetic progression a lot more sensibly than release date, and the newly remastered mix is stately, sharp, and spacious.  Cultists of course, will sniff that the only way to go are the two proper studio albums, but though the last few weeks have given me a greater appreciation for both 1979's Unknown Pleasures and 1980's Closer, neither matches this compilation's focus, perhaps because most of Joy Division's greatest songs appeared on singles and odd one-off compilations.  The intense "Transmission," with its rallying cry to "dance, dance, dance to the radio," and the sorrowful cri de cœur "Love Will Tear Us Apart," so stirring and powerful Deborah made the title his epitaph even though the lyric concerns the dissolution of their relationship, are both well-established classics.  But what about the gorgeous funeral march "Atmosphere" or the gripping "Dead Souls," the A and B sides, respectively, of a French-only single and released under a German title (Licht und Blindheit -- "Light and Blindness")?  Or the mechanical, more "controlled" single version of the landmark "She's Lost Control," not so much about epilepsy, though obviously that's there, as it is about the fear of being at the mercy of your body, of circumstance, of the inevitable turn of the Earth: "Well I had to phone her friend to state my case/And say she's lost control again/And she showed up all the errors and mistakes/And said I've lost control again/But she expressed herself in many different ways/Until she lost control again/And walked upon the edge of no escape/And laughed I've lost control."  It's no wonder that Anton Corbijn titled Curtis' bio-pic, adapted from Deborah's memoir, Control -- the word gets to the man's very essence.

The remainder of the compilation is remarkably astute, and wise in its restraint -- personal favorites like the opening of Closer, the grueling "Atrocity Exhibition," would have completely upset the record's flow, and after two admirably clunky openers, it's one classic after another, honoring rockers more often than dirges, including the Doors-y "Shadowplay" (compare Curtis' "To the center of the city in the night, waiting for you" to Morrison's sleazier "Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light/Or another lost angel in the city of night") and the anguished "Isolation," which ends the record on choppy squelches that presage the familiar sound of skipping CDs years before digital technology (and for that matter, recalls the end of New Order's playful "Every Little Counts," recorded in 1986).  My favorite Joy Division track however, is one no one ever talks about, the haunting, desperate "Twenty Four Hours," which might have been one of the songs Annik Honoré was referring to when she told Factory Records prexy Tony Wilson she hated Closer because she was worried Ian's suffering wasn't a fictional construct, and that she feared for his well-being -- worries that fell on deaf ears, as with the exception of Deborah, almost no one else in Ian's orbit scrutinized his lyrics, let alone take them as anything other than Rock God posturing.  I myself am not much for "authenticity" in these matters -- suicide is many things but it's not a character builder, and I put balance above most other things -- but my God, "Twenty Four Hours" is an overwhelmingly powerful piece of music.  Essentially a one chord rave-up linked to a quieter but unbearably tense bridge, it's one of the most desolate songs I've ever heard, completely convincing in its passion and dolor: "Now that I realize how everything's gone wrong/Gotta find some therapy, this treatment takes too long/Deep in the heart of where sympathy held sway/Gotta find my destiny, before it gets too late."  After which the music shifts to the chord that begins the bridge, and abruptly ends, without resolve, leaving the sentiment adrift in mid-air.  Which is how I prefer to end the narrative -- open to possibility -- rather than the one Curtis chose in real life.  It may be too late for his destiny, but the song is his final offering, allotting a little bit more time -- and hope -- to you and me.            

 August 22, 2014

[odyshapemusic]

Apache Dropout - Heavy Window

Monomania succeeded as an album and as artistic propaganda because it couldn’t not. However good it ultimately is (not bad, I say) it could never be anything short of monomatic genre exercise, an outlandish novelty. “Whoa. Bradford Cox went garage rock, didja hear?” Not to get cynical here, but Cox had to’ve considered Thom Yorke in the calculus of the album’s inception. Leader of the elected outfit of rock saviors falls down a rabbit hole, emerges through a drain pipe, changes music forever. We’ll see how that goes.

One band you can set outside the anxiety of Cox or his influence is Bloomington, Indiana’s Apache Dropout - a group that wouldn’t go dream pop even if they had the money for studio time, or, you know, knew how. They’re too busy being a genuine garage rock band. You can tell because you can tell they learned to play everyone else’s catalogue (seriously, everyone’s) before fooling themselves into making up one of their own.

Broadly, their third album, Heavy Window, sounds like the midpoint of early Butthole Surfers and anytime Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments - something that should’ve seemed inevitable, and would’ve been if alt rock had managed to recover from its hideous Stroke. But please don’t allow me to reduce them any further than that. Yes, Dropout Apache suffers from unrelenting guitar death, and their frontman, Sonny Blood, screams (I’m sorry) bloody murder enough to amend for occasional intelligibility (whether vocal or lyrical) - but they exceed either forerunner in flexibility.

Contained within the well worn signifiers of consciously poor form is a kind of menagerie of stolen goods from rock history. And it’s all somehow kind of obvious, like it transcends the murk. Actually, there’s no like about it. Dropout Apache is transcendently allusive. There’re too many familiar riffs here to name, and Blood steps out from behind the McDonald’s drive-through speaker a few times to (sorry again) serve up some classics.

After two opening horrorshows (ordered by Cobain’s alt screed, ‘verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, bad solo’) the third track, “Trash is Treasure,” rides the new new wave - it’s a Talking Heads call and response in sprechgesang, with Blood masquerading as Fred Schneider.

Then comes “Movie Magic,” which clones “Sister Ray” and puts a smile on her face. Well, the riff is brighter, anyhow. Blood (sorry) kinda congeals here to a thick slog - but not necessarily in a bad way. “Crystal Ball” is polluted surf rock; “Left the Nest” lifts in morbid reverb a Chuck Berry riff I can’t recall (but I’m comfortable ‘every one of them’); and “Detectives” goes X on yr unsuspecting ass.

There’re some pretty good hooks too, since I failed to mention. I’m sure many of those are also stolen.

I amused myself before I wrote this - I thought of calling Heavy Window a covers album without any covers. But it isn’t. Everyone fakes it. Just ask Bradford Cox.

I also thought of mentioning that like Monomania, Heavy Window is about as appropriate as album titles get - what with these songs being a heavy tinted look out to rock gods of yesteryear. But that’s a load of bullshit. I bet their pad's just got a big, heavy window they wish they could open when practice gets too hot. Or something like that. They’re just a garage rock band, after all.

[odyshapemusic]

Ferguson Goddam: 31 Riffs On A Theme

1)

Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was killed by a police officer, sparking protests around the nation, was shot at least six times, including twice in the head, a preliminary private autopsy performed on Sunday found.

One of the bullets entered the top of Mr. Brown’s skull, suggesting his head was bent forward when it struck him and caused a fatal injury, according to Dr. Michael M. Baden, the former chief medical examiner for the City of New York, who flew to Missouri on Sunday at the family’s request to conduct the separate autopsy. It was likely the last of bullets to hit him, he said.

Mr. Brown, 18, was also shot four times in the right arm, he said, adding that all the bullets were fired into his front.

The bullets did not appear to have been shot from very close range because no gunpowder was present on his body. 

Frances Robles & Julie Bosman, “Autopsy Shows Michael Brown Was Struck At Least 6 Times,” New York Times, 08/17/2014  http://tinyurl.com/p6cb2pp

2)

Arrested on charges of unemployment, he was sitting in the witness stand The judge's wife called up the district attorney She said you free that brown eyed man You want your job you better free that brown eyed man

Way back in history three thousand years In fact ever since the world began There's been a whole lot of good women sheddin' tears For a brown eyed handsome man It's a lot of trouble with a brown eyed handsome man.

Chuck Berry, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” Sept. 1956

 3)

The streets were quiet, eerie quiet, and it was pitch black and maybe one in the morning. We were moving slowly down South 7th Street - we had crossed Springfield and were approaching South Orange Avenue - when we saw the lights. Red lights like vicious eyes blinking. A riot of red lights blinking. Like Devils or pieces of hell. We were slowing down, and the lights seemed to get frantic, batting and winking, little silent splinters of scream. Then we could see under the streetlights piles of police cars, maybe five or six. For one instant we started to stop and back up or try to U-turn or even speed up on the sidewalk and go past. But the fantasy had stopped. All of us could sense that if we did anything we would die. We could see the shotguns and helmets. They had the street blocked and as we slowed pulling up to them we looked at each other and got ourselves ready.

A mob of police surrounded the van, two of them pulling open the front and back doors. They had their shotguns and handguns trained on us as they dragged us out the doors. Shorty, Barney, and I. I heard one guy say, “These are the bastards who’ve been shooting at us!”

Another shouted, “Where are the guns?”

Then another cop stepped forward, I think he was saying the same thing. What was really out is that this cop I recognized, we had gone to high school together! His name was Salvatore Mellillo. The classic Italian American face. “Hey, I know you,” I said, just as the barrel of his .38 smashed into my forehead, dropping me into half-consciousness and covering every part of me with blood. Now blows rained down on my head. One dude was beating me with the long nightstick. I was held and staggering. The blood felt hot in my face. I couldn’t see, I could only feel the wet hot blood covering my entire head and face and hands and clothes. They were beating me to death. I could feel the blows and the crazy pain but I was already removed from conscious life. I was being murdered and I knew it. I screamed, “Allahu Akbar. Al Homdulliah!” Spitting the rage and pain back at them.

But then I could hear people shouting at them. Voices calling, “You bastards, stop it. Stop it. You’re killing them. Motherfucking bastards, stop it.” From the windows black people were shouting at the police. From a tall apartment building overlooking the scene. People screamed at them. They started throwing things.

I could hear the policemen shouting at each other. “Put ‘em in the car. Put ‘em in the car!” But once in the car, the torrent of blood was falling out of my head so fast that one of them started cursing. “Get him out of the fucking car. He’s bleeding all over the fucking car!” I never lost consciousness, but I lapsed into an even lower state of semiconsciousness. I felt myself being lifted into the paddy wagon.

So I was locked up the first night of the Newark rebellion.

Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of Leroi Jones, 1984

 4)

You explained it to me I must admit But just for the record you were talkin' shit Y'all rap about no knock bein' legislated For the people you've always hated In this hell hole you, we, call home

No knock, the man will say To keep that man from beating his wife No knock, the man will say To protect people from themselves

No knockin', head-rockin', inter-shockin' Shootin', cussin', killin', cryin', lyin' And bein' white No knock

No knocked on my brother Fred Hampton Bullet holes all over the place No knocked on my brother Michael Harris And jammed a shotgun against his skull

For my protection? Who's gonna protect me from you? The likes of you? The nerve of you? Your tomato face deadpan Your dead hands ending another freedom fan

No knockin', head rockin', inter-shockin' Shootin', cussin', killin', cryin', lyin' And bein' white

But if you're wise, no knocker You'll tell your no-knockin' lackeys Ha!  No knock on my brother's head No knock on my sister's head No knock on my brother's head No knock on my sister's head

And double lock your door Because soon someone may be no-knockin' Ha, ha! For you.

Gil Scott-Heron, “No Knock,” Free Will,  1972

 5)

After [Mike] Brown's death came his demonization. First, we heard that Brown had run for stealing candy from a store. Then we were bombarded with a photo of Brown in a red Nike tank top on a stoop, posing for the camera.

This photo, in which Brown was flashing a "gang sign"—a peace sign, actually—was presented as proof that the teenager was a thug; his friends and family now not only have to work through their grief, but against a posthumous slur campaign. Johnson described his friend in an MSNBC interview was cool and quiet. Brown's uncle, Bernard Ewings, said in a Sunday interview that Brown loved music. Brown's mother, Leslie McSpadden, said that he was funny and could make people laugh. He graduated from high school in the spring, and was headed to college to pursue a career in heating and cooling engineering. Monday would have been his first day.

By all accounts, Brown was One Of The Good Ones. But laying all this out, explaining all the ways in which he didn't deserve to die like a dog in the street, is in itself disgraceful. Arguing whether Brown was a good kid or not is functionally arguing over whether he specifically deserved to die, a way of acknowledging that some black men ought to be executed.

To even acknowledge this line of debate is to start a larger argument about the worth, the very personhood, of a black man in America. It's to engage in a cost-benefit analysis, weigh probabilities, and gauge the precise odds that Brown's life was worth nothing against the threat he posed to the life of the man who killed him. It's to deny that there are structural reasons why Brown was shot dead while James Eagan Holmes—who on July 20, 2012, walked into a movie theater and fired rounds into an audience, killing 12 and wounding 70 more—was taken alive.

To ascribe this entirely to contempt for black men is to miss an essential variable, though—a very real, American fear of them. They—we—are inexplicably seen as a millions-strong army of potential killers, capable and cold enough that any single one could be a threat to a trained police officer in a bulletproof vest. There are reasons why white gun's rights activists can walk into a Chipotle with assault rifles and be seen as gauche nuisances while unarmed black men are killed for reaching for their wallets or cell phones, or carrying children's toys. Guns aren't for black people, either.

Greg Howard, “America is not for black people,” The Concourse, 08/12/2014, http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/america-is-not-for-black-people-1620169913  

 6)

Fuckin with me 'cause I'm a teenager With a little bit of gold and a pager Searchin my car, lookin for the product Thinkin every nigga is sellin narcotics

You'd rather see me in the pen Then me and Lorenzo rollin in the Benzo Beat tha police outta shape And when I'm finished, bring the yellow tape To tape off the scene of the slaughter Still can't swallow bread and water

Lights start flashin behind me But they're scared of a nigga so they mace me to blind me But that shit don't work, I just laugh Because it gives em a hint not to step in my path

To the police I'm sayin fuck you punk Readin my rights and shit, it's all junk Pullin out a silly club, so you stand With a fake assed badge and a gun in your hand

But take off the gun so you can see what's up And we'll go at it punk, I'ma fuck you up

I'm tired of the muthafuckin jackin Sweatin my gang while I'm chillin in the shackin Shining tha light in my face, and for what Maybe it's because I kick so much butt

They put up my picture with silence 'cause my identity by itself causes violence The E with the criminal behavior Yeah, I'm a gangsta, but still I got flavor

N.W.A., “Fuck tha Police,” Straight Outta Compton, 1988

7)

The McCone Report, significantly, ignores the political atmosphere of Los Angeles. It refers, for example, to the repeal in 1964 of the Rumford Act—the California fair-housing law—in these words: “In addition, many Negroes here felt and were encouraged to feel that they had been affronted by the passage of Proposition 14.” Affronted, indeed! The largest state in the Union, by a three-to-one majority, abolishes one of its own laws against discrimination and Negroes are described as regarding this as they might the failure of a friend to keep an engagement. What they did feel—and without any need of encouragement—was that while the rest of the North was passing civil-rights laws and improving opportunities for Negroes, their own state and city were rushing to reinforce the barriers against them.

