ROCK
& RAP CONFIDENTIAL
No. 232
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WHY KISS AIN’T ON OUR LIST...
Dave Marsh writes: In the fall of 1973,
recently arrived in New York City and besotted by the extraordinary shows I’d
seen by the New York Dolls in Queens and downtown Manhattan, I decided I wanted
to investigate who the city’s best bands other than the Dolls might be. This
wound up being a story that ran first in Newsday, the Long Island daily where I had the pop music
beat; then Creem, which I was no longer editing but still writing for;
and finally the British weekly, Melody Maker.
The article, which may have been headlined Great White Rock in its first
appearance, boasted that there were currently a dozen “excellent” rock acts in
the New York City area, and talked about eight of those I had seen. In order of
appearance they were: The Dynomiters, Harlots of 42nd Street, Kiss, Luger,
Elliott Murphy’s Aqua Show, New York Central, Queen Elizabeth featuring Wayne
County and Teenage Lust. (I can’t remember why I didn’t mention the Miamis. I
loved the Miamis—on stage anyway, like so many of these bands, that group was
never captured right on tape.)
Coming up with a punk icon (Wayne County), one of the key New York
singer-songwriters of the period whose career has lasted forty years (Elliott
Murphy), and a huge pop success in the space of 2,500 words isn’t bad. But
history—helped along by Wikipedia which at least three people have tried to
amend for accuracy, all rejected by the mysterian Wikiprocess—remembers none of
this. If it did, the Kiss Army might salute me rather than flooding my website
with what amounts to “nyah, nyah, nyah,” now that Kiss is finally going to get
into the Hall of Fame.
Because that article was the first mention of Kiss in the press, and it
was not hostile. In its entirety it reads:
“This group looks as if it just stepped out of the underground movie
Pink Flamingos, leading me to believe that I was right all along in
thinking that the glitter craze was an ugliness contest.
“But Kiss's music sounds as if it is the most
thought-out, controlled sound around, and the stage show is just as
professional. And, they say, Eddie Kramer (of Led Zeppelin and Electric
Ladyland) wants to produce them. Heavy metal meets El Topo.”
OK, I called them ugly. Why the fuck did you think they
added the face paint? Other than that, it’s at least a kind of backhanded
praise. It’s honest, too. I didn’t like Kiss, but I recognized what they had
going for them (though I wish I had mentioned manager Bill Aucoin, a great
market manipulator who’s been cheated out of almost all credit thanks to the
megalomania infesting that band’s camp.)
Musically, I was done with them before I ever turned the
first album over to the second side. Kiss had an extraordinary aptitude for
adopting every cliché in hard rock history, and a complete absence of any
ability to create so much as a hint of a new one. (I suppose maybe they were the
model for Motley Crue?) The most interesting of their studio albums is
Destroyer, and it’s not all that interesting, except as an example of the
highly professional output of producer Bob Ezrin and guitarist Dick Wagner
during the mid-‘70s. On their own, they were not clever at coming up with riffs,
the beats are as repetitious as punk but without the energy, and their most interesting lyric is
“Beth” which is nothing more than third-rate Bob Seger blended with second-rate
Billy Joel, or maybe “Detroit Rock City” which is a clumsy J. Geils swipe...and
so forth except for the disco album, I guess.
But they have the best make-up in the Hall. Until Insane Clown Posse is
inducted, at least.
I
realize this paints Kiss as more mediocre than incompetent, but....well, if the
only qualification is having made a record at least 25 years before the ballots
got mailed out, they are qualified, and perhaps I shall be fortunate enough not
to live to see the advent of Justin Bieber and One Day in the Hall's once
formidable list of inductees.
And yeah, Kiss inspired a lot of kids to want to be in bands. So did half
a dozen girls (and boys!) in every high school graduating class.
All that mediocrity was harmless enough until the boastful bassist
decided to turn it into a propaganda machine for the only two things he’s ever
loved: Gene Simmons and money. Sex Money Kiss, his book on how to become
a rich success, offers a stupendous (or maybe I mean stupefying) blend of
preposterous career advice, dangerously over-simplified and inaccurate economic
information and advice, and an account of human intercourse—by which I don’t
mean just sex--that verifies emotional stagnation at the age of maybe fourteen.
You could figure the same stuff out in maybe fifteen minutes of watching his
dumb-ass TV show. (Yes, this means
I passed on reading the other two. Pointless repetition is one of the worst
things about Kiss.)
Alas, Simmons also has politics, of a sort, though I’d sure he would deny
anything of the kind because that might alienate part of the audience—although
since he views the rest of the species as essentially a chain of ATMs, maybe
not. He is basically a cheerleader for capitalism and spreading the U.S. system
abroad in ways that make Bono look like John Maynard Keynes.
Then there are his sexual politics, which amount to “Bend over, meat” and
I mean that literally. It is true that Simmons imagines all other human beings
(except his sainted mama and perhaps his kids) as inherently inferior to
himself, but he has a particular
contempt for women. I stopped being amused by this along about the time
that he began to boast about his Polaroid collection. The misogynist
misanthropy reaches a pinnacle in
his 2008 book, Ladies of the Night: A Historical and Personal Perspective on
the Oldest Profession in the World.