The McCone Report goes on to mention two other “aggravating events in the twelve months prior to the riot.” One was the failure of the poverty program to “live up to [its] press notices,” combined with reports of “controversy and bickering” in Los Angeles over administering the program. The second “aggravating event” is summed up by the report in these words:

Throughout the nation unpunished violence and disobedience to law were widely reported, and almost daily there were exhortations here and elsewhere, to take the most extreme and illegal remedies to right a wide variety of wrongs, real and supposed.

It would be hard to frame a more insidiously equivocal statement of the Negro grievance concerning law enforcement during a period that included the release of the suspects in the murder of the three civil-rights workers in Mississippi, the failure to obtain convictions against the suspected murderers of Medgar Evers and Mrs. Violet Liuzzo, the Gilligan incident in New York, the murder of Reverend James Reeb, and the police violence in Selma, Alabama—to mention only a few of the more notorious cases. And surely it would have been more to the point to mention that throughout the nation Negro demonstrations have almost invariably been non-violent, and that the major influence on the Negro community of the civil-rights movement has been the strategy of discipline and dignity. Obsessed by the few prophets of violent resistance, the McCone Commission ignores the fact that never before has an American group sent so many people to jail or been so severely punished for trying to uphold the law of the land.

Bayard Rustin, “The Watts,” Commentary Magazine, March 1966, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-watts/

8)

Can't you see it Can't you feel it It's all in the air I can't stand the pressure much longer Somebody say a prayer

Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Lord have mercy on this land of mine We all gonna get it in due time I don't belong here I don't belong there I've even stopped believing in prayer

Don't tell me I tell you Me and my people just about due I've been there so I know They keep on saying "Go slow!"

But that's just the trouble "do it slow" Washing the windows "do it slow" Picking the cotton "do it slow" You're just plain rotten "do it slow" You're too damn lazy "do it slow" The thinking's crazy "do it slow" Where am I going What am I doing I don't know I don't know

Yes you lied to me all these years You told me to wash and clean my ears And talk real fine just like a lady And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie

Oh but this whole country is full of lies You're all gonna die and die like flies I don't trust you any more You keep on saying "Go slow!" "Go slow!"

You don't have to live next to me Just give me my equality Everybody knows about Mississippi Everybody knows about Alabama Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam,” 1964

9) 

More than 13 years after the police shooting of Amadou Diallo, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has agreed to restore a service weapon to one of the four New York City officers involved, a decision that Mr. Diallo’s mother characterized as a betrayal.

Mr. Kelly had indicated “that he was not going to give back the gun,” Kadiatou Diallo said in a phone interview from her home in Maryland. “Now he has turned around and given back the gun. We want to know why. Why did he change his mind?”

The police fired 41 shots, killing Mr. Diallo as he stood in the vestibule of his apartment building in the Bronx on Feb. 4, 1999. Although the officers said they believed he had a gun, Mr. Diallo was unarmed.

The Police Department offered no official explanation on Tuesday about restoring a gun to the officer, Kenneth Boss. But a law enforcement official familiar with Mr. Kelly’s reasoning pointed to the recent exoneration of another officer, Michael Carey, who fired 3 of 50 bullets shot at Sean Bell, who was killed on the morning of his wedding outside a Queens nightclub in 2006.

“The subsequent exoneration in the trial room of Officer Carey in the Sean Bell case, whose gun-carrying privileges were restored under similar circumstances as the Diallo shooting played a significant role in the decision,” the law enforcement official said.

Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said he believed that Mr. Kelly’s decision, reported Tuesday in The New York Post, was “appropriate and long overdue.” “This police officer was exonerated in a criminal trial and in a thorough departmental review and there was no reason to deny him full restoration,” Mr. Lynch wrote in a statement.

The fusillade of bullets, 19 of which struck Mr. Diallo, prompted furious protests against the police. The officers, all white and members of the elite Street Crime Unit, said they believed Mr. Diallo had a gun. It turned out to be his wallet.

Wendy Ruderman and J. David Goodman, “Diallo’s mother asks why officer who shot at her son will get gun back,” The New York Times, 10/02/2012, http://tinyurl.com/k36bozo

10)

The police department is like a crew, It does whatever they want to do. In society you have illegal and legal. We need both, to make things equal. So legal is tobacco, illegal is speed, Legal is aspirin, illegal is weed, Crack is illegal, ‘cause the cannot stop ya, But cocaine is legal if it’s owned by a doctor. Everything you do in private is illegal, Everything’s legal if the government can see you.

Boogie Down Productions, “Illegal Business,” By All Means Necessary, 1988

 11)

About 150 people gathered for an afternoon demonstration in downtown St Louis, 12 miles southeast of Ferguson, where Michael Brown, 18, was shot repeatedly by Darren Wilson last Saturday afternoon. Some wielded placards with messages defending the 28-year-old officer and his family.

“He was doing his job,” said Kaycee Reinisch, 57, of Lincoln County, Missouri. “And now because of public uproar in Ferguson, he is being victimized. He is being victimized by the whole city, the state and the federal government.” Reinisch said she had relations in law enforcement who would be “frightened to do their jobs” if Wilson were punished for the incident.

Robin Barklage, who said he once lived in one of the apartment buildings overlooking the site of Brown’s shooting, said he believed police claims that Brown assaulted Wilson. “I believe he did what he had to do,” said Barklage. “No officer is going to go further then they need to”.

Others – none, apparently, from Ferguson – complained about the charges of police racism in a city where 50 of the 53 police officers are white, while the population is roughly two-thirds black. Figures compiled by the Missouri attorney general show that black residents are stopped and searched disproportionately by the police.

“Ferguson will now be forced to hire 10 African American police officers just because of this terrible ordeal,” said Damon Andersen of Imperial City, Missouri. “Let the black officers see how difficult it is to try and deal with the black criminals on the beat they are patrolling.”

Jon Swaine, “Ferguson police officer was 'doing his job', say supporters,” The Guardian, 08/17/2014, http://tinyurl.com/kcwymul 

 12)

Tell me what has become of my rights Am I invisible because you ignore me? Your proclamation promised me free liberty, now I'm tired of bein' the victim of shame

They're throwing me in a class with a bad name I can't believe this is the land from which I came You know I really do hate to say it The government don't wanna see But if Roosevelt was livin' He wouldn't let this be, no, no

Skin head, dead head Everybody gone bad Situation, speculation Everybody litigation Beat me, bash me You can never trash me Hit me, kick me You can never get me

All I wanna say is that They don't really care about us All I wanna say is that They don't really care about us

Some things in life they just don't wanna see But if Martin Luther was livin' He wouldn't let this be, no, no

Michael Jackson, “They Don’t Care About Us,” 1996

13)

A few days after George Zimmerman’s acquittal, I was on the phone with my father. Trayvon Martin’s fate, my dad said, could have fallen on “my grandfather, my father, me, you….” His voice trailed off slightly, and I knew that the most frightening declaration was coming next: in less than two decades, it could find my two-month-old nephew. Not every situation ends with a death, and many end without bodily harm, but the absence of empathy toward black men from our political, law-enforcement, and judicial systems is nearly beyond comprehension.

Earlier in the week, Rich Lowry, at Politico, wrote, “Let’s take a tragedy and make it a racial crime. … Let’s never, ever admit that if Martin hadn’t hit Zimmerman, he would almost certainly be alive today.” How far must a heart travel to reach a place of empathy for Trayvon Martin? The six jurors and, it seems, Rich Lowry have found that path unpassable or, at least, obstructed. Lowry continues:

Let’s ignore that Zimmerman is from a mixed-race household. Let’s forget that he initially didn’t mention Martin’s race on his 911 call and said he “looks black” only when prompted by the operator. Let’s disregard testimony about his good character, lest it get in the way of the national dialogue about how he’s a racist murder [sic] who got away with it.

Let’s say the trial was about race in America or about whether black men can walk home from the store or any other insipid, racially charged nonsense to fill the air or column inches. The national conversation cannot afford to get mired down in legal niceties like what constitutes lawful self-defense, let alone reasonable doubt.

Lowry mocks those who are trying to come to terms with what he rightly calls a “tragedy.” In doing so, he brushes aside the historical relationship that blacks have had with people in America who hold power. “What constitutes lawful self-defense” in Florida and other states with Stand Your Ground laws has been redefined to legalize—and, indeed, encourage—lethal force inspired by fear. Moreover, a Stand Your Ground claimant stands a greater chance of being cleared of a crime if his victim is black. The history of race and criminalization is not a sideshow but, rather, the central issue.

Later, Lowry writes,

Let’s not talk about the 90 percent of black murder victims killed by other blacks. That is not a fit topic for the nation’s wide-ranging national conversation. Why should we get worked up about something that happens on the streets of Chicago literally every night? If you are bothered by routine slaughter, sadly, you just don’t get it. For national conversation purposes, not all murders are equal.

More attention—from the media and from political leaders—should be paid to the communities being torn apart by violence. But let’s not pretend that no one is taking action, or that those communities are idly waiting to be saved from themselves. Individuals and organizations across the country are dedicated to disrupting cycles of violence, against the strong tides of history, poverty, and dysfunction. Using black-on-black violence as a retort to focussing on a single incident of injustice is a bit of rhetorical trickery, one that further entrenches the pathology with which America regards black men: they’re not like us; their violence comes from something in their nature; look at how they are when they’re together.

We levy power when we define others in terms that are not their own, and black people, excluded from obtaining power for much of American history, have been susceptible to debilitation—political, economic, in the realm of law-enforcement—by definitions from the upper classes. And it’s worked, generation after generation.

Matthew McKnight, “Before and After Trayvon Martin: How Power Flattens Humanity,” The New Yorker, July 22 2013, http://tinyurl.com/jwaxbzg 

14)

Get that flashlight out of my face I'm not a dog, so damn it, put away the mace I got cash and real attorneys on the case You're just a joker perpetratin’ a ace You got time, you wanna give me a taste I don't smoke cigarettes, so why you're lookin for base? You might plant a gun, and hope I run a race Eatin in the messhall, sayin my grace You tried to frame me, but it won't work Illegal search

On the turnpike, and everything's right In the background is flashin lights Get out the car in the middle of the night It's freezin cold, and you're doin it for spite Slam me on the hood, yo, that ain't right You pull out your gun if I'm puttin up a fight My car, my clothes, and my girl is hype But you wanna replace my silver stripes You're a real man, your uniform is tight Fingerprint me, take me name and height Hopin it will, but I know it won't work Illegal search

And them cops out there That did the wrong thing to one of my brothers In Jersey Keep on searching Youknowmsayin? Cause that was foul

LL Cool J, “Illegal Search,” Mama Said Knock You Out, 1990

​

15)​

[Chief Thomas Jackson,] I’m offering no judgment as to the legitimacy of the police action in the death of Mr. Brown, nor am I critiquing your department’s militarized performance with regard to the resulting civil disturbances in your municipality. I leave the former for the more careful assessments of prosecutors and, presumably, a grand jury; the latter, I am sure, will be a subject of continued discussion within your community, in Missouri as a whole, and elsewhere in the country.

But for now, let’s simply focus on the notion that you, as head of a police department accountable to the citizens of your jurisdiction, actually seem to believe — along with local prosecutors — that it is plausible for a sworn and armed officer to kill a citizen and do so in anonymity.

Regrettably, I know that you are not alone in this astonishing breach of trust.  More than a decade ago, some of our most authoritative federal agencies began a tragic retreat from basic accountability, shielding their agents from any scrutiny for their use of the most significant power that a law officer can possess — the taking of a human life as an act of personal deliberation.  Following the lead of the FBI, other large urban departments have since followed suit, or attempted to do so at points.

But the cost to our society is not abstract — and the currency in which that cost is paid is trust.  Your department has shown that you do not trust the public with the basic information about who specifically has, in the performance of his or her duties, been required to take a human life in Ferguson. And that same public is now in the street demonstrating that they do not believe that Ferguson law enforcement can therefore be relied upon for anything remotely resembling justice.  

If you cannot see the contempt inherent in your policy, then you, sir, may need to reconsider both your own role and the premise of law enforcement in a democratic society.   You may need to yield your position to someone who retains the basic notion that your officers, armed with the extraordinary authority of using state-sanctioned lethal force on fellow citizens, are equally burdened by a responsibility for standing by their actions in full. You, your department, and the prosecutors in your jurisdiction are now running from that responsibility. In doing so, you lose the trust and respect of your citizens, your state and the nation.

I know that you wish to claim that the individual officer, if identified, would be somehow vulnerable. But this is dishonest and dishonorable, sir.  Having covered a police department in a jurisdiction even more troubled than your suburban community, I am well aware of the resources available to your department to protect one of its own against retribution. Your officers are the ones with legal authority. They are all armed. And they can maintain a presence anywhere in your jurisdiction.  Moreover, they have, if necessary, the support of your county’s prosecutors and judiciary, and all of the law itself to ensure the safety of a solitary officer.   They are, as police in Baltimore were accustomed to saying, the biggest, toughest gang out there — so much so that the claim of violent retribution against this officer is embarrassing hyperbole. The same claim was offered by a police commissioner here in Baltimore five years ago, in an abortive effort to hide the identities of officers who took life in the course of their duties. When examined in detail, the claim of any serious threat against any officer evaporated into a series of half-baked crank calls and unsubstantiated rumor.  Fears of retribution were not the issue; accountability was the real target. As it is now in Ferguson.

David Simon, “The endgame for American civic responsibility, Pt. III,” 08/14/2014, http://davidsimon.com/the-end-game-for-american-civic-responsibility-pt-iii/ 

16)

Not guilty, the filthy devils tried ta kill me When the news get to the hood then niggas will be hotter than cayenne pepper, cuss, bust Kickin’ up dust is a must I can't trust a cracker in a blue uniform Stick a nigga like a unicorn Vaugn, wicked, Lawrence Powell, foul Cut his fuckin’ throat and I smile  Go to Simi Valley and surely somebody knows the address of the jury Pay a little visit, "Who is it?" (Who is Ice Cube?) "Can I talk to the grand wizard?" then boom Make him eat the barrel, modern day feral Now he's zipped up like leather tuscadero Pretty soon we'll catch Sergeant Coon Shoot him in the face, run up in him witta broom Stick prick, devils ain't shit Introduce his ass to the AK40 dick Two dazed niggas layin in the cut To get some respect we had to tear this muthafucka up

Ice Cube, “We Had To Tear This Muthafucka Up,” The Predator, 1992

17)

"We were told it was a two-prisoner job," [paramedic Billy] Pagan has said. "We get there and there are two holding cells in the back. There are three guys in the cell on the left. One guy is sleeping in a chair with a hat on his face. Patrick Antoine [another prisoner] is standing there with another guy. Patrick has a cut above his eye."