It seems odd that he didn’t write the book he’s best qualified for on
this topic, which would be a history of pimping. Because if Simmons isn’t an evangelist
he is certainly a peddler, and he practices the hard sell and the emotional con.
Kiss didn’t have fans, it had an Army because they were the biggest band of
their era. The truth is, Kiss never sold more than 2 million copies of a studio
album although that was precisely the time when the Bee Gees and Fleetwood Mac,
the Eagles and a bunch of others began to sell 10 million (and more). One reason
Kiss’s audience is early teenagers-- though these days that is true more often
emotionally than chronologically, of course—is that only someone stuck there
would be so militantly gullible.
Why shouldn’t Kiss be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? Because they
have added not the slightest musical value to rock, which is why they were not
especially huge record sellers. And because, so far, in one way or another, the
Hall has avoided honoring the music at its most mercantile and shallow.
But above all because there are so many worthy candidates who are not in
the Hall of Fame. At the snail ‘s pace at which the Hall parcels out induction,
many of the artists in the list below will be dead before they are even on the
ballot. In Kiss’s own genre and time, by which I mean 1970s hard rock, almost
every fan of it as a whole (as opposed to the Kiss Army) would agree that at
least Cheap Trick, Deep Purple, Judas Priest and Motorhead are not just more
deserving, but far, far better choices. Not every one of these fifty artists,
who operated at more or less the same time as Kiss, are going to end up in the
Hall of Fame nor should they. But they’re all better than Kiss.
Alice in Chains
Anthrax
Bad Brains
Bad Company
Black Oak Arkansas
Black Crowes
Blue Oyster Cult
Body Count
Bootsy’s Rubber Band
Canned Heat
Cheap Trick
The Commodores
Deep Purple
Def Leppard
Dio
Foreigner
Free
J. Geils Band
Humble Pie
Iron Maiden
The James Gang
Rick James
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
Judas Priest
Krokus
Living Colour
MC5
Molly Hatchet
Mother’s Finest
Motorhead
Mott the Hoople
Mudhoney
New York Dolls
Ted Nugent / Amboy Dukes
Ohio Players
Pantera
Poison
Procol Harum
The Scorpions
Sepultura
Social Distortion
Soundgarden
Steppenwolf
Twisted Sister
Ten Years After
Thin Lizzy
The Time
War
W.A.S.P.
White Zombie
(This list was compiled by RRC, not Dave Marsh
alone.)
*****
THE VICTORY TOUR…. “I need to know/If the world says it’s time to go/Tell
me, will you break out?”
This refrain, which calls out from the frenzied forward
bounce of Janelle Monae’s “Dance Apocalyptic,” is the kind of lyrical element
that worms its way into the back of your head and pans its way from ear to ear
throughout the day. That’s because it’s important. The song’s video shows Monae
with her hair down, risking an entirely new look, some mix of Nona Hendryx and
Aaliyah, playing guitar, breaking out into the night with a post-apocalyptic
biker gang.
Though the most musically ambitious pop star of the past
twenty years obviously foresees a moment when everything will change, her new
album, Electric Lady (Bad Boy), is about how to survive the world prior
to that moment. That’s why another line that lingers in the head is from the
stately ballad “Victory”—“To be victorious, you must find glory in the little
things.”
Monae’s a strategic thinker but one who takes time with
the details. She built her base with Atlanta’s Wondaland Arts Society, an
alliance of artists building on and consciously expanding the existing
collectivity of Southern rap’s Dungeon Family, and that Southern rap collective
is well represented here by Ray Murray (Organized Noize), Cee-Lo Green (Goodie
Mob) and Monae’s early champions, OutKast’s Andre 3000 and Big Boi. Many of us
first saw her open up for the white alternative act Of Montreal, and we watched
her win over that indie crowd with a perfectly honed rock and roll tent revival.
Then she toured with Bruno Mars, her vision making the tour more double bill
than headliner and opener. This tour also allowed Monae to reach tweenyboppers
and show established fans she could expand to an auditorium mainstage without
losing her intensity. Since then, she has opened for Katy Perry, Prince and
Stevie Wonder—fusing every strain of popular American music (Charlie Chaplin to
Jimi Hendrix, for starters) into rock show crescendos marked by charismatic fits
(Monae shaken by the spirit on the stage floor) and the five foot tall rocker’s
exuberant crowd surfing. To feel the uplift of Monae’s live show is to give in
to the ecstatic vision that once got a lot of rock and roll records burned.
Growing up in a neighborhood held together by three
churches, Monae no doubt knows that great lesson from Isaiah, “Without a vision,
the people perish.” While critics scratch their heads over the sci-fi concept of
her body of work, Monae moves forward with confidence that her fans get the idea
of mass liberation and subordinate the trivia to bigger concerns—the bad ass
struts of her duets with Prince and Solange on, respectively, “Givin ‘Em What
They Love” and “Electric Lady,” the funky, simmering build of her duet with
Miguel on “Primetime,” and the soulful shimmy of “Q.U.E.E.N.,” her collaboration
with Erykah Baduh .
On “Q.U.E.E.N.,” as elsewhere, she name-checks her
hometown, crying, “I’m trying to free Kansas City.” This sentiment is echoed later in
“Ghetto Woman,” Monae’s funky, driven tribute to her mother, a
woman—representative of so many—she fears is misunderstood by the world because
“all you ever needed was someone to free your mind.” “Free your mind” here
becomes something more than thinking big, it’s about the need for others to
share in the burden, it’s about a community that believes a new world is
possible.
After that, “Victory” serves as the album’s peak, Monae’s
voice having never ridden a more beautiful melody, never sounded more relaxed,
never more confident in the “mustard seed” she knows will one day move
mountains. The near-perfect final third of the record caresses the dawning of a
new day coming—most viscerally on the classic rock of “Sally Ride.” On the
80’s-flavored world-pop expanse of “What an Experience” she refers to her lover
as “a good red wine” (yes, you can hear the UB40 in the mix), making a sacrament
for artist and audience, holding tight to the moment, building toward the
future.—D.A.
FEET DON’T FAIL ME NOW… When I was in Navy boot camp, we spent most of our time
marching. Marching to chow, marching to the rifle range, marching out to the big
concrete grinder to continue marching as we practiced for our graduation parade.
One of the recruits in our company, a kid from LA named Johnny Baiseri, was
chosen to march us when the drill instructor wasn’t around. Johnny was half
Mexican, half Arab, and he taught us how to march to commands given in Spanish
and Arabic. We got really good at it and we loved to do it when we’d pass by
some high-ranking brass. We were doing what we were told yet we felt totally
defiant. The brass could sense it but what could they say?
We also had a couple of guys in the company who had been
on competitive drill teams in high school. They taught us to think of marching
as a dance. Make your foot hit the ground with a bounce. Put joy in your step.
Move that rifle from side to side like a woman on the dance floor.
So there we were, eighty guys out on the grinder. Johnny
carried a ceremonial sword that he
would raise before we began to move. Then he would bring it down like a
conductor cuing the orchestra. Off we went as one, making music however we
could. We would turn on a dime—right angles, oblique angles, 180s--singing in
English (“Your mother was born on your left….go right!”), Spanish, and Arabic,
stopping with a satisfying final doubletime one-two with the feet. We were
completely regimented yet felt totally free.
We were hardly Sly and the Family Stone, but they heard the same drummer
we did. On the previously unissued instrumental “Wide World of Color” from the
new boxed set Higher (Sony Legacy), the tune is driven by stately bass
lines and parade ground drums, the horns darting in and out to keep everything
in line, just as Johnny Baiseri did with us. Rehearsed til the band was as tight
as a hairpin turn, Sly and the Family Stone were completely regimented yet felt
totally free.
The fact that the pinnacle of what my boot camp company
could create was the equivalent of a mere dab of paint on the Family Stone
canvas shouldn’t obscure what we had in common—the need to make sound into
feeling no matter what.—L.B.
DANCE TO THE MUSIC…. In the industrial Midwest where I come from, the civil
rights movement led to integration in the workplace and, in many cases, the
neighborhood. Black and white
worked together, we lived next door to each other, we listened to a lot of the
same music. But we didn’t socialize. We didn’t party together.
This was partly due to the residue of American history, going back to the
seventeenth century when the master class had to pass laws to keep slaves and
white indentured servants apart. It was solidified by the backlash against the
civil rights movement, most shockingly reflected in segregationist Alabama
governor George Wallace’s campaigns for President. Wallace received a high
percentage of the Midwestern blue collar vote in 1964, 1968, and 1972. It seemed
then that racial division at the heart of America was permanent and intractable.
Would things ever change?
This separation began in the early years of American
history. In the seventeenth century, white indentured servants and black slaves
had grown so close that the master class felt threatened. So they passed laws to
keep white and black people apart. This taboo was strengthened by the, as reflected in
the George Wallace campaigns for president in 1964, 1968 and 1972. Wallace
received a high percentage of the Midwestern blue collar each time he ran, the
result of white backlash against the civil rights movement. It seemed then that
racial division at the heart of America was intractable. Would things ever
change?
Enter disco. The history of disco is always told through the prism of
club life in New York City. That’s accurate, but incomplete. At its peak, disco
was so popular that it leapt across all boundaries. In Rust Belt factory towns,
it seemed that every club and every bar had a mirror ball and a lighted dance
floor. The channels of daily life that still kept us separate overflowed and we
came together. To dance. To party. The racial tension that was never far from
the surface in the mills and factories released itself on weekend nights as
human nature asserted itself and broke the shackles of history. We moved through
a haze of music, light, and smoke and became one. It was fucking
beautiful.