When Pagan asked about the second prisoner, cops pointed to the adjoining cell. Louima lay there, his hands free, fully clothed, Pagan told investigators.

"Louima was in there alone," Pagan has said. "We didn't even see him at first. He got up when Frank went over. Louima had a swollen face, that was all we saw. No blood. No smell."

The paramedics said cops told them that the prisoners were hurt in a riot and that they were cop fighters. "The cops told us nothing about rectal trauma or homosexuality," Pagan said, referring to police claims that Louima's injuries resulted from homosexual activity. 

The paramedics wanted more information. "What happened to you?" Birnbaum asked. 

"I am not going to say anything here," Louima said.

"You gotta tell us what happened," the paramedic said. "What's wrong with you? We can't help you unless you tell us where it hurts."

"Wait till we get to the hospital," Louima whispered.

That is consistent with what the torture victim told me from his hospital bed. 

"The medics helped me," Louima said. "But I was too scared to tell them."

He said because the cops threatened to kill him if he talked, he never spoke to anyone until he got to the hospital. Then Louima spoke to a nurse, who told another nurse, Magalie Laurent, who placed the 911 call to Internal Affairs that the NYPD could not find for two weeks.

"I don't blame him for not telling me," Pagan has said. "I would have done the same thing if I was surrounded by cops. The Fire Department doesn't want us to go into that precinct on a job. Cops may feel we overheard something. But we didn't hear or see anything unusual."

There was a white sheet on the stretcher. There was no blood on it when Louima got up, Pagan has told investigators. Any rectal bleeding, Pagan reasoned, was internal.

"I don't think I ever saw Justin Volpe," he said of the cop accused of using the wooden stick. "But one of the cops I saw in the paper . . . took Polaroid shots of Louima outside the cell before we left. Very normal. 'Face left, then right.' "

The cop seemed proud of his work, Pagan told investigators.

Mike McAlary, “They saw Louima’s terror,” Daily News, Sept. 5 1997, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/louima-terror-article-1.238610

18)

Laid down last night, hopin' I would have my peace, I laid down last night, hopin' I would have my peace,  But when I woke up, Tom Rushen was shakin' me

When you get in trouble, it's no use to screamin' and cryin', When you get in trouble, it's no use to screamin' and cryin',  Tom Rushen will take you, back to the prison house flyin'

I got up this mornin', Tom Day was standin' around, I got up this mornin', Tom Day was standin' around, If he lose his office now, he's runnin' from town to town

Let me tell you folksies just how he treated me, Let me tell you folksies just how he treated me, Aw, he caught me yellin', I was drunk as I could be.

Charley Patton, “Tom Rushen Blues,” 1929

​

19)​

I'm slowly catching up on my reading on the week's events in Ferguson and trying to get my head around what exactly happened. In the meantime, one idea creeping into the discourse—that black people are unmoved by intra-community violence—deserves to be immediately dismissed.  Eugene Robinson, reacting to the tragic murder of Knijah Bibb, offers an incarnation here:

We’ve been through this so many times. Brown, from all reports, was a good kid who had just graduated from high school and was about to enroll in college. But young black men are automatically assumed to be dangerous thugs—and are not given the benefit of the doubt that young white men are accorded. This is racist and wrong, and it must change.

But we should be just as outraged over Knijah’s death—and just as determined that this kind of killing should never happen again.

The entire Prince George’s County police force—not just the homicide division—has been working long hours to try to find Wallace and is motivated by what a police spokesman called a “sense of moral outrage”.

That feeling should be universal. The near-constant background noise of black-on-black violence is too often ignored. Yet it continues to claim victims at a rate that our society should consider outrageous and unacceptable.

There are a number of things wrong here. To the extent that killings by the police generate more outrage, it is completely understandable. Police in America are granted wide range of powers by the state including lethal force. With that power comes a special place of honor. When cops are killed the outrage is always different than when citizens are killed. Likewise when cops kill under questionable terms, more scrutiny follows directly from the logic of citizenship. Great power. Great responsibility.

More importantly Robinson's claim is demonstrably false. The notion that violence within the black community is "background noise" is not supported by the historical record -- or by Google.  I have said this before. It's almost as if Stop The Violence never happened, or The Interruptors never happened, or Kendrick Lamar never happened. The call issued by Erica Ford at the end of this Do The Right Thing retrospective is so common as to be ritual. It is not "black on black crime" that is background noise in America, but the pleas of black people.

There is a pattern here, but it isn't the one Eugene Robinson (for whom I have a great respect) thinks. The pattern is the transmutation of black protest into moral hectoring of black people. Don Imus profanely insults a group of black women. But the real problem is gangsta rap. Trayvon Martin is killed. This becomes a conversation about how black men are bad fathers. Jonathan Martin is bullied mercilessly. This proves that black people have an unfortunate sense of irony.

The politics of respectability are, at their root, the politics of changing the subject—the last resort for those who can not bear the agony of looking their country in the eye. The policy of America has been, for most of its history, white supremacy. The high rates of violence in black neighborhoods do not exist outside of these facts—they evidence them.

This history presents us with a suite of hard choices. We do not like hard choices. Here's a better idea: Let's all get together and talk about how Mike Brown would still be alive if Beyoncé would make more wholesome music, followed by a national forum on how the charge of "acting white" contributes to mass incarceration. We can conclude with a keynote lecture on "Kids Today" and a shrug.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Black people are not ignoring ‘black on black crime’: The politics of changing the subject,’ The Atlantic, 08/15/2014, http://tinyurl.com/ncde3ct

20)

When it come to something we say What they don't like is a brother like me on the mic In fact to the gritty ain't none of us wack Noriega had back

Jeffrey Dahmer enter the room without cuffs How the hell do we get stuffed In the back of a cell On an aisle Aint’ it wild What’s criminal?

Only if I had more time to kick The rhythm that keep ripping down the door So the real criminals get exposed behind the clothes Doors and the suits that make and break the law Looking for my own cause I had enough bull I can't understand it must be crooked way they planned it

Police supposed to keep the peace But I can’t trust ‘em So I keep my piece Loaded & cocked Cause I don't miss the block I’m talking about the ones who don’t get chained to the rock Those who got away with the dirt and the grime While we go away for the neighborhood crime

Never liked what I saw in the law Indiana trees hanging us instead of leaves We hanging from the roof (yeah) By real criminals

Public Enemy, “Hazy Shade Of Criminal,” Greatest Misses, 1992

21)

Rush Limbaugh: I'm not trying to be funny here.  I'm trying to explain something. So everything you say is true. The street that you're talking about, the McDonald's, places have been looted, and the cops are enforcing the law, and the cops are protecting private property from further damage, vandalism, looting, what have you. The cops are protecting neighborhoods, okay?  Now, some people, Joe, actually believe that because a cop shot an unarmed teenager, that the cops ought to look the other way when there is a reaction to it because people think that the cop shooting an unarmed teenager is wrong, and therefore there must be a price paid for that.  Some people look at the price and say, "You gotta do understand that the vandalism's gonna happen, Rush. You have to understand they're gonna loot.  They're ticked off!  The cops killed an unarmed kid," and so some people expect the cops to look the other way as a means of not ratcheting up tensions even further.  Some people, Joe, I'm telling you.  I'm not talking about residents.  I mean, people not living in St. Louis, looking at the situation -- maybe media -- would say, "Maybe the cops, for community peace, should just kind of look the other way."

Caller:  One wrong does not justify another wrong.

Limbaugh:  No, I know. I know.  So here's what happens.  When people who think that the cops should look the other way say, "Just, you know, don't go after anymore people. Just kind of stand aside. Let some things happen. Let them boil over. Let 'em get it out of their system. Let 'em do some looting. Let 'em do this. You know, give 'em a week before you enforce the law."  When the cops then come in and enforce the law, those people that think the way I've just described think the cops are being hard, cold, mean SOBs, 'cause they don't understand.  So when you call and support what the cops are doing and say, "We're scared. They're protecting us. They're trying to keep order and so forth," a lot of people are gonna think you're the weirdo.  Not me.  I'm just telling you that America 2014 has some very odd ideas about conflict resolution and expectations and how a wrong is dealt with and so forth.  Many of them think that a show of force, enforcing the law, is provocative, unnecessary, and mean, given all the circumstances here.

Caller:  Well, just like Israel. If you don't show force and strength, it only gets worse.

Limbaugh:  Oh, I hear you.  

Rush Limbaugh, “Ferguson Resident: We are Not Afraid of the Police -- We are Afraid of the Rioters,” The Rush Limbaugh Show, 08/14/2014,

22)

Hey Mr. Policeman I've seen you in my neighborhood You look to me up to no good I've seen you with your gun in your hand

Hey Mr. Policeman I saw you shoot my good friend down He was just havin' fun Checkin' out a one & one

It's a shame and disgrace Everytime you show your face Somebody dies man La la la la la la la la la

Hey Mr. Policeman Why don't you leave the boys alone Why don't you just roll your own And call me on the telephone

Rick James, “Mr. Policeman,” Street Songs, 1981

23)

Second-generation non-lethal weapons already appear to have been tested in the field. In a first in U.S. crowd control, protesters at last September’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh found themselves clutching their ears in pain as a vehicle mounted with an LRAD circled streets emitting a piercing “deterrent tone.” First seen (but not used) at the 2004 Republican Convention, the LRAD has since been used on Iraqi protesters and on pirates off the Somali coast; the Israeli Army has used a similar device against Palestinian protesters that it calls “the Scream,” which reportedly causes overwhelming dizziness and nausea. The 2009 Pittsburgh G20 protests also produced another U.S. first when a New York social worker was arrested for posting details of police movements to a Twitter feed; when Iranian protesters made similar use of Twitter during the contested elections last summer, U.S. elites had nothing but praise.

It may be “tactical pharmacology,” finally, that holds the most promise for quelling the unrest stirred by capitalist meltdowns, imperialist wars, and environmental collapse. As JNLWD research director Susan Levine told a reporter in 1999, “We need something besides tear gas, like calmatives, anesthetic agents, that would put people to sleep or in a good mood.” Pentagon interest in “advanced riot-control agents” has long been an open secret, but just how close we are to seeing these agents in action was revealed in 2002, when the Sunshine Project, an arms-control group based in Austin, Texas, posted on the Internet a trove of Pentagon documents uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act. Among these was a fifty-page study titled “The Advantages and Limitations of Calmatives for Use as a Non-Lethal Technique,” conducted by Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory, home of the JNLWD-sponsored Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies.

Following the Sunshine Project’s revelations, the JNLWD quickly issued denials, and subsequent Freedom of Information Act requests have been refused on national security grounds — and also, no doubt, because such research is prohibited by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, signed by more than 180 nations and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1997. Little more was heard about the Pentagon’s “advanced riot-control agent” program until July 2008, when the Army announced that production was scheduled for its XM1063 “non-lethal personal suppression projectile,” an artillery shell that bursts in midair over its target, scattering 152 canisters over a 100,000-square-foot area, each dispersing a chemical agent as it parachutes down. There are many indications that a calmative, such as fentanyl, is the intended payload — a literal opiate of the masses.

It may seem absurd that the eternal battle between the haves and the have-nots may devolve into a Marxist pun. But several generations of U.S. policymakers have struggled to realize this very absurdity, and they have been quite articulate about their reasons — perhaps never more so than at an April 8, 1997, Senate hearing on the Chemical Weapons Convention. Three former secretaries of defense — Donald Rumsfeld, Caspar Weinberger, and James Schlesinger — appeared together to voice their opposition to ratification, with Schlesinger reading a letter of opposition from yet another former defense secretary, Dick Cheney. All of them objected to the treaty’s prohibition against using “riot-control agents” as a “method of warfare,” and on this subject Schlesinger, who served under Richard Nixon, repeated a familiar argument. If riot-control agents were to be banned, “whether in peace or war,” he said, “we may wind up placing ourselves in the position of the Chinese government in dealing with the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. The failure to use tear gas meant that the government only had recourse to the massive use of firepower to disperse the crowd.”

It is striking, of course, that a former American defense official would so publicly identify with the leaders of an authoritarian Communist regime. Perhaps even more striking, though, is that the formulators of our policy of pain compliance feel so limited in their options — confronted by citizens calling for change, their only response is to seek control or death. There are many other possible responses, most of them far better attuned to the democratic ideals they espouse in other contexts. That pain compliance seems to them the best alternative to justice is an indictment not of the dreams of the protesters but of the nightmares of those who would control them.

Ando Arike, “The Soft-Kill Solution: New frontiers in pain compliance,” Harper’s, March 2010, http://harpers.org/archive/2010/03/the-soft-kill-solution/

24)​

Nigga, you remember the smoke and the burning buildings and shit? Couple stolen T.V.'s and a seat belt for my safety (uh huh) Played the passenger I think it's five years after eighty- seven do the math ' 92 don't you be lazy (I won't) Looking out the window, notice all the essentials of a block party that stop for a second then it rekindle Like a flame from a trick candle everybody got dental Insurance 'cause we 'bout to floss you get that couch I sent you? I heard that from a block away probably had credentials of a scholar but shit not today them Dayton spokes was his to take Refrigerators, barbecue pits and Jordan kicks They did invasions while helicopters recorded it Hello Mister Miyagi I want them ten woo-woofers Say that you got me if not I'll dig in your drawer for it The swap meet was the bull's eye like Tauruses Murder was the melody you should know what the chorus is Papa you really telling me we can just get some more of it if we run out? He said lil nigga today the poor is rich Don't tell your mom that you seen a Molotov bomb If she ask just know you have to lie and son don't forget Bitches ain't shit, hoes ain't neither Niggas gon' snitch watch the company you keeping And one day you'll put money in the ghetto when you got it Rather than having to hustle off these Rodney King riots (That's right the mothafuckin' Rodney King you just put your daddy on Bullis Rd.)

Kendrick Lamar, “County Building Blues,” good kid, m.A.A.d city, 2012

25)

A Chicago-area police officer who fatally shot a young dog in front of its 6-year-old owner on Friday was fired on Monday. Witnesses said the dog was not provoking the cops before it was shot.

Police dispatch in the Chicago suburb of Hometown, Illinois received a phone call on Friday from the dog’s owners that Apollo, a 16-month-old shepherd mix, got out of the family’s yard, and they requested assistance in finding him, Police Chief Charles Forsyth said in a statement on Facebook. The officer ‒ identified by the Justice for Apollo Facebook page as Robert Norris ‒ located the dog and followed him back to his home.

Norris reported that, while attempting to coax the dog back into the house, the dog turned, growled and approached him in a threatening manner. He then withdrew his service weapon and fired one shot, striking the dog, the chief said.