On Sunday morning segregation reasserted itself. We might as well have
been living in South Africa—church congregations were black or they were white,
no exceptions. But we were too hung
over to think about it. On Monday we were back at work and the competition to
climb the ladder to better jobs resumed. So did the friction that accompanied
it. Until the next weekend.
For this process to continue, it needed a star to follow,
not just disco’s one-hit wonders (who in the hell was Crown Heights Affair?). It
fell to Donna Summer to pump up the volume. She really was the Queen of Disco.
She urged us to dance, not with the rote patter of some TV host, but like a
doctor who has the cure to your disease. Try it, you’ll like it. And since the
dominant dance, the Hustle, was almost as simple as the Twist, everyone did it.
Her songs spoke to our needs and our longings from some mutual place deep inside
and we responded.
Donna Summer drew us toward her by flaunting sex but also
because she understood our world of work.
There was “Working the Midnight Shift” (“My body carries on / But I’m
dying inside”), “She Works Hard for the Money” (“Just tips for pay”), even “Bad
Girls.”
In its classic form, disco eventually faded (though it never
disappeared), but Donna Summer didn’t. She went on to make excellent music that
explored rock, pop, and even reggae. Meanwhile, her disco hits lingered in the
corners of our collective consciousness, marking time until someone came along
and figured out what to do with them.
That someone turned out to be two people: Dahlia Ambach Caplan and
Randall Poster. They’re the producers of Love to Love You Donna (Verve),
a remix album of Donna Summer’s hits. It works because a diverse crew of
remixers digs into the songs and comes up with often startling reimaginations.
It works because the originals are so catchy and well-structured that they can
take wandering paths and still sound something like themselves.
There’s Masters At Work’s version of “Last Dance,” which is mostly subtle
changes as it doubles the length while using a live band and some additional
drum programming, allowing Andrew Synowiec’s guitar the freedom to guide us
through the mix. On the other hand, in Afrojack’s take on “I Feel Love,” the
robots have taken over, big and noisy and destructive like some futuristic heavy
metal, wreaking havoc until Donna enters slyly to imply that it’s all a dream
and everything will be alright. The cherry on top is “La Dolce Vita,” a new song
by Summer and longtime producer Giorgio Moroder. It moves along subtly like the
demure slice of Europop it is until you get to the hook, which is as big and
sweet and dense as a wedding cake.
Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder helped to popularize electronic dance
music over thirty years ago, so it’s tempting to say that Love to Love You
Donna brings them up to date. But that would imply that the music ever went
out of date. Listening to these remarkable remixes caused me to revisit the
originals once again and that confirmed for me that they are timeless. They have
no expiration date. Love to love you baby.—L.B.
*****
LAST
DANCE... Millions of us loved
Donna Summer, and the more you knew her, the more likely it was that you’d be a
fan of her, as well as her music. No one knew her better than Bruce Sudano, her
husband. He shares that knowledge with Angels on a Carousel, his first
solo album since her death. Not the facts--you can look those up. Angels
gets to the heart. It’s a remarkable record, filled with loss and heartbreak,
but at the same time, steeped in faith and memories of the greatest happiness.
On “That’s What It’s All About,” he reduces the truth he’s telling to a single
line: “Live every moment, love all you can.” In his voice, it doesn’t sound like
a cliché, it sounds like a testimonial.
Sudano is a rock’n’roll–maybe more pertinently, rock and
soul--guy, heavily indebted to post-doo wop harmony (Brooklyn Dreams was his
group), but also a terrific guitarist and songwriter, all in ample evidence on
Angels. (At his best, he’s sometimes a kinder, gentler Joe Walsh,
sometimes Dion born ten years later.) And this is not only the work of a very
able veteran, it’s a concept album, about the life and death of a particularly
fortunate couple who even so can’t escape tragedy.
Sudano’s lyrics are suspended between joy that blossomed out of four
decades of romance and agony over those final months when the beautiful couple
was brutally torn apart by cancer. I’ve spent a career hearing sad stories, and
twenty years listening to people talk about losing their loved ones. There’s not
anything new here, I suppose, but there never is. All that separates the one
from the other is the details and the power with which they’re expressed. I also
have spent a lifetime, as we all have, hearing about other people’s great loves
(particularly on “All Those Years Ago”). Same deal. Sudano nails both.
Angels on a Carousel operates as a spiral, moving from a
macrocosmic view to a question that boils down to...”Why?” Sudano doesn’t
bluff—there is no answer. But everything on his album says that is far less
important than living every moment, loving all you can. Nobody will ever make a
greater Donna Summer tribute album.—D.M.
High Hopes, Bruce Springsteen
(Columbia)—While this album is pieced together largely from songs that Bruce has
had for years, it’s still pretty hard to miss the themes inherent in the way
he’s organized the tracks. What you get is a journey from darkness to light, is
the simplest way to explain it.
Much of it sounds very much like the albums he’s made in the last ten
years. Much of it also refers back to albums he made forty years ago . Could it
be happenstance that the question at the heart of “Born to Run”—‘I want to know
if love is real”—reappears here in “This is Your Sword,” which is about a battle
for some kind of more enlightened humanity. (You say it comes from the Vatican,
I say it comes from solidarity with the oppressed—voila! We’re both
right.)