But Apollo’s owner says the dog was never aggressive and did not lunge at the responding officers. She said he didn’t get defensive until Norris pulled out his gun.

“We were in the lawn and the cop already had his gun out,” owner Nicole Echlin told WMAQ. “I tried to call him in the house and he just stood there staring and I guess he showed his teeth and the cop just shot him, right in front of me and my 6-year-old daughter.”

“The dog wasn’t doing anything. I didn’t see it doing anything, it wasn’t barking,” said witness and area resident Nicco Torres. “Then I saw a cop shoot the dog, the dog fell to ground on the lawn. I saw through the window the dog was on the floor shot but the dog was still moving, it was moving its legs like it was trying to run but it was laying down.”

“I don’t know why they would pull out a gun they had so many other options,” said Echlin's 23-year-old sister and fellow owner Kristy Scialabba, who works at an animal care center in Chicago. “And to shoot a dog in front of a child, that’s going to scare her for the rest of her life.”

On Monday, Norris was fired, Forsyth announced on the Hometown Police Department’s Facebook page. “Although the Officer may have been justified under the Illinois Use of Force statute governing deadly force, I have made the decision to terminate that [officer’s] employment with the Hometown Police Department,” the chief  wrote. “In addition, all reports and witness statements will be forwarded to the Illinois State Police Public Integrity Unit to be reviewed.”

"I'm heartbroken. That was my best friend. It was also my niece's best friend (and she is) traumatized,"Scialabba said to the Tribune. "It should have never happened."

In response, she started the Justice for Apollo Facebook page, created a petition calling for Norris to be fired or punished for shooting the dog and planned a protest of the Hometown PD, which has since been cancelled after the officer was terminated. “Apollo got his justice,” Scialabba wrote on Monday.

“Police officer fired for killing dog in front of 6-year-old owner,” 07/28/2014, http://rt.com/usa/176220-illinois-officer-fired-killing-dog/ 

26)

Don't call me nigger, whitey Don't call me whitey, nigger Don't call me nigger, whitey Don't call me whitey, nigger

Well, I went down across the country And I heard the voices ring People talkin' softly to each other And not a word could change a thing

Don't call me nigger, whitey Don't call me whitey, nigger Don't call me nigger, whitey Don't call me whitey, nigger

Sly & The Family Stone, “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey,” Stand!  1969

 27)

Every now and then, a charge of police brutality hits the headlines. Such was the case when Staten Island police officer Daniel Pantaleo put Eric Garner in a chokehold last Thursday. Garner died. Somebody caught the whole thing on video. There has been much outrage since.

But browse through civil court dockets in any of the five borough, and you'll notice that charges of police brutality are common. Many more don't make it to court. Most are phoned in to the NYPD or the Civilian Complaint Review Board. From 2009 to 2013, the department faced 11,334 "force allegations," according to a report by the CCRB. That's more than 2,000 a year. Less than two percent were substantiated.

There are two ways to interpret that statistic, of course. Some will see it and conclude that the vast majority of police brutality accusations are made-up. People going after cops they don't like or exaggerations of minor and incidental contact. A product of any anti-police sentiment in the city. 

Some will see that two percent as an indictment of the internal investigation process. A product of the Blue Line. A statement that police officers almost always get the benefit of the doubt and have a free pass to rough somebody up as long as there are no cameras around.

Among the 189 substantiated cases, nearly two-thirds fell under the category of "physical force," which includes "dragged/pulled, pushed/shoved/threw, beat, punched/kicked/kneed, slapped, fought, and bit." The next most common were "nightstick as club," "pepper spray," and "gun pointed." After that was "chokehold," with nine incidents.

In all there were 1,022 chokehold accusations. Of those, 462 were fully investigated. In 13 percent of cases, investigators were unable to identify the officers involved. The lion's share of cases were ruled "unsubstantiated" or "unfounded."

Complaints against the NYPD spread disproportionately across demographics and precincts. The majority, 57 percent, among those who filed complaints were black. The majority, 61 percent, were between 15 and 34 years old.

Albert Samaha, “Almost All Allegations of NYPD Brutality Go Nowhere,” The Village Voice, July 25 2014, http://tinyurl.com/kotxza5 

 28) 

Listen, homie, it's Dollar Day in New Orleans It's water water everywhere and people dead in the streets And Mr. President he bout that cash He got a policy for handlin the niggaz and trash And if you poor you black I laugh a laugh they won't give when you ask You better off on crack Dead or in jail, or with a gun in Iraq And it's as simple as that No opinion my man it's mathematical fact Listen, a million poor since 2004 And they got -illions and killions to waste on the war And make you question what the taxes is for Or the cost to reinforce, the broke levee wall Tell the boss, he shouldn't be the boss anymore Y'all pray amin

God save, these streets One dollar per every human being Feel that Katrina clap See that Katrina clap God save, these streets Quit bein' cheap nigga freedom ain't free Feel that Katrina clap See that Katrina clap

Mos Def, “Dollar Day,” 2006

 29)

Esquire: How can we get the black people to cool it?

James Baldwin: It is not for us to cool it.

Q: But aren't you the ones who are getting hurt the most?

Baldwin: No, we are only the ones who are dying fastest. 

Q:  What would you say ought to be done to improve the relationship of the police with the black community?

Baldwin : You would have to educate them. I really have no quarrel particularly with the policemen. I can see the trouble they're in. They're hopelessly ignorant and terribly frightened. They believe everything they see on television, as most people in this country do. They are endlessly respectable, which means to say they are Saturday-night sinners. The country has got the police force it deserves and of course if a policeman sees a black cat in what he considers a strange place he's going to stop him; and you know of course the black cat is going to get angry. And then somebody may die. But it's one of the results of the cultivation in this country of ignorance. Those cats in the Harlem street, those white cops; they are scared to death and they should be scared to death. But that's how black boys die, because the police are scared. And it's not the policemen's fault; it's the country's fault.

Q: In the latest civil disorder, there seems to have been a more permissive attitude on the part of the police, much less reliance on firearms to stop looters as compared with last summer when there was such an orgy of shooting by the police and the National Guard.

Baldwin: I'm sorry, the story isn't in yet, and furthermore, I don't believe what I read in the newspapers. I object to the term "looters" because I wonder who is looting whom, baby. 

Q: How would you define somebody who smashes in the window of a television store and takes what he wants?

Baldwin: Before I get to that, how would you define somebody who puts a cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is looting whom? Grabbing off the TV set? He doesn't really want the TV set. He's saying screw you. It's just judgment, by the way, on the value of the TV set. He doesn't want it. He wants to let you know he's there. The question I'm trying to raise is a very serious question. The mass media-television and all the major news agencies-endlessly use that word "looter". On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us, And no one has seriously tried to get where the trouble is. After all, you're accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it's obscene.

Q: Would you make a distinction between snipers, fire bombers and looters?

Baldwin: I've heard a lot of snipers, baby, and then you look at the death toll.

Q: Very few white men, granted. But there have been a few.

Baldwin: I know who dies in the riots.

Q: Well, several white people have died.

Baldwin: Several, yeah, baby, but do you know many Negroes have died? 

James Baldwin, “James Baldwin Tells Us All How To Cool It This Summer,” Esquire, July 1968, http://www.esquire.com/features/james-baldwin-cool-it

 30)

Oh, Lord, don't let 'em shoot us! Oh, Lord, don't let 'em stab us! Oh, Lord, don't let 'em tar and feather us! Oh, Lord, no more swastikas! Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

Name me someone who's ridiculous, Dannie. Governor Faubus! Why is he so sick and ridiculous? He won't permit integrated schools.

Then he's a fool! Boo! Nazi Fascist supremists! Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your Jim Crow plan)

Name me a handful that's ridiculous, Dannie Richmond. Faubus, Rockefeller, Eisenhower! Why are they so sick and ridiculous?

Two, four, six, eight: They brainwash and teach you hate. H-E-L-L-O, Hello.

Charles Mingus, “Fables Of Faubus,” Mingus Ah Um, 1959

 31)

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

[odyshapemusic]

Chicken

OK, the Chicken, Alaska story. This has almost nothing to do with music, but in honor of my favorite band, Wussy, their album Strawberry and my favorite song on that album, here it goes:

April of 1993. I had finished up my residency in internal medicine at Emory in the summer of 1992, and I was asked to be chief resident of medicine for a year before starting my cardiology fellowship in Boston the summer of 1993. The Emory chief resident is based at Grady Memorial Hospital, an inner city hospital in downtown Atlanta that mostly cares for indigent patients, but the chief resident also oversees three other hospitals and literally hundreds of interns, residents, and medical students: It was (and remains) one of the biggest medicine training programs in the country.

There were a lot of great perks to the job, one being getting 4 club-level season tickets to see the Atlanta Braves. The Fulton-Dekalb Stadium, which is now a parking lot, was an easy walk from Grady. The tickets came via what is now an illegal mechanism but I got to watch almost every home game of a classic pennant race with the Giants right up close. But being chief resident was also hard work. I was on call around the clock and very literally in the hospital 7 days a week without break for the first 9 months.

I didn’t manage to get a vacation in for most of the year, but as my year drew to a close I decided to take 2 weeks off to visit my friend Steve in Alaska. I’ll need to introduce you to Steve. Steve was born and grew up in Macon Georgia, the home base of the Allman Brothers and Capricorn Records. His dad was a lawyer who sold used tractor trailers by the time I met him. To this day, Steve epitomizes to me all the best things about being “Country” and “Southern”. Steve is also full of boundless energy and curiosity— we really aren’t joking when we talk about him being hypomanic. Two important points: Steve knows more about baseball than anyone I know, and Steve knows more about country music than anyone I know. Uncanny encyclopedic knowledge.

Somehow Steve married a woman from Australia and they were in the middle of having their 5 children in 1993. Steve had finished up his residency a year ahead of me and did something really smart: He moved his family to Anchorage, Alaska and practiced general medicine there for 2 years before eventually doing a fellowship in gastroenterology and moving back to Georgia. So in the spring of 1993, Steve had been in Alaska almost a year, knew his way around a bit, and was developing road fever from the waning winter darkness. I was completely burned out from working nonstop at one of the busiest hospitals in the world. We both decided to take two weeks off together to drive around Alaska in Steve’s Jeep Wrangler. We mostly slept in the Jeep. We made lots of friends along the way. We did not always use good judgment.

Highlights of the trip include fishing for halibut off Ninilchik (where, at 2AM the night before we went out, we heard a sudden rushing sound in the creek that runs through town as we were leaving a bar, which turned out to be the very first salmon entering the creek to begin their run that spring); going further down the Kenai Peninsula to Homer Spit, where I bought the most remarked-upon trucker hat of my life; up to Talkeetna, from which we ascended to Ruth Glacier on Denali; stripping down for pictures at the Arctic circle road sign; and up through Fairbanks and toward Prudhoe Bay, getting stopped by a washed-out bridge in Coldfoot in the middle of the night and very nearly losing our lives at a truck stop full of drunken, stranded long-haulers.

But the story I’m going to tell you tonight began in Tok, Alaska. We arrived in Tok, which is over toward the eastern part of the state, in a late afternoon near the end of our journey. It’s a city of a couple of thousand folks, and I recall a totem in the middle of the street that commemorates the fact that Tok has the widest daily temperature swings of any city in the US. We were tired on the verge of being wiped out by this part of the trip and decided to get a room. The hotel was right across the street from the police station, and was literally two parallel mobile homes divided up into cubicles, with a walkway in between and a common bathroom at the far end. Being a step up from the Jeep, getting a room there— and a shower, a luxury during our trip— seemed like a good idea . . . at the time.

We got settled in and then found a place to get some dinner and beers. We heard music coming from a bar that had lots of cars out front, favorable omens. We walked into an unbelievable sight: A cover band was playing ‘70s classic rock in a segregated bar. Segregated in the sense that half the bar was Native American and half the bar was white, and it was easy to tell which half was Eskimo and which wasn’t. Being from where we were from, we knew this was a potentially volatile situation best handled with care, so we found a small table in the back and ordered fried chicken wings with extra hot sauce and cold beer, Pabst Blue Ribbon. It was dollar beer night for PBRs.

The band was playing all the songs that you’d expect them to play: “Can’t Get Enough”, “Radar Love”, like that. Imagine two rednecks like Steve and myself listening to a band play “Sweet Home Alabama” under those circumstances if you want to truly understand surreality as a going concern. As the beers kicked in, the band sounded better and the scene seemed more manageable, at least for Steve, who decided to walk up toward the bandstand to hear the music better. Steve can go very quickly from appearing very country and slightly wigged out to erudite and in control, sort of like the mental patients in the yacht scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and that’s what he did as he walked up toward the band. He stood up front, holding his beer and looking contemplative, like he was examining the Portinari alterpiece.

I hung back, my intuition for problems still nagging me. After a couple of songs, I saw that Steve was in the middle of an animated conversation. He was talking to a curly haired Eskimo woman who was overweight, looking early 30’s but probably mid-20s, wearing a grey sweatshirt with the neck cut out. After a second, I saw him wave his ring finger in front of her, bend over quickly in a slight bow, and walk straight back toward me. He slammed his PBR on the table and said “We gotta get out of here.” Not that he needed to say that to me by then. I threw two twenties on the table and we went back to the jeep.

Steve had been in enough tough jams to know how to avoid a bad situation, and I was glad we were both alert to the tension and dodged that bullet. It was around midnight when we left, but there was still some light out, so we decided to do some fishing before going to bed. We found a stream a couple of hundred yards down the road and spent a half hour fishing for small trout that we caught and released. We headed back to our hotel room once the mosquitos found us and crawled into the two cots along each wall of our room. It was pretty cold by then so we used our down jackets as blankets.

It was extra easy to go to sleep stretched out in luxury rather than in the passenger seat of the Jeep, and I’m sure I was deeply in REM when there was a blast of sound—bang bang bang followed by a bleeting sheep-like sound. This repeated several times— bang bang bang bleeeeet— before we both realized that the banging was on the door of our room and the bleet was actually someone yelling “Steve!” in a very high voice. Steve jumped out of bed in his tighty wighties— I slept in my blue jeans— and tilted his head down slightly looking over at me, his “This is serious” look. We were both disoriented, trying to figure out what could possibly be going on. Given Steve’s glare, I figured I needed to sort it out, so I went over to the door and peered through the peep hole. There stood the Eskimo woman who’s passions Steve had thwarted several hours earlier, yelling at the top of her lungs and clutching something that looked like it just might be a small child. I explained this to Steve in as much detail as I could muster: “It’s her.”

So Steve, being the clever one, motioned me to stand behind the door, which he slowly cracked open. I guess he was planning to talk his way out of this. Neither of us expected what happened next: The door slammed open and she was suddenly standing in our dinky hotel room, screaming at the top of her lungs “Steve!” She was holding between her hands, in the middle of her chest, a rectangular white object. As I regained my orientation, I slowly realized that she was holding. . . a five-pound bag of flour.

I’m not sure whether the bag of flour registered in my brain before or after the explosion. But what I do know now, with the benefit of hindsight, is that the curly haired Eskimo detonated the flour in our hotel room, and then split before Steve and I were sure we were still alive.

So the situation is this: A bag of flour has exploded in the mobile home cubicle that we have rented for the night. The roar of the explosion has awakened everyone else in the hotel, most of whom appear to be drunk, drugged out, and extremely pissed. They, and the guy who rented us the room— either the owner or the manager, or maybe both— are standing outside the door of our room. And everything inside our room, including ourselves, is covered in a fine white powder that rises like smoke off of every surface.

I don’t recall Steve or I saying anything. I’m not sure what there would have been to say. I do remember looking out the tiny window of our room and seeing a mustachioed overweight police officer with a two-gun holster walking across the street. Almost immediately he was in the mobile home and I realized that he was wearing sunglasses at some ungodly early hour of the morning. He was asking us who we were. We were two rednecks covered head to toe in bleached all-purpose flour— isn’t that obvious?

No good was going to come out of the situation, although I guess it wasn’t apparent that we had broken any serious laws either, so we and all of our dusty clothes and sundries were thrown out of the hotel after we settled up our bill (cash only). I remember the flour boogers that were building up in my nose as I looked out the back of the Jeep while we drove off. Flour was crusting up everywhere on our bodies as we sweat despite the temperature. We were too shocked to realize how miserable we felt. It didn’t even occur to us to wonder how we looked. We drove down the road a few miles, wiping the flour out of our eyes and noses and mouths with our hands, and pulled over to the side to sleep, wake up, and pray that this situation was all just a nightmare.

The sun didn’t really come up, it just hovered over the horizon, but eventually we woke. We were still covered in flour, but now it had spread throughout the inside of the Jeep, fine white particles everywhere that had dispersed as we slept. But on our clothes and bodies, the flour was caked in hardening ridges, like flecks of plaster. Steve had raccoon eyes where he has rubbed the flour out of his orbits, and the flour was matted up in blotches all over his face. It made him look sickly and somehow emaciated, even though he has never been a slim guy. I imagine I looked just as bad or worse, but I couldn’t tell and didn’t want to know.

We got out of the Jeep and walked around in a dazed sort of way. As we got our orientation, we realized that we parked about 200 yards from a service station in the middle of nowhere in Alaska that had been invisible to us given the darkness and the flour. Somehow this was the most improbable aspect of our entire fiasco. For lack of a better idea, we got back into the jeep and pulled up to the pump. At the very least, we figured we would need lots of gasoline to sort out our situation.

We sat at the pump without moving. It seemed like a long time, but it was probably only a few minutes. But I remember this guy with his hand above his eyes, peering in from the driver’s side window, looking at us. Keep in mind that flour dust was coating everything within the car at this point so what is inside the car is hazy from every perspective. We should get out and explain things, I thought.

In retrospect, we could only have looked like aliens. Steve had on an armless down jacket without anything under it, not even a t-shirt, and he’d pulled on hunting pants over his skivvies but he didn’t have shoes on. I was still in my dust-covered jeans, dust-covered t-shirt (Jane’s Addiction, Ritual de lo Habitual), and also no shoes.

We got out and did some explaining to a guy Steve and I might have known all our lives. He’s 50+ (or maybe 40+, it’s hard to tell up there), beer-bellied with silver hair that was greasy and neither long nor cut recently, and several days worth of facial hair. He was wearing a wife-beater t-shirt, dirty worn out jeans, and duck boots. He had a handgun in a holster under his right arm. He told us he knew that something was the matter when he woke up because his goats were restless, and he’d been keeping an eye on our Jeep since early in the morning. We tried our best to explain what had happened that night, but I don’t think it made a lot of sense. However, our new friend warmed up to us and eventually invited us to shower behind the service station. “Leave them billie goats alone” he said.

We got ourselves cleaned up and got the flour debris out of the car as best we could. We asked the guy where we were. “Chicken, Alaska”. Which consisted of his house, the service station, and nothing else. I asked him where the name came from. He said the town was named after the state bird. There was a pregnant pause, and then Steve said “The Alaska state bird is the ptarmigan.” And the wife-beater t-shirt guy said “Couldn’t spell ptarmigan.” Got it. Chicken. And off we went.

[odyshapemusic]

A Downloader's Diary #40: August 15, 2014

A DOWNLOADER'S DIARY #40: AUGUST 15, 2014

by Michael Tatum

  There are fewer records this month than July -- though to be fair, two titles comprise five discs.  August is always tough for this column, even though it began this month four years ago. 

Calypso: Musical Poetry in the Caribbean 1955-69 (Soul Jazz)  Killjoys have been complaining about the quotidan music and shallow lyrics on this compilation of hits from Trinidad, Jamaica, the Bahamas, and elsewhere, but I say that depends on what you deem "poetic" -- just because Lord Byron (the calypso star, I mean) resembles Edward Lear a great deal more than he does the Right Honorable George Gordon doesn't mean he and his like-minded buddies don't have a gift for whimsical rhymes and ribald subject matter.  I ask you: wouldn't you like hearing a catchy uptempo ditty about James Bond villainess Pussy Galore, the first moon landing, or the first heart transplant rather than one limning, say, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage?"  All right, all right, the heart transplant one is historically inaccurate -- the recipient (Jewish grocer Louis Washkansky) and the donor (car accident victim Denise Darvall) were both white, so there was no "Negro Heart" involved, though Darvall's kidneys ended up saving the life of ten-year-old Jonathan van Wyk, a black South African.  But would you really let that spoil the one in which the sassy Brownie fantasizes about being a bed bug biting the asses of the most voluptuous women he can find?  Or the one in which a ghost thwarts Lord Kitchner's "Love in the Cemetery," or the one that justifies prostitution as "Exchange Not Robbery?"  As for the music, it doesn't always walk in beauty like the night -- the formula is part of the charm.  And they keep the hijinks and hilarity going without a Sparrow song in the bunch.   A—

Golem: Tanz (Corason Digital) Between the energizer-bunny rhythm, vaudeville trombone, boneheaded chord progression, and inane lyric, the track these klezmer-punk renegades open with might irritate and/or frighten away sweet shiksas like my darling wife, and that's how these madcap New York jokers want it -- for them, a chant like "Dance dance dance dance dance dance dance" is a clever feint lulling you into a false sense of what banalities to expect next.  Which just happens to include: a naive virgin washing away her wedding night jitters in the mikin veh bath, a Yiddish cowboy who speaks English to his kids and German to "the guards," and a Russian Jew who joins the anti-Semitic Soviet Armed Forces in order to enroll in med school, then eye-pokes someone who dares call him a "kike."  Then they appropriate an inadvertently hysterical Russian public service announcement detailing the horrors of Vodka: “It makes you sickly, makes you cough/Makes you smell like dirty socks." Later, in a related playlet, mastermind Annette Eziekiel Kogan and her dapper sidekick Aaron Diskin play two miskayts -- poor souls so homely they're actually cute -- who fall in semi-committed lust after overlooking various shortcomings and grotesqueries.  Musically, the band strangely recalls the Mexican pop music my grandparents played while I was growing up, which explains why Mexico City based-label Corason Digital scooped them up when JDub, former home of Matisyahu and Balkan Beat Box, went bust.  And as for that deceptively dimwitted opener?  It turns out it commemorates the life of a concentration camp survivor who emigrated to America, amassed a small fortune, and lived the rest of his years to the fullest.  If that's not enough of an accomplishment to make a man do the sher, I don't know what is.   A—

Hyperdub 10.1 (Hyperdub)  Glasgow-born, London-based Steve Goodman boasts a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Warwick, which he's put to good use as the author of 2009's Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, a study of "acoustic force" -- what people like you and me call "noise" -- and how it affects whole populations when utilized as a weapon, warning, or instrument of torture.  He begins by chronicling a disturbing 2005 report that the Israeli air force utilized deafening sonic booms -- high-volume, deep-frequency cacophonous reverberations caused by low-flying jets traveling faster than the speed of sound -- to terrorize Palestinians on the Gaza Strip. That might give you some insight into Hyperdub, the webzine he founded in 2000 and upgraded to a proper record label four years later, which for many represents ground zero in the now-ubiquitous electronica subgenre known as dubstep -- this is a man fascinated not by music or even rhythm as much he is sound, texture, and, especially, dissonance.  This disorientingly copious thirty-five track pig-out celebrating the label's first ten years focuses on what Noel Gardner of NME dubs "dancefloor bangers," but Americans raised on "Get Low" and "Turn Down For What" might not hear it that way -- engaging rhythms abound here, but the prevailing mode here is more the trippy lo-fi electronica that the Brits do so well.  Surprisingly however, with Burial and DJ Rashad the only names a neophyte like myself registers in the old long term memory bank, this zips by engagingly, even if the proceedings are a mite anonymous until Mark Viera (handle: Flowdan), of the same crew that produced Wiley and Dizzee Rascal, smears a little grime on the dancehall-inspired "Ambush."  Don't get me wrong -- to choose but one example, I dig the slurping synths on Ill Blu's "Clapper" just fine.  But close-minded rockists such as myself do prefer some nifty catchphrases, whether banal but efficient ("Wind it up!") to the winningly bizarre ("I need a blanket cuz I'm cold mother cold") to the surprisingly useful (someone should hire Spaceape to chant "Am I new age therapy spreading fear and disease" on Jenny McCarthy's doorstep).  Verdict: as head candy goes, not nearly as hard as I might prefer.  But crunchy enough to fleck tiny bits of enamel off the old medulla oblongata.  A—          

Miranda Lambert: Platinum (RCA)  People go a little too far when they label Lambert a "feminist," but she isn't exactly your average Nashville blonde either -- the first song justifies taking the surname of your husband by noting it sends a message to your father that you're your own woman.  The album is full of these paradoxes, as on "Automatic," in which Miranda remembers the halcyon days when she taped the Country Countdown on a cheap cassette recorder because she didn't have the money to buy the albums proper -- presumably a slag at downloaders, yet simultaneously acknowledges, inadvertently or not, the reasons why people "steal" music in the first place, i.e. they're goddamn broke. From an idyllic song about getting rowdy to a celebration of "old shit" that sounds completely out of character coming from a thirty-year-old woman, from a number protesting gravity's war on the human body to a sincere championing of pre-martial sex as the prime factor that "maintains a small town population," her slightly twisted tropes enable her to get away with the nostalgia-mongering that rankles on so much other Nashville product, so that when she says she misses the days when "staying married was the only way to work your problems out" you nod in sympathetic agreement rather than counter with statistics on infidelity and domestic violence.  As such, this isn't merely Lambert's victory, but also one for songwriter Natalie Hemby, who has her name on seven out of fifteen tracks, including many key songs fitting the theme.  Which is what, exactly?  Eat, drink, and fuck in the back in the back of your Daddy's pickup truck: for tomorrow you might be pregnant and married to a guy who looks like Blake Shelton.  Perish the thought.   A

Jenny Lewis: The Voyager (Warner Bros.)  Though I appreciate Carl Wilson coming out in Slate against anti-California prejudice -- I'm tired of being forced to the back of the bus every time my wife and I vacation in New York -- I'm afraid that even as a native, I must demure.   There are qualitative demarcations between Rumours, Late for the Sky, and (look it up) What's Wrong With This Picture?, and though Jennifer-oh-Jenny bests Jackson Browne and Andrew Gold as a wordslinger and tunesmith, she's never led a band as strong as the Mac on her solo recordings.  I said "solo recordings" -- if you're going to self-plagiarize yourself, as Lewis does on this album's "Slippery Slopes," you better make damn sure no one's going to play the end result up against 2007's "Under the Blacklight" and rue the absence of Blake Sennett's arrangements and Rilo Kiley's underrated rhythm section, and those excited that she's looking to Beck and Ryan Adams for production pointers should probably reacquaint themselves with the aforementioned's sorry discographical pages on Wikipedia.  And before I start carping about the occasionally mannered singing and perfunctory lyrics, I should probably mention that I enjoy almost everything here regardless -- no doubt if someone like, say, Bethany Cosentino were to produce material on the order of the disco-lite pastiche "She's Not Me" or the bemused-not-bitter "Just One of the Guys," I'd be frothing at the mouth at what a artistic breakthrough the album represented.  But unlike Cosentino, Lewis has made a point of setting the bar high, something she's not going to ironically dismiss with her rainbow pantsuit and the iconic Warner Bros. Burbank palm trees on the CD label.  Also, the meaning of the metaphorically muddled title track completely mystifies me -- something you can't say about "The Pretender" or "Lonely Boy," which at least accomplished self-mythologizing on their own solipsistically narcissistic bullshit terms.   A—  

Spoon: They Want My Soul (Loma Vista) A common rockcrit cliche -- the indie smartypants who knows his record collection forwards and backwards -- defines the limitations of the formalist: someone who knows how to ignite your synapses with a drum beat or guitar riff but uses his musical acumen to camouflage anything remotely resembling an unguarded emotion.  That's Britt Daniel in a nutshell -- I've been a Spoon fan for a decade and I don't think I could tell you one damn bit about what kind of person he is, either as a flesh and blood human being or even a contrived persona digitalized and written on aluminum and plastic.  I can't even find evidence of a wife or long-term girlfriend in his online interviews.  Thus, his albums are only as effective as their hooks, and are differentiated only by the tiny bits of himself that peek out from underneath his tightly-wound aesthetic.  Granted, new keyboardist/guitarist Alex Fischel helps ensure this is the band's most immediately arresting record since 2002's Kill the Moonlight, while legendarily EQ-ignoring producer Dave Fridmann makes this boom and scratch and bubble like no album they've ever done.  But if Kill the Moonlight bemoaned the dead-end slacker lifestyle (which Daniel denied) and 2010's Transference dared breach the mystery zone of long-term romantic commitment, what's going on here?  I say it's about getting what you want but realizing it's not all that you thought it was cracked up to be -- the holy rollers have got him down, there's still rent to be paid, and all of his peace is hidden on back-masked tapes that he no longer owns, all mitigated by a mysterious innamorata who, if we're to take the urgent "Rainy Taxi" at its word, must have to put up with some frustratingly mixed signals.  May I recommend the more straightforward "Break out of character for me/Time keeps going on when/We got nothing else to give."    A— 