But the real purpose of High Hopes, it ought to be obvious to
everyone with ears, is to showcase his collaborations with Tom Morello. Tom
renews “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and on the other six tracks where he appears, he
explodes and, yes, rages as he hasn’t since his band broke up. Mostly Morello is
the solo guitar, the featured instrumentalist, but it’s more than that. Morello
is a voice from an entirely different rock generation—itself not all that
young—and sparks fly on E Street as a result.
Which perhaps answers the question “Will you still need me?” from “When
I’m 64.”—D.M.
*****
SOMEONE TOLD MY STORY…. In a chapter that explores the reasons behind Johnny
Cash’s successful 90s revival when Merle Haggard couldn’t even get his records
released, Merle Haggard: The Running Kind author David Cantwell compares
the two old friends—“The Man in Black is always edging toward symbol and
myth….[He] starts down-to-earth but soars….The Hag looks to fly, but remains
earthbound in the end. He’s life-sized, circumscribed, life as it is, a
realist—and like a character out of Crane or Dreiser, the Hag is most often not
part of something bigger than himself so much as swept away by forces beyond his
control.”
Though that may sound like a description of weakness, it’s every bit as
much key to Haggard’s strengths. Who else could so well capture the pride
warring with fear in Dustbowl immigrants in “Mama’s Hungry Eyes” and “California
Cottonfields,” so that listeners could believe he was telling his own story? Who
else could have listeners also believing (at least for three minutes time) all
those convict songs he sang, including serving “life without parole” in “Mama
Tried,” that guy serving a life sentence doing hard wage labor on “Working Man’s
Blues” as well as that upright citizen who salutes the college dean in “Okie
from Muskogee”?
Only a visionary artist with “an All-American working
class attitude… as hopeful as it is defensive” would go into the studio and
record an inter-racial love story, “Irma Jackson,” on the heels of recording
“Okie from Muskogee.” The character in that song wants to shout down the “mighty
wall” that stands between white and black, but, out of fear, out of a sense of
pragmatism, he doesn’t. For similar reasons, Haggard himself buried that single
for two years, and, instead, put out the hard-hat anthem, “The Fightin’ Side of
Me.” That move might be called a sell-out, or it might be called riding a rough
wave. What matters at least as much is, after he finally put out Ms. Jackson,
this is the same artist who could turn what may be the saddest Christmas song
ever, 1973’s “If We Make It Through December,” into the strongest crossover hit
of his career.
In 274 pages of vivid, graceful storytelling, RRC’s good friend David
Cantwell grapples with the key complexities of one of the most important
musicians in American history, a man who embodies (and has repeatedly paid
homage to) the tradition that ties together Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills and Lefty
Frizzell while laying the foundations for country sensibilities that have all
but shoved his brand of realism off popular radio. In so doing, Cantwell gets at
the musical and political contradictions at the heart of America.
Above
all, what makes this work is the intimacy with which Cantwell captures this
music—complicating our understanding of the Bakersfield sound, sharply defining
the different strengths that made Bonnie Owens, Leona Williams, George Jones and
Willie Nelson particularly important collaborators at various points in
Haggard’s career, and capturing the experience of the songs themselves, vividly
showing, for instance, why “Kern River” may well be the scariest record to take
place at that all-important American setting, the river’s edge, and why “Sing Me
Back Home” says volumes about the death penalty, almost none of them explicitly
in the lyric. By not sacrificing the music for the ideas or the ideas for the
music, Cantwell argues why the voices we most need to hear, the voices Haggard’s
spent a lifetime breathing life into, are those using every tool at their
disposal to navigate the roughest currents of a world changing like never
before.—D.A.
*****
THIS MONTH’S DOWNLOADING
PROSPECTS….12 Stories, Brandy
Clark (Slate Creek)--“We pray to Jesus
and we play the lotto ‘cause there ain’t but two ways we can change tomorrow,”
Clark sings, opening her debut with a sympathetic song about a life of limits
and no clear way out. Using restrained—but notably simmering—country
arrangements, Clark’s debut stacks up the details of everyday blues in exquisite
detail, telling you exactly why, for instance, a mom smokes a joint in her
kitchen after finishing her “to-do” list on “Get High.” As with great blues, the
pain tends to be cut with humor, turning the murderous rocker “Stripes”—“the
only thing saving your life is I don’t look good in orange and I hate
stripes”—into something like fun. And there are shimmers of hope here, too, like
the woman on “Hungover” who puts her life together while her husband is sleeping
one off or moments at the brink of something new, “What’ll Keep Me Out of
Heaven,” “The Day She Got Divorced,” and “Just Like Him.”
De La Tierra (Roadrunner)--Metal
guitarists from Brazil’s Sepultura and Argentina’s A.N.I.M.A.L. join forces with
the bass player from Argentinean ska band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs and the
drummer from Mexico’s Mana for an uncompromising and aggressive set all sung in
Spanish or Portuguese. You don’t need to speak either to be hooked by the melody
of “Somos Uno” or to feel the sadness channeled by anger in “Maldita Historia”
or to be flung past Jupiter by the escape velocity of “Cosmonauta
Quechua.”
La Noche Mas Larga, Buika (Warner
Music)—Buika, 40ish, is from Spain’s Balearic Islands where she was born to
African parents (she now lives in Miami). Singing with what has been accurately
called a “broken sensuality,” she combines Latin music, jazz, and flamenco. On
this, her seventh album, Buika sings in Spanish (her own songs and a
hemisphere’s worth of others), French (Jacques Brel), and English (Billie Holiday’s “Don’t
Explain,” Abbey Lincoln’s “Throw It Away”). She collaborates with guitarist Pat
Metheny on the lovely “No Lo Se” and throughout with producer/arranger Ivan
“Melon” Lewis, who is also a pianist who knows how to use subtlety to generate
power. It comes together best on “Siboney,” a nearly century-old song by Ernesto
Lecuona which describes the homesickness the composer feels being away from his
native Cuba. It manages to combine the sadness of being far away with the sweet
undertow of memory.
Indestructible, Nina Dioz (Nueva
Nation)--If you doubt the vitality of today’s hip hop, check out this Monterrey
rapper’s hard hitting lyrics, slamming rhythms and lush, vivid soundscapes. On
the single “Lo Quiero Matar,” Dioz plunges headlong into the brutality of
domestic violence, while on “La Cumbia Prohibida,” she and sister rapper Li
Saumet re-ignite the revolutionary fun in girl power, and on “2 Cool 4 School,”
Dioz distills rock and roll high school fantasies to their essence, sweetly
singing how she wants those around her to hear her vibrations and feel her voice
in the air. Indestructible can be heard at
https://soundcloud.com/
Strictly Business, EPMD
(Priority)—The Long Island duo’s 1988 debut remains fresh and powerful—massive
funk and album rock samples, primitive drum machines, vocal flows that are both
arrogant and laid back, and above all an intense musicality. Classic tracks just
roll out one after the other: “Strictly Business,” “I’m Housin’ (covered to good
effect a generation later by Rage Against the Machine), “You Gots to Chill,”
“It’s My Thing.” Plus five bonus tracks, remixes and dub versions, all
worthy.
Trouble, Natalia Kills
(Interscope)--“Maybe I just fight because I don’t know where I belong,” Natalia
Cappuccini sings on the haunting ballad, “Devils Don’t Fly,” and that seems
about right. That inability to fit in also seems crucial to her distinct appeal
as a bad girl of pop who actually feels dangerous, say, the way Madonna once
did. On the in-your-face techno rocker “Problem” as well as the reflection on
domestic agony, “Saturday Night,” she manages to craft empowering sing-a-longs
out of the messiest of realities.
Mystic Power, Alpha Blondy (VP)—The
veteran African reggae star fleshes out a basic sound with biting rock guitar
(Blondy was once the singer in a rock band), simple synths, several guest
vocalists and everything from harmonica to violin. The result is a soundtrack
for his wide ranging political canvas, which condemns French colonialism on the
one hand (“France a Fric,” which means “France has money”) to anti-immigrant
nationalism in his native Ivory Coast (“Danger Ivoirite”). There’s a French
language cover of “I Shot the Sheriff” (“J’ai Tue le Commissaire”) and the
countryish “Reconciliation,” which has the dual meaning of healing after the
Ivory Coast civil war and the end to Alpha Blondy’s beef with fellow reggae star
Tiken Jah Fakoly, who is featured on the track. Best of all may be “Hope,” a
collaboration with Jamaica’s Beenie Man which combines their very different
styles to great effect.
“I Can’t Remember to Forget You” Shakira
(featuring Rihanna) (RCA)--The ska rhythm on the verses certainly points up
the Latin American connections between these Colombian and Barbadian singers,
but this dazzling pop song also drives home their connection as rock vocalists.
The chorus’s hard driving guitar and drums allow Shakira to press the song’s
angst, while Rihanna adds to the tension by keeping her cool and absolutely
selling the outlaw line, “I’d rob and I’d kill to keep him with me/I’d do
anything for that boy.” And if the line between art and life seems disturbingly
blurry there, the strength of these two women’s interplay is every bit as
reassuring.
The River & The Thread, Rosanne
Cash (Blue Note)--Cash’s resonant vocals perfectly suit these reflections on
the singer’s Southern roots. Standouts include the crackling rocker “Modern
Blue,” the brooding “The Long Way Home,” the haunted “Night School” and a
gorgeous cover of Jesse Winchester's “Biloxi.”
Mercy, Jon Cowherd (Blue
Note/ArtistShare)—Cowherd, who has worked with everyone from Iggy Pop to
Cassandra Wilson, has been the keyboardist in the Brian Blade Fellowship since
its inception in 1997, so the easy empathy here between him and drummer Blade
comes as no surprise. As both a writer and a player, Cowherd takes his time,
winding around, back and forth, sometimes repeating in a circle, seldom giving
an obvious big emotional payoff. Instead he invites the listener to join him in
the sheer delight of the feelings the piano can evoke in the hands of someone
who can play anything but who chooses always to play that just right thing.