Suburban Base: The History of Hardcore, Jungle, and Drum & Bass: 1991-1997 (Suburban Base)  Hardcore will never die!  -- although there is a very good chance it will evolve, fade, or transform itself into whatever electronica subgenre gets the UK ravers ecstatic this week.  Which isn't to say that the music doesn't have staying power, or that it can't be contextualized for those of us who get our thrills in our living rooms than dance floors, or that a stellar comp couldn't make sense of what back then seemed like too much of a good thing.  So meet Dan Donnelly of Romford, the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Havering -- a "suburb," if you will -- who in the late '80s opened a record store specializing in dance music called Boogie Times that eventually branched out into printing its own white label records.   You can see why that format might be a plus in electronica circles, which both cultivates facelessness and zips to the next big thing when a "star's" fifteen minutes of fame (you know, the A-side of a 12" single) are up.  So don't be nervous that you don't recognize any of the artists on these generous three discs selling retail for less than one -- Donnelly had an ear for the novel, the voltaic, the quixotic, the onomatopoetic, the vivacious, ending his run only when it stopped being a source of personal pleasure.  Tracking the progression of a scene that goes from shallow to arty as soon as the club rats turn up their snouts at the immortal "Sesame's Treet," each of these three CDs can be played from beginning to end with nary a dull spot, and the pacing and segueing ensures that each moves like one thing.  Too much like one thing, actually -- I've spent a month with the damn thing and "Sesame's Treet" is the only thing that sticks out.  Maybe if hardcore had come up with a few more hooks like that, maybe it wouldn't be, you know, dead.    B+            

Jack White: Lazaretto (Third Man/XL  Recordings)  Having encountered the titlular archaism by complete coincidence while re-reading Italo Calvino's masterful On a winter's night a traveler (p. 70: This was as we passed the Church of Saint Apollonia, then transformed into a lazaretto for cholera patients...), I feel qualified to take on Jack White's thematic metaphor.  Is this album a quarantined holding station for bad feelings too sick and twisted to be unleashed onto a pure and pristine listening public?  Nah, that would be a Nick Cave album -- though the artiste would never describe it as such, this is is White's comedy record, supposedly adapted from a batch of short fiction he wrote when he was nineteen and found moldering in a box his attic.  Now personally, as back stories go I find that a little bit too pat to be credible, which is why I'm lodging a protest once I quit doubling over in laughter -- I mean, the man busts his lip on Wine Spodie-Odie, proves he can dig ditches like the best of 'em, complains about not indulging his God-given right to entitlement, plays dumb like Columbo for his woman, and nicks some choice rhymes from Horton Hears a Who, all while bulking up the flesh and muscle on his country-blues monster til its ambling gait shakes the rafters.  Now all I wanna know is if the hilarious "3 Women" refers to Janice, Sissy, and Shelley or Meg, Renée, and Karen.    A—    

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Eno/Hyde: Someday World (Warp) Or, Yes Pussyfooting ("Daddy's Car," "Witness") **

Wye Oak: Shriek (Merge) Wye pine? Well, she's awfully good at it ("Schools of Eyes," "Paradise") **

Eno/Hyde: High Life (Warp) The lion oversleeps tonight ("Lilac," "Cells & Bells") *

TRASH

Robin Thicke: Paula (Star Tracks/Interscope) I have a deeply ingrained cynicism against displays of "vulnerability" as public as this -- when a Padre fan asks his girlfriend to marry him via stadium jumbotron, he does so because societal expectation demands for her to answer yes, even though they know zilch about their relationship.  Where privacy entails true risk, and doesn't pressure the woman into a scenario in which she is "required" to give into the man, a mass audience unwittingly plays into the manipulations of passive aggressive men, a rule that goes for Lou Barlow (who at least got some good songs out of it), as much as this calculating asshole, whose serenading of his sixteen-year-old biracial future ex-wife with the song "Jungle Fever" during their first dance should have been a red flag predictor of his future callousness.  Except this putative show of contrition even screws that up, revealing more unsavoriness about its creator than I think even Thicke himself realizes.  Why on earth would he sing a song about his own salacious impulses, and have a chorus of young girlies echo or answer every self-directed finger-wag?  Why would he recall an evening when she chased him with his favorite golf club, then pretended to down twenty sleeping pills -- to make her look good?  If she's a "spoiled rich kid," does that mean Alan Thicke got screwed out of some Growing Pains royalties?  Why does he cutesily refer to her pedalian appendages as "toesies?"  Why does the album cover ape Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsies?  Wouldn't Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies Man been more apt?  And why would you try and win back your wife four months after being served divorce papers with a hastily-written batch of quickies and sloppy seconds that might remind your wife of...aw come on man, do I have to take that joke to its logical conclusion?  D-I-S-R-E-S-P-E-C-T, dude.  C    

Sharon van Etten: Are We There (Jagjauuwar)  How pathetic is this indie songstress?  When I found out this was a song cycle about a recent break-up, my first thought was: wait a minute, what was the last one?  My second?  Um, where's the "Rolling in the Deep?"   B—        

Morrissey: World Peace is None of Your Business (Harvest) His most direct political statement: when he indicts the beef industry for its role in the nation's rise in colon cancer.     C+  

YG: My Krazy Life (Def Jam)  Ah, no actually, pretty konventional.  C+

First Aid Kit: Stay Gold (Columbia)  If you put a million papegojors in a room and forced them to listen to Gram Parsons records for eternity, two of them would eventually be able to imitate his cadences -- but that doesn't necessarily mean they'd come up with "Hickory Wind" or "Grevious Angel."  C+

[odyshapemusic]

A Downloader's Diary #40: August 15, 2014

A DOWNLOADER'S DIARY #40: AUGUST 15, 2014

by Michael Tatum

  There are fewer records this month than July -- though to be fair, two titles comprise five discs.  August is always tough for this column, even though it began this month four years ago. 

Calypso: Musical Poetry in the Caribbean 1955-69 (Soul Jazz)  Killjoys have been complaining about the quotidan music and shallow lyrics on this compilation of hits from Trinidad, Jamaica, the Bahamas, and elsewhere, but I say that depends on what you deem "poetic" -- just because Lord Byron (the calypso star, I mean) resembles Edward Lear a great deal more than he does the Right Honorable George Gordon doesn't mean he and his like-minded buddies don't have a gift for whimsical rhymes and ribald subject matter.  I ask you: wouldn't you like hearing a catchy uptempo ditty about James Bond villainess Pussy Galore, the first moon landing, or the first heart transplant rather than one limning, say, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage?"  All right, all right, the heart transplant one is historically inaccurate -- the recipient (Jewish grocer Louis Washkansky) and the donor (car accident victim Denise Darvall) were both white, so there was no "Negro Heart" involved, though Darvall's kidneys ended up saving the life of ten-year-old Jonathan van Wyk, a black South African.  But would you really let that spoil the one in which the sassy Brownie fantasizes about being a bed bug biting the asses of the most voluptuous women he can find?  Or the one in which a ghost thwarts Lord Kitchner's "Love in the Cemetery," or the one that justifies prostitution as "Exchange Not Robbery?"  As for the music, it doesn't always walk in beauty like the night -- the formula is part of the charm.  And they keep the hijinks and hilarity going without a Sparrow song in the bunch.   A—

Golem: Tanz (Corason Digital) Between the energizer-bunny rhythm, vaudeville trombone, boneheaded chord progression, and inane lyric, the track these klezmer-punk renegades open with might irritate and/or frighten away sweet shiksas like my darling wife, and that's how these madcap New York jokers want it -- for them, a chant like "Dance dance dance dance dance dance dance" is a clever feint lulling you into a false sense of what banalities to expect next.  Which just happens to include: a naive virgin washing away her wedding night jitters in the mikin veh bath, a Yiddish cowboy who speaks English to his kids and German to "the guards," and a Russian Jew who joins the anti-Semitic Soviet Armed Forces in order to enroll in med school, then eye-pokes someone who dares call him a "kike."  Then they appropriate an inadvertently hysterical Russian public service announcement detailing the horrors of Vodka: “It makes you sickly, makes you cough/Makes you smell like dirty socks." Later, in a related playlet, mastermind Annette Eziekiel Kogan and her dapper sidekick Aaron Diskin play two miskayts -- poor souls so homely they're actually cute -- who fall in semi-committed lust after overlooking various shortcomings and grotesqueries.  Musically, the band strangely recalls the Mexican pop music my grandparents played while I was growing up, which explains why Mexico City based-label Corason Digital scooped them up when JDub, former home of Matisyahu and Balkan Beat Box, went bust.  And as for that deceptively dimwitted opener?  It turns out it commemorates the life of a concentration camp survivor who emigrated to America, amassed a small fortune, and lived the rest of his years to the fullest.  If that's not enough of an accomplishment to make a man do the sher, I don't know what is.   A—

Hyperdub 10.1 (Hyperdub)  Glasgow-born, London-based Steve Goodman boasts a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Warwick, which he's put to good use as the author of 2009's Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, a study of "acoustic force" -- what people like you and me call "noise" -- and how it affects whole populations when utilized as a weapon, warning, or instrument of torture.  He begins by chronicling a disturbing 2005 report that the Israeli air force utilized deafening sonic booms -- high-volume, deep-frequency cacophonous reverberations caused by low-flying jets traveling faster than the speed of sound -- to terrorize Palestinians on the Gaza Strip. That might give you some insight into Hyperdub, the webzine he founded in 2000 and upgraded to a proper record label four years later, which for many represents ground zero in the now-ubiquitous electronica subgenre known as dubstep -- this is a man fascinated not by music or even rhythm as much he is sound, texture, and, especially, dissonance.  This disorientingly copious thirty-five track pig-out celebrating the label's first ten years focuses on what Noel Gardner of NME dubs "dancefloor bangers," but Americans raised on "Get Low" and "Turn Down For What" might not hear it that way -- engaging rhythms abound here, but the prevailing mode here is more the trippy lo-fi electronica that the Brits do so well.  Surprisingly however, with Burial and DJ Rashad the only names a neophyte like myself registers in the old long term memory bank, this zips by engagingly, even if the proceedings are a mite anonymous until Mark Viera (handle: Flowdan), of the same crew that produced Wiley and Dizzee Rascal, smears a little grime on the dancehall-inspired "Ambush."  Don't get me wrong -- to choose but one example, I dig the slurping synths on Ill Blu's "Clapper" just fine.  But close-minded rockists such as myself do prefer some nifty catchphrases, whether banal but efficient ("Wind it up!") to the winningly bizarre ("I need a blanket cuz I'm cold mother cold") to the surprisingly useful (someone should hire Spaceape to chant "Am I new age therapy spreading fear and disease" on Jenny McCarthy's doorstep).  Verdict: as head candy goes, not nearly as hard as I might prefer.  But crunchy enough to fleck tiny bits of enamel off the old medulla oblongata.  A—          

Miranda Lambert: Platinum (RCA)  People go a little too far when they label Lambert a "feminist," but she isn't exactly your average Nashville blonde either -- the first song justifies taking the surname of your husband by noting it sends a message to your father that you're your own woman.  The album is full of these paradoxes, as on "Automatic," in which Miranda remembers the halcyon days when she taped the Country Countdown on a cheap cassette recorder because she didn't have the money to buy the albums proper -- presumably a slag at downloaders, yet simultaneously acknowledges, inadvertently or not, the reasons why people "steal" music in the first place, i.e. they're goddamn broke. From an idyllic song about getting rowdy to a celebration of "old shit" that sounds completely out of character coming from a thirty-year-old woman, from a number protesting gravity's war on the human body to a sincere championing of pre-martial sex as the prime factor that "maintains a small town population," her slightly twisted tropes enable her to get away with the nostalgia-mongering that rankles on so much other Nashville product, so that when she says she misses the days when "staying married was the only way to work your problems out" you nod in sympathetic agreement rather than counter with statistics on infidelity and domestic violence.  As such, this isn't merely Lambert's victory, but also one for songwriter Natalie Hemby, who has her name on seven out of fifteen tracks, including many key songs fitting the theme.  Which is what, exactly?  Eat, drink, and fuck in the back in the back of your Daddy's pickup truck: for tomorrow you might be pregnant and married to a guy who looks like Blake Shelton.  Perish the thought.   A

Jenny Lewis: The Voyager (Warner Bros.)  Though I appreciate Carl Wilson coming out in Slate against anti-California prejudice -- I'm tired of being forced to the back of the bus every time my wife and I vacation in New York -- I'm afraid that even as a native, I must demure.   There are qualitative demarcations between Rumours, Late for the Sky, and (look it up) What's Wrong With This Picture?, and though Jennifer-oh-Jenny bests Jackson Browne and Andrew Gold as a wordslinger and tunesmith, she's never led a band as strong as the Mac on her solo recordings.  I said "solo recordings" -- if you're going to self-plagiarize yourself, as Lewis does on this album's "Slippery Slopes," you better make damn sure no one's going to play the end result up against 2007's "Under the Blacklight" and rue the absence of Blake Sennett's arrangements and Rilo Kiley's underrated rhythm section, and those excited that she's looking to Beck and Ryan Adams for production pointers should probably reacquaint themselves with the aforementioned's sorry discographical pages on Wikipedia.  And before I start carping about the occasionally mannered singing and perfunctory lyrics, I should probably mention that I enjoy almost everything here regardless -- no doubt if someone like, say, Bethany Cosentino were to produce material on the order of the disco-lite pastiche "She's Not Me" or the bemused-not-bitter "Just One of the Guys," I'd be frothing at the mouth at what a artistic breakthrough the album represented.  But unlike Cosentino, Lewis has made a point of setting the bar high, something she's not going to ironically dismiss with her rainbow pantsuit and the iconic Warner Bros. Burbank palm trees on the CD label.  Also, the meaning of the metaphorically muddled title track completely mystifies me -- something you can't say about "The Pretender" or "Lonely Boy," which at least accomplished self-mythologizing on their own solipsistically narcissistic bullshit terms.   A—  

Spoon: They Want My Soul (Loma Vista) A common rockcrit cliche -- the indie smartypants who knows his record collection forwards and backwards -- defines the limitations of the formalist: someone who knows how to ignite your synapses with a drum beat or guitar riff but uses his musical acumen to camouflage anything remotely resembling an unguarded emotion.  That's Britt Daniel in a nutshell -- I've been a Spoon fan for a decade and I don't think I could tell you one damn bit about what kind of person he is, either as a flesh and blood human being or even a contrived persona digitalized and written on aluminum and plastic.  I can't even find evidence of a wife or long-term girlfriend in his online interviews.  Thus, his albums are only as effective as their hooks, and are differentiated only by the tiny bits of himself that peek out from underneath his tightly-wound aesthetic.  Granted, new keyboardist/guitarist Alex Fischel helps ensure this is the band's most immediately arresting record since 2002's Kill the Moonlight, while legendarily EQ-ignoring producer Dave Fridmann makes this boom and scratch and bubble like no album they've ever done.  But if Kill the Moonlight bemoaned the dead-end slacker lifestyle (which Daniel denied) and 2010's Transference dared breach the mystery zone of long-term romantic commitment, what's going on here?  I say it's about getting what you want but realizing it's not all that you thought it was cracked up to be -- the holy rollers have got him down, there's still rent to be paid, and all of his peace is hidden on back-masked tapes that he no longer owns, all mitigated by a mysterious innamorata who, if we're to take the urgent "Rainy Taxi" at its word, must have to put up with some frustratingly mixed signals.  May I recommend the more straightforward "Break out of character for me/Time keeps going on when/We got nothing else to give."    A— 