Boiling away underneath is Brian Blade who, like major influence Art Blakey, is
capable of sharp turns and loud attacks while never losing sight of his duty to
support the whole. Guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist John Pattatucci get in
where they fit in, which is just where they should be.
Bad Self Portraits, Lake Street Dive
(Signature Sounds)—They first attracted attention with a YouTube video of a
jazzy, retro performance of “I Want You Back” on a Boston sidewalk. Their Motown
roots actually go back a little bit further than that, seeming to stop dead
center on “You Can’t Hurry Love.” With just guitar, (acoustic) bass, and drums
they strip that classic sound down but then keep building it back up, mostly by
adding interesting vocal embellishments around the singing of Rachael Price. Her
strong, brassy voice is at home in rock and jazz (she’s also sung with the likes
of Joshua Redman). Like early Motown it’s all about love, but here it’s songs
about romance in the context of living in your parents basement or chasing a
local lounge singer or trying to justify what may (or may not) be morally
justifiable. Here and there LSD hints at experimentation, so maybe their next
album will flow from Motown’s Norman Whitfield psychedelic
period.
*****
PATTY CAKE…. “Silver Bell was buried in the new corporate
regime,” Patty Griffin writes in the liner notes for her latest album. “Thirteen
years and some days after its recording it is being released commercially for
the first time with brand new mixes from the legendary Glyn Johns, who has
managed to rescue large portions of it from the trends of its day and, for me,
has breathed some new life into the time capsule known as Silver Bell.”
The first track on the album, “Little God,” seems to be about the very
music industry whose financial high jinks led to this magnificent work being
shelved in 2000. “Good morning, little God,” Griffin sings, “I see you’ve come
for me again / With a noose between your teeth / You are not my friend.”
The over-production on the original version of the album which Glyn Johns
has now stripped off? “You tell me to throw the fight / Go and place your little
bet.”
The kind of record company executive who would impose his “vision” upon
an artist is familiar to us all, either through direct experience or from movies
ranging from Wayne’s World to Dreamgirls. And very familiar to
Patty Griffin, who sings: “Shake, little God / Shake your little fists / All the
strippers think you’re odd / But you leave the biggest tips.”
The music sets the mood with electric guitar lines that slither like a
snake and are at times absolutely creepy. Griffin gets the last laugh when she
spits out an epitaph for the music industry, a death letter that would have made
sense to some in 2000 but is rightly regarded as just plain common sense
today:
They say time is running out
And you don’t know what to do
And I hear them talk about
Another place to live without you
The music on Silver Bell (A&M) shifts back and
forth from country to surging rock & roll to piano-driven ballads, with even
a few hints of electronica. The rock can get almost punkish, yet at other times
the guitar solos sound like something Chet Atkins might have played if he’d
grown up in the desert. In turn, those electric solos find their acoustic
equivalent elsewhere with the gentle breathing of accordion or banjo.
What makes this diverse stew a singular meal is Patty
Griffin’s voice. It can be breathy or sharp, judgmental or forgiving, but
ultimately it is embracing: “What do you wish you were? / Do you wish you were
the light of every star? / Nobody knows but, maybe that’s just what you are.”
She pulls you in so that you are seeing and feeling your world through her eyes
and her world through your eyes. In that process, the last thing you’re
concerned with is the specific nature of the soundtrack.
Griffin works quickly. Her lines and even her words are short (on
“Fragile,” 79% of the words have only one syllable). She makes, say, John
Fogerty songs seem over-written and downright wordy. But although this leaves
space for listeners to inject their own thoughts and feelings, that doesn’t mean
there isn’t a lot to chew on. “Fragile” concludes with this:
Underneath the waves
Sits your sweet and drowning daughter
Too strong for this world
And too fragile for the water
The title track is about a motel, but only in the sense that
Psycho is a movie about motels. To wit:
The wallpaper is
A color called sea foam
Pull down the shades a little and you’ve
Got yourself a prison cell
Patty Griffin can take individual words or even syllables
and give them a life of their own, playing them like an instrumentalist, putting
them in harmony or conflict with each other as if they were notes. She delivers
the line “Something as simple as boys and girls” on “Mother of God” in a way
that’s not only achingly beautiful on its own but so that it seems to contain
the entire history of male/female relations. Which it probably does. Pushing
further, she sometimes talks in tongues, spraying wordless vocals against the
music to express not religious ecstasy but
pain or depth beyond the reach of any lyric.
Ironically, now that the songs on Silver Bell have been stripped
down they are actually much richer, so much so that a review, a poem, a short
story, or even a novel could be written about each and every one of them. Now
that they have made their collective escape from music industry purgatory, maybe
that will happen. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.—L.B.