Suburban Base: The History of Hardcore, Jungle, and Drum & Bass: 1991-1997 (Suburban Base)  Hardcore will never die!  -- although there is a very good chance it will evolve, fade, or transform itself into whatever electronica subgenre gets the UK ravers ecstatic this week.  Which isn't to say that the music doesn't have staying power, or that it can't be contextualized for those of us who get our thrills in our living rooms than dance floors, or that a stellar comp couldn't make sense of what back then seemed like too much of a good thing.  So meet Dan Donnelly of Romford, the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Havering -- a "suburb," if you will -- who in the late '80s opened a record store specializing in dance music called Boogie Times that eventually branched out into printing its own white label records.   You can see why that format might be a plus in electronica circles, which both cultivates facelessness and zips to the next big thing when a "star's" fifteen minutes of fame (you know, the A-side of a 12" single) are up.  So don't be nervous that you don't recognize any of the artists on these generous three discs selling retail for less than one -- Donnelly had an ear for the novel, the voltaic, the quixotic, the onomatopoetic, the vivacious, ending his run only when it stopped being a source of personal pleasure.  Tracking the progression of a scene that goes from shallow to arty as soon as the club rats turn up their snouts at the immortal "Sesame's Treet," each of these three CDs can be played from beginning to end with nary a dull spot, and the pacing and segueing ensures that each moves like one thing.  Too much like one thing, actually -- I've spent a month with the damn thing and "Sesame's Treet" is the only thing that sticks out.  Maybe if hardcore had come up with a few more hooks like that, maybe it wouldn't be, you know, dead.    B+            

Jack White: Lazaretto (Third Man/XL  Recordings)  Having encountered the titlular archaism by complete coincidence while re-reading Italo Calvino's masterful On a winter's night a traveler (p. 70: This was as we passed the Church of Saint Apollonia, then transformed into a lazaretto for cholera patients...), I feel qualified to take on Jack White's thematic metaphor.  Is this album a quarantined holding station for bad feelings too sick and twisted to be unleashed onto a pure and pristine listening public?  Nah, that would be a Nick Cave album -- though the artiste would never describe it as such, this is is White's comedy record, supposedly adapted from a batch of short fiction he wrote when he was nineteen and found moldering in a box his attic.  Now personally, as back stories go I find that a little bit too pat to be credible, which is why I'm lodging a protest once I quit doubling over in laughter -- I mean, the man busts his lip on Wine Spodie-Odie, proves he can dig ditches like the best of 'em, complains about not indulging his God-given right to entitlement, plays dumb like Columbo for his woman, and nicks some choice rhymes from Horton Hears a Who, all while bulking up the flesh and muscle on his country-blues monster til its ambling gait shakes the rafters.  Now all I wanna know is if the hilarious "3 Women" refers to Janice, Sissy, and Shelley or Meg, Renée, and Karen.    A—    

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Eno/Hyde: Someday World (Warp) Or, Yes Pussyfooting ("Daddy's Car," "Witness") **

Wye Oak: Shriek (Merge) Wye pine? Well, she's awfully good at it ("Schools of Eyes," "Paradise") **

Eno/Hyde: High Life (Warp) The lion oversleeps tonight ("Lilac," "Cells & Bells") *

TRASH

Robin Thicke: Paula (Star Tracks/Interscope) I have a deeply ingrained cynicism against displays of "vulnerability" as public as this -- when a Padre fan asks his girlfriend to marry him via stadium jumbotron, he does so because societal expectation demands for her to answer yes, even though they know zilch about their relationship.  Where privacy entails true risk, and doesn't pressure the woman into a scenario in which she is "required" to give into the man, a mass audience unwittingly plays into the manipulations of passive aggressive men, a rule that goes for Lou Barlow (who at least got some good songs out of it), as much as this calculating asshole, whose serenading of his sixteen-year-old biracial future ex-wife with the song "Jungle Fever" during their first dance should have been a red flag predictor of his future callousness.  Except this putative show of contrition even screws that up, revealing more unsavoriness about its creator than I think even Thicke himself realizes.  Why on earth would he sing a song about his own salacious impulses, and have a chorus of young girlies echo or answer every self-directed finger-wag?  Why would he recall an evening when she chased him with his favorite golf club, then pretended to down twenty sleeping pills -- to make her look good?  If she's a "spoiled rich kid," does that mean Alan Thicke got screwed out of some Growing Pains royalties?  Why does he cutesily refer to her pedalian appendages as "toesies?"  Why does the album cover ape Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsies?  Wouldn't Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies Man been more apt?  And why would you try and win back your wife four months after being served divorce papers with a hastily-written batch of quickies and sloppy seconds that might remind your wife of...aw come on man, do I have to take that joke to its logical conclusion?  D-I-S-R-E-S-P-E-C-T, dude.  C    

Sharon van Etten: Are We There (Jagjauuwar)  How pathetic is this indie songstress?  When I found out this was a song cycle about a recent break-up, my first thought was: wait a minute, what was the last one?  My second?  Um, where's the "Rolling in the Deep?"   B—        

Morrissey: World Peace is None of Your Business (Harvest) His most direct political statement: when he indicts the beef industry for its role in the nation's rise in colon cancer.     C+  

YG: My Krazy Life (Def Jam)  Ah, no actually, pretty konventional.  C+

First Aid Kit: Stay Gold (Columbia)  If you put a million papegojors in a room and forced them to listen to Gram Parsons records for eternity, two of them would eventually be able to imitate his cadences -- but that doesn't necessarily mean they'd come up with "Hickory Wind" or "Grevious Angel."  C+

[odyshapemusic]

The Genius of the Music of Comedy

If you’re an acceptable human being, you’ve gifted some portion of your life since Monday to Robin Williams - though he doesn’t need it now, and seems never to have. Whatever. Maybe we need it instead.

I certainly do. For me, Williams is a procession of touchstones in my own growth. I owe at least some of my childhood awe to his Peter Pan, my intransigent love for play and excess to his Genie, my consent to human limitation to his Sean Mcguire, my principles of acceptance to his Armand Goldman (yes, with a ‘d’). A barely finite string of lessons masquerading as punchlines.

That seems like enough. But yesterday, after rewatching his monologues in Good Morning, Vietnam and learning that the Academy rejected Aladdin’s nomination for Best Screenplay on that grounds that Williams adlibbed half the film, I decided to thank him for something else.

I was reminded of a strange New York Times feature with Jerry Seinfeld, in which he offers - with all undue pomp - almost useless advice on the formation of a joke. But he’s read his Hamlet, or at least knows its most enduring moral, and saves the interview by insisting that brevity is the soul of wit.

“I’m looking for the connective tissue that gives me the really tight, smooth length - like a jigsaw puzzle link. And if it’s too long, if it’s just a split second too long… You will shave letters off of words, you count syllables. It’s more like songwriting.”

He’s right… but by his own admission, spent two years crafting a bad joke about Pop Tarts. On the other hand, Robin Williams spent the duration of a neural impulse to award us something like this:

Not only does this performance signal the genius of improv - it shows in real time that you can reconcile Hamlet with, say, Oscar Wilde: Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess abbreviated in rhythmic pulse, a chaotic burst ordered in iambs. Go ahead and think up a better summary of pop music than this.

It also happens to be the style I’ve adopted as a writer - one I like to think is malleable enough in its excess to match form with any subject I pick. Except today. There’s no imitating Robin Williams. For one, it took me two hours to write this piece, not 14 seconds. But more importantly, the world lost far too much of its musical spontaneity when Robin Williams decided he had no left time to invent it - not even 14 seconds. We ought to relax for a minute, out of respect. Then, after some time, we can wonder how in the world we’ll get it all back.

Armand Goldman, the staid, gay, Jewish nightclub owner Williams had every excuse to patronize with exuberance, sheds character just once in The Birdcage. It's the oddest scene in my favorite comedy. Watch it, it’s a minute long:

It’s an essential break, one that screams to the audience “I'm doing exactly what I'm telling this other guy to do. I’m keeping it all inside a character. I’m still alive under Armand. I'm still Robin Williams. I'm still the eclectic celebration of life.” In the end, however, the opposite appears to have been true. Underneath the spoken excesses, the unmatched range of style, the genius of the music of comedy, was some unbearable truth even Robin Williams couldn’t put into words. Every acceptable human being wishes he hadn’t kept it all inside.

[odyshapemusic]

Listening Notes, Ultra-Brief (Pt. 141)

PICKS  

Punk 45 Vol. 3: Sick On You! One Way Spit! After The Love & Before The Revolution - Proto-Punk 1969-76

If you want to nitpick, start with “proto” itself, a vague qualifier up for interpretation. With only six of twenty-one cuts pre-dating actual punk Patti Smith’s Arista debut, the selections also bypass any number of misfits both obvious and obscure, from Zakary Thaks to Blue Cheer and Neu! And yet this potent brew of garage/psych/glam does exactly what the title claims - suggest the ways in which a non-movement of disaffected post-60s urban types pushed against the limitations of technology and blues scales. No way theoretical bands like Jack Ruby or bedroom outsiders like George Brigman could sustain interest over the course of a full-length. Liberated from such practicalities, their four-minute blasts of unreasonable confrontation are revelations. Oklahoma Stooges fans, Hammersmith Kinks enthusiasts, worldwide Lou Reed acolytes: jamming without a net, they offered three-chord context for glue sniffers everywhere. Brainier types would soon supply the content.

 Punk 45 Vol. 2: There Is No Such Thing As Society - Get A Job, Get A Car, Get A Bed, Get Drunk! Underground Punk And Post-Punk In The UK 1977-81

It wasn’t some Bromley Contingent gobber who said “there is no such thing as society” - it was the longest-serving Prime Minister of the modern era. So of course punk rock registered as youth culture in recession-plagued/pre-Thatcherism England, a rare example of cross-Atlantic inspiration in which America’s UK counterparts proved less artsy. As befits a scene which burned brightly before disseminating into rival camps, these two dozen cuts are mostly curios, although often brief and always clattering. Trivia buffs will enjoy future Midnight Runner Kevin Rowland bellowing his way through a Killjoys number or a Vibrators side-project featuring members Miss Directed, Miss Guided, and C. Slug. Footnote fanciers will dig glorious one-offs from Puncture, The Users, The Jermz. Aesthetes will value the genius of Swell Maps and The Mekons, whose ’78 single “32 Weeks” sounds both primeval and visionary in this context. And I’m sure somebody will get a kick out of the 1.32 “Wot’s For Lunch Mum?”  

 NEAR PICK

Punk 45 Vol. 1 Kill The Hippies! Kill Yourself! The American Nation Destroys Its Young - Underground Punk In The United States Of America 1973-1980

Excepting Blondie, US first-wave punk was underground by definition, so this comp’s title seems overlong and then some. Had the urban Ohio/suburban California focus suggested within the notes held strong rather than detouring into New Orleans and Austin, perhaps these twenty-one selections might have added up to some kind of counter-narrative to New York/London hegemony rather than a noisy grab-bag. And it’s difficult to conceive how anybody curious about one-off singles from The Urinals and X Blank X wouldn’t already claim intimate familiarity with Pere Ubu’s “The Modern Dance” or the Heartbreakers’ “Chinese Rocks”. Yes but still. The loose, wonderful aesthetic under consideration encompasses both the lo-fi pop chug of ’73 Flamin’ Groovies and the keyboard-trilling chants of ’78 Theoretical Girls. Between those two conceptual and geographical peaks lies a lot of fuzz, including enough San Fernando dross (Hillside Strangler, how punk) to give heart to El Lay haters. Avant-garage blur more than no future, although note obvious alternative to killing the hippies: “Kill Yourself”.   

[odyshapemusic]

A Blast from the Metal Plast

In honor of National Heavy Metal Day (11/11/11), I’ve decided to count down my 10 favorite HM albums. This is highly subjective, both in terms of what I like and what constitutes metal. I’ve stayed away from Teena Marie-isms (Mr. Eddy), although I thought about including Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods. Every one of these titles is probably instantly recognizable to folks around here: I’ve never had much success in deviating off the mainstream for my metal fix. Nor is much of this recent vintage in spite of some effort on my part to find a fresh metal stream to swim in. Enlighten me: It wouldn’t be a decent list if there was no room to squabble.

 10. Peter Brotzmann: Machine Gun

9. The Stooges: Fun House

It’s always a challenge to determine how far to go back in a genre exercise. But it does seem to me that there is something about free jazz that served as a spark for what became heavy metal even if its sonic maelstrom was largely expunged from the metal juggernaut going forward—it was a spark that, once the fuse was lit, wasn’t needed for the explosion that followed. At some level bands like the Stooges and the MC5 and early Blue Oyster Cult used distortion and trebly guitar notes to approximate the evanescent epiphany that the best late 60s avant jazz could muster. To me, these two albums are yin and yang, one turning free jazz into proto metal and the other using blotches of quasi-structured atonality to create rock that was not merely heavy. The one element that neither of these records touch, but that becomes a required spice in a lot of heavy metal from late 70s onward, is the progginess of Devotion and Red, both of which just miss my metal top 10.

8.  Black Sabbath: Mob Rules

Let me say something that no self-respecting metalhead would ever admit: I really don’t like Ozzy Osbourne in any form. Even more, Black Sabbath Mach I wasn’t all that much in the technical chops department, something that should never be said of any honest metal band. Yet although Sab had got its shit together by the time of Mob Rules, Ronnie James Dio isn’t a natural fit for me—the soaring quasi-Wagnerian metal vocal style that epitomized the New Wave of British Heavy Metal just isn’t my thing. So why I consider Dio an archetype rather than just another metal primo uomo has more to do with the fact that he seemed like a heck of a nice guy rather than anything to do with my particular fascination with the oeuvre. An oeuvre that shakes the walls on Mob Rules, which mostly expunges the lugubriousness and D&D mystagogy that is so closely associated with Sabbath. This is as typico as my tastes in heavy metal go, but when you are talking about monsterous cuts like the darkly wicked “Falling Off the Edge of the World”, the Zeppy “Slipping Away”, or “Mob Rules” itself in all its glory, it’s far enough.