*****
LINGER ON…. I was kind of an intermittent Lou Reed fan. There were
things I loved and things that scared me half to death that I couldn’t love or
resist, and things that I thought were just silly, and there was Metal
Machine Music, which was a hoax even if Lou got taken in by it himself. But
he gave me four Velvet Underground albums, each to my adult ear sounding better
than the last, and culminating in Loaded, which for me was a
life-changing experience.
It was the solo albums I felt more hot and cold about. Lou’s singing
reached its peak on the last two Velvets albums--he sounds more fluent, the edge
is more implicit and still sharper. The songs probably got better as time wore
on, since he was a great writer when he got anywhere near a good idea. Later on,
with Robert Quine, he made his purest music ever, simply as sound. The singing
wasn’t as good as earlier, the songs were not always his best, but the tracks
were so good, you could take them by themselves.
He was way beyond bold. Who else would do a bohemian doo-wop tribute
album and climax it with a cynical six and a half minute autobiography? We remember Loaded for “Sweet
Jane” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll” but in its own way, “Oh! Sweet Nuthin,” the extended
ballad that closes the album, is just as good, musically and lyrically. He went
for it, and though he could annoy the fuck out of interviewers, I was smart
enough never to interview him so I could just listen and ignore the stuff I
didn’t like so much and eat up the ones that hit me. The Blue Mask is somebody’s
tour de force, whether Reed’s or Robert Quine’s or both. Quine had more
heart than any other musician in Manhattan in that early ‘80s period, tacking in
from Miles Davis, triangulated by Mick Ronson and Steve Hunter/Dick Wagner.
Most of all Lou had a way of expressing heart, that elusive hoodlum
desideratum of youth in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the greaser rock era, when
to be stand up was the whole game. And throughout his work, whenever it came
time to call his own bluff, tell his own story with the wounds and all, and the
victories that came from the wounds, he triumphed. That is the Lou Reed of
“Street Hassle,” “Coney Island Baby,” “Sweet Jane,” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll.” He
could be Dr. Sardonicus in rock regalia, the rest of the time he could be
superciliously hip, he could even be tender on the final two Velvets albums with
“Pale Blue Eyes,” and “Candy Says” and “Beginning to See the Light.”
I absolutely believe he meant it when he said, “The most
important part of my religion is to play guitar.” And it’s pretty notorious that
I’m hard to convince.
With Loaded’s perfectly matched pair, “Sweet Jane” and “Rock ‘n’
Roll,” Reed upped the stakes for everyone. People had been writing songs about
rock’n’roll and why it mattered and wouldn’t die and maybe made people
invincible (Lou: “It’s an obscure power that can change your life.”) for 15
years. The Showmen’s “It Will Stand” might have been the first and it had the
usual message. But those two songs of Reed’s were about something more: I will
stand.
I still remember the first time I heard them, in the old Creem
magazine offices on Cass Avenue in inner city Detroit. We got the mail early
there. Thursday or Tuesday or whatever day we got 'em, the major label packages
would take a while to listen
through--you might get four or five in a package, which was huge then. And so it
was about three o’clock, maybe four when I got around to playing Loaded.
The opener, "Who Loves the Sun," seemed an unlikely but not inappropriate sequel
to “Pale Blue Eyes,” maybe a weird attempt to do the Beach Boys in S&M drag.
Sounded real good.
And then those two songs came on and it was just...you
felt flattened by 'em, really. When the song hits the emotional breaking point
on "Sweet Jane"--"But anyone who had a heart / He wouldn't turn around and break
it"--you’d have dived into the storm for Lou Reed at that moment. It was so
fucking perfect, especially that ragged harmony, so much my own truth, so much
what I had sought and such a miracle to find. And then "Rock ‘n’ Roll," which
was, I still think, part two of the same song in a lot of ways. Much more a
surface song, but then again--starting at five years old and not believing what
you’re hearing, it was exactly right.
So I turn around about the third time I'm playing the tracks back to
back, top volume on those floor speakers in the huge square cabinets we had and
there stands Johnny B, Mitch Ryder's great drummer and one of my mentors in how
to listen and what to listen to. Mitch’s band rehearsed upstairs and Johnny’s
doing one of his B things, his jaw dropping and his fingers poppin'. And then
the rest of the band comes in and we are all standing there with our brains in
tatters.
Six months later, I'm sitting at a table at the Waldorf, some room where
Mitch is doing a debut party for his Detroit album, and they hit "Rock
'n' Roll," which they’d worked up about a day after first hearing it. We were
sitting right up front, and Lou leans over from across the table next to us and
says, "That's what that song was supposed to sound like."
I didn’t really agree with him even though I was thrilled
he loved Mitch’s version. “Rock ‘n’ Roll” is one of those tunes where the first
time you hear it, if it's your truth, you bond with it like being put on mama's
chest right after they cut the cord.
So I will never miss Lou Reed, he will be
with me until I can no longer hear that gorgeous guitar intro and then “Standin’
on the corner....” all the way through to “and it’s all right now / Oh baby, oh
baby, oh baby,” babbling off into semi-coherence.
There are very few artists who can map the universe of your own heart,
after all.
So linger on, Lou, linger
on.—D.M.
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