7. Dinosaur Jr.: You’re Living All Over Me

If there is a vibration that echoes late at night over the heavy metal delta, it’s wafts from the thudding bass that amalgamated first in the Brøotzmann octet and quickly became a required ingredient in metal from Sabbath onward. Nearly uniquely among the alterna-punk legion, Lou Barlow plugged into this fuzzed out hammerclaw sound as a mission statement far more provocative and distinctive than J. Mascis’ phased and sped up post-Neil Young guitar. Too frequently lumped with grunge (which they anticipated by half a decade), their roots and construction led instead to a reimagination of metal matched only by Loose Nut/In My Head-era Black Flag in its post-punk fury. With their debut single “Repulsion” and this landmark album, Dinosaur Jr. got the attention of the entire indie-rock kingdom, even if nobody else could really keep up with them. From the opening thump-thump-blast of “Little Fury Things” (with Lee Renaldo screaming in the background) to the Sabbathy “The Lung” to the bass-driven “In a Jar”, this only lets up its metal credentials slightly on the pre-Sebadoh “Poledo” that closes out the LP. (Note that the Merge CD reissue substantially upgrades the SST pressing, and tags on a killer cover of “Just Like Heaven” to boot.) Mascis threw Barlow out of the band after the subsequent album, Bug, for infantile behavior (which says a lot considering the source), and Mascis only approached this level of mastery without Barlow once, on the shimmering Where You Been? But this is a metal cornerstone, making the case that you don’t have to dress up in spandex and sing like Pavarotti on nitrous to be heavy.

6. AC/DC: Powerage

Does anyone not like AC/DC? Were it not for the band’s perverse refusal to release a greatest hits album, AC/DC would be represented in every single record collection in the known universe.  Two things about this band. The first is that they’ve never expanded beyond a basic blues structure, insofar as they’ve never needed anything more than pentatonic riffing to bring hell to high order. Second is that, most metal is annoying with all the ego (vocal histrionics, magnum opus guitar solos, etc), whereas AC/DC is 200 proof id. So how do you convince someone who’s never heard AC/DC (say, a Martian) that AC/DC brings it? I have all sorts of hormonal reasons to stick up for Black In Black, which came out when I was 17 (the height of my powers!) and was the first mainstream rock record I went for after selling my Skynyrd and Allman Brothers records in punk/new wave immersion a couple of years before. But however leather-lunged Brian Johnson is, and however much ominous awesomeness the intro to “Hell’s Bells” brings to the party, Powerage is the AC/DC I’m playing for that Martian.  Unlike so many other AC/DC records (not Back in Black though), Powerage isn’t just a couple of jewels amid the rock. In fact, none of its tunes have acquired FM-radio classic status, as befits the band’s first fully integrated album of songs. Yet in killer track after killer track (the cognoscenti will stand up for “Sin City”, “Riff Raff”, “Rock & Roll Damnation”) AC/DC move ever so slightly away from the juvenilia of their hit-or-miss formative work. Most importantly, Powerage is the best place to go to understand Mr. Bon Scott. He casts asides like a lecherous old man, when he shouts it’s like a horn player cutting through the guitars, and from start to finish the fun he is having is inescapable. Put it on, turn it up, and power down your frontal lobe for 40 minutes.  Good enough for Keith Richards, good enough for me.

5. Slayer- Reign in Blood

If Your Living All Over Me is punk turning metal, then this is the opposite: a standard issue metal band cranks up the BPM, rips apart verse-chorus-verse, and flirts with Wire-esque song lengths, going hardcore on our asses in the process. Some things I note about Reign In Blood: 1) As Slayer tone down the Satanic yammer of their preceding albums, they turn to Mengele for lyrical ruminations instead. 2) Total running time: 29 minutes. 3) Drummer Dave Lombardo (who might as well be named Jackhammer) quit Slayer during the Reign In Blood tour, giving his reason as “I wasn't making any money, I think I had just gotten married.” Insofar as the lyrics of Reign In Blood evoke brutality, it is in service to brutal music, which is why charges that the band equivocates on the immorality of the SS don’t stick. (I mean, please, shouldn’t it be required to actually read the lyrics through once before throwing Nazi daggers into the air?) So yes it’s all here—headthumping tempos, death-defying interlocking guitar, guttural inchoate vocals that track a provocative lyric sheet, all of which (excepting the lyric sheet itself) fit on one side of a cassette at the time of Reign In Blood’s initial release in 1986. Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth-- they all should have called it quits after this appeared. In fact, the only thing that holds a candle to this is Ministry’s Psalm 69 runefest, which arrives in a place similar to Reign In Blood even if its raw ingredients are different. So let’s give some love for the man who melded this all together—Rick Rubin, who has got to be the only record producer who can claim to his credits classic albums in three genres as dispersed as hip-hop, metal, and country. Do the Avett Brothers count as boy band? Holy moly.

4. Dio: Holy Diver

I instinctively disliked this record for most of its existence. But I enjoyed it when the That Metal Show guys put it number one on their best-of heavy metal this-or-that lists. Not because I was being kitschy, I just got a kick out of these ingratiating metalheads having opinions so obviously divergent from my own. I say I disliked this album instinctively because I barely ever heard it, certainly not all the way through. I turned the sound off when the Dio videos popped up on MTV. Nothing could be worse than a histrionic European (well he sang in Rainbow and Sabbath but I didn’t know he was actually from New Hampshire) singing songs of Satan over clunky sub-Paranoid guitar churn. So then RJD up and died through no fault of his own, and come to find out the guy was a saint. A champion. A passionate metal crusader. So I bought a copy of Holy Diver on Amazon for next to nothing to have what was definitely intended to be a kitsch-fest. And boy did I feel embarrassed and stupid when I fell in love with the CD first time through. It opens with Motorhead-worthy riffage, the sound is stripped down for circa 1983 metal, sparing on the guitar overdubs, and let’s give some serious props to the drummer, Vinnie Apice, who is just totally wicked here. But the songs are what really sell this album. Without ever deviating from post-NWOBHM orthodoxy, RJD (who produces here as well as singing and writing) carefully structures his songs around awesome chord changes (the riff that drives “Gypsy” is power pop-ready), sing-along chants (“Holy Diver”), and—wait for it—hooks galore (“Caught In the Middle”, “Rainbow in the Dark”). If you require some suspension of disbelief to get through the vocals and lyrics here, then so be it; underneath that is a glorious testament to a heavy metal hero.

3. feedtime- Shovel

OK, the genre of music here is open for debate.  Fist-to-skull music? Gadget-core? Offal rock? This is the only album I know of that makes Hüsker Dü’s Metal Circus sound like the Osmond Brothers. (I lie. Actually Black Vinyl Shoes.) By virtue of thy oppressively brutal disinterest in anything other than ROAR!, oh Shovel I deem thee most metal. And about that, the music nerd in me wants to ask, so what’s up with all this monolithic threnody? All three of you guys are from Australia, right? I mean, I know other bands from Australia, like this one from Brisbane that you don’t really sound like, so where did all this BRAACCGGHBLAMBLAM come from? Also, do you hog-whip people at your shows? Because it sounds like you might and that scares me. And what exactly do you need the shovel for anyway? So yes we have a band here who wield distorto-stun bass along with fuzzed out guitar (played out of tune and with a bottleneck, nice touch man) and ferociously monotonous drumming at the service of lyrics that are totally incomprehensible but delivered with a passion that borders on biker speed psychosis. There is no point in distinguishing one song from another with regard to any measure of quality other than to say that there is a band of silence in between each one. This is heavy metal forged from one indefinitely repeated 4/4 measure of free jazz but tempered with layers of distortion, obdurate unirhythm, and a dynamic range of 3 full tones on the pentatonic scale. Plus live raccoon skinning going on in the background. I play Shovel whenever I hate people. I play this a lot.

2. Led Zeppelin- Presence

The folks who argue that Led Zeppelin doesn’t count as “heavy metal” make the point that Zep was too stylistically diverse for the category, but in reality it’s because those folks haven’t given this staggeringly cacophonous album the attention that it deserves. Framed by the twin tragedies of Robert Plant’s car accident (he recorded the vocals for Presence from a wheelchair) and his 5-year old son’s unexpected death, and recorded and mixed in less than three weeks, Zeppelin stripped their music down to the raw essence of the band: Jimmy Page left his acoustic guitars behind at Boleskine House and Plant banished the faeries to the moors before coming to the studio. What is left is an extended colloquy between Page’s army of guitars and John Bonham polyrhythmic traps on the topic of relentlessness. Whereas Bonham used to mess around with the 3rd and 4th beats of a measure, here he is all in front (which is why for the first time Zep’s once-per-album James Brown homage doesn’t sound like a parody). Bonham’s drums are the lead instrument for “Achilles’ Last Stand”—pay attention to how he sets the pattern of the song during the push-pull intro, goes across that rhythm during the first part of Page’s guitar solo, and then brings those two elements together as the song winds down. Or listen to how he takes control of the harmonica interlude in “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”. Bonham’s ride-the-Furies onslaught showcased on Presence became a defining feature of New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands, and it’s not even the coolest thing going on here. Because that would be Jimmy Page’s quasi-Nordic guitar work. Recording all of the overdubs in one 18-hour session (how did those guys do that kind of thing back then?), Page creates a trebly, chiming and churning guitar sound that, when the ensemble sections all come together, sounds like a black metal Basie band. Presence may not be the best Zep album ever (that would be Physical Graffiti), but by toning down the chutzpah and stripping away the filler, it is their most singularly metal moment.

1. Motorhead- Ace of Spades

I’m not sure how best to set the table for this musical fast food epiphany except to say that it’s the ultimate heavy metal meal.  N=1 in a Venn diagram that includes punk, all forms of metal, British cowboys (who bring with them a soupçon of Nazi curiosity, take it as it is), teeth-grinding people bored by silence, short-wave radio enthusiasts trying to track down marooned WWII survivors who don’t exist, and people who survive head injury without long-term sequelae. Ace of Spades is that adrenalized moment in a roller coaster ride where the cart you are in starts going down the steepest descent, repeated over and over. The one aspect of heavy metal that trips so many people up is the sense that you have to buy in, at least a little bit, to a shared fantasy: the phantasmagoric lyrics, the outfits, the melodrama. But that is not even close to being the case here. Motorhead is about getting down to business: Set your briefcase down, unlock it, pull out the sawed off Remington Model 11, and start shooting. And every single song they shoot out here is a classic. The slowest one, “The Chase Is Better Than the Catch”, would rock out 99% of the metal world, “(We Are) The Roadcrew” is tribute song-as-thunderclap, and there is no catching up to speed metal like “Ace of Spades” itself. It would be a shame to call this heavy metal for people who don’t like heavy metal: Ace of Spades still has every element that the chains-and-maloik crowd demands. This is the great shining moment where it all comes together. ‘Nuff said. Turn it up!

[odyshapemusic]

Sunday Morning Coming Down #Eighteen

• "My reaction to the New Yorker piece was that it was a piece from Mad Magazine. I saw it, I read it, cursorily glanced at it. It was so ridiculous. I had no idea anybody could conceive of it as being true." Sonny Rollins addresses the sloppy satirical New Yorker "Sonny Rollins In His Own Words" piece over at Sonny Rollins.com.

• "Hanna is the rebel grrrl older sister many of us millennials dreamed of having – someone who could show us how to navigate girlhood’s profound, ubiquitous challenges head-on, with fire and grit. I can’t think of a better mentor for Cyrus right now." The Kathleen Hanna/Miley Cyrus album probably won't happen, but The Guardian's Charlotte Richardson Andrews says we can dream.

• "With the skyline in the background, Lollapalooza once again brought three days of music to Chicago's Grant Park. Kings of Leon and Artic Monkeys rocked out, Skrillex and Calvin Harris kept the crowd dancing, Outkast and Nas rapped some of the greatest verses ever written, Iggy Azalea played her song of the summer and a few dedicated people dressed up as those inflatable tube-men that wave outside car dealerships. Here's the best things we saw." Jessica Hopper, Stacey Anderson, and Brittany Spanos over at RS recount with impeccable readability the goings-on at Lollapalooza 2014. 

• "It speaks to Nina Simone’s intelligence and restless force that, in her twenties, she attracted some of African-American culture’s finest minds. Both Langston Hughes and James Baldwin elected themselves mentors: Simone, appearing on the scene just as Holiday died, seemed to evoke their most exuberant hopes and most protective instincts. But Hansberry offered her a special bond. A young woman also dealing with a startling early success—Hansberry was twenty-eight when “A Raisin in the Sun” won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, in 1959—she had a strongly cultivated black pride and a pedagogical bent. 'We never talked about men or clothes,' Simone wrote in her memoir, decades later. 'It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk.'" Claudia Roth Pierpont writes on the many battles of Nina Simone for The New Yorker.

• "We made a single. It was written by Glenn O’Brien. His review about our live show said, “These kids sound like they listen to dub for breakfast.” So, we made a song called “We Eat Dub For Breakfast” as a B-side. The next thing, Glenn O’Brien was reviewing our single and said, “This song is about something I wrote about them in another review.” All of this happened pretty quickly." Michael Lachowski of Pylon talks to Kim Taylor Bennett about boomboxes and Kraftwerk for Noisey.

• "In an open letter to Dylan, printed in the November 1964 issue of the influential folkie publication Sing Out!, editor Irwin Silber beseeched folk music’s wonder boy to return to his old self, rather than relate to “…a handful of cronies behind the scene". In his heartfelt missive, Silber claims Dylan has “somehow lost touch with people” and had become intoxicated with “the paraphernalia of fame.” Silber mentions Dylan’s affection for James Dean and how “that awful potential for self-destruction which lies hidden in all of us and which can emerge so easily and so uninvited.” For all his concern for Dylan’s well-being, Silber missed the point." It was 50 years ago today (pretty much): Allen Rabinowitz looks back at Another Side Of Bob Dylan for Consequence Of Sound.

• "In his quest to save obscure music, Bastos told me, Freitas sometimes buys records he doesn’t realize he already owns. This spring he finally acquiesced to Bastos’s pleas to sell some of his duplicate records, which make up as much as 30 percent of his total collection, online. “I said, ‘Come on, you have 10 copies of the same album — let’s sell four or five!’ ” Bastos said. Freitas smiled and shrugged. “Yes, but all of those 10 copies are different,” he countered." Brazilian Zero Freitas on his quest to buy every record ever made, at NYT.

• "Victor’s presence at the creation mattered to Mr. Dylan, said Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian and author of “Bob Dylan in America,” a 2010 best seller. “It’s a sense of loyalty, of kinship,” he said. “You were brothers together. You were scuffling. That’s why Dylan brought him back.”" NYT's Sam Tanehaus talks with Jacob Maymudes - author of a new and oddly personal Dylan biography.