Malcolm's Theme

From Ossie Davis's eulogy for Malcolm X, 1965:

What I'm Digging: Krieg and Inquisition

I've been listening to two bands a lot lately on my noisy commute to and from work.

Inquisition is a duo of Portland-based Columbians who play an interesting take on black metal. The singer has the same croaked vocals as Immortal's Abbath, and the lyrics are all about worshipping Satan. What I like about the band is the warped guitar sound he has. There's almost an experimental edge to them. So even though their politics suck (they have a Nazi-themed side project, their early albums were put out on a label that distributes racist metal, etc.)and they are Satan-worshippers, I still really like this. I think the fact that they are Columbian makes their shitty politics a bit easier to take.



So on to a band that aren't Nazi-flirting Satanists....Krieg. (Well, shit, except their name is German for "war").  I really enjoy their 2014 album Transient, which to me sounds like a hardcore record with growled vocals. It's brutal and pummeling and all in the red, and then there will be moments of melody. A really powerful, melancholy record.



I've also been listening to a lot of jazz, so it isn't all latently racist white dude rage music for me, fyi.

Kamasi Washington Review

Kamasi Washington

The Epic 

Brainfeeder, 2015

Originally posted on RapReviews

According to a 2014 Nielsen report, jazz is the least popular genre in America. Jazz made up just 1.4% of all albums sold in 2014, compared with 17% for hip-hop, 30% for rock, and 14% for pop. To put that in perspective, the 5.2 million jazz albums sold in the U.S. in 2014 is only a little more than the total sales of the “Frozen” soundtrack alone. To most people, jazz is background music that all sounds the same, music you might hear at a reception or cafe, but certainly wouldn’t pay to listen to. From my own perspective as a jazz fan who doesn’t listen to contemporary jazz, I think there are a few reasons for this. Jazz has struggled with finding a broader voice in the past twenty years. Unlike metal, another genre that has faded from mainstream favor, there isn’t a robust jazz underground. The jazz that is out there is either avant-garde noise, easy listening smooth jazz, or fiercely traditionalist. It hasn’t found a way to connect with younger audiences, or audiences beyond dedicated jazz heads. Music tastemaker Pitchfork covers experimental music, modern classical music, but almost no jazz. Myself, I am a huge jazz fan, but I almost never listen to anything contemporary. I have hundreds of jazz albums, but only two of them were recorded within the last thirty years. 

And yet jazz has the potential to speak to current audiences. People still have an appetite for instrumental music, as the success of EDM in recent years proves. People also have an appetite for music that challenges traditional song structures, whether it be in the form of composers like Max Richter, electronic artists like Oneohtrix Never, or extreme metal artists like Liturgy. There is also still an audience for music that swings and grooves, both from the jam band end of the spectrum and the funk and R&B end.

Enter Kamasi Washington and the West Coast Get Down. They are a group of 10 L.A.-based jazz performers who all grew up together playing in high school. Many of them had parents or music teachers who were session musicians in funk and R&B bands, so grew up surrounded by music. I heard of Kamasi for the same reason most people heard of him: he played on Kendrick Lamar’s new album, and his album came out on Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label. (It’s no coincidence that Kamasi is co-signed by Flying Lotus; “You’re Dead!” was basically a jazz album).  From that background, I was expecting “The Epic” to have a heavy hip-hop or electronica influence. It doesn’t. What it does have is a scope and power that is beyond almost any jazz album I’ve heard since John Coltrane’s later work or MIles Davis’s fusion albums in the 70s. In short, it is one of the best jazz albums I’ve ever heard.

The music on “Epic” was recorded in December 2011. Kamasi and the other musicians did a month of recording sessions, focusing on different band leaders, which resulted in 190 songs. 45 of these were Kamasi’s, which he in turn pared down to the 17 that appear on the three-disc and aptly named “The Epic.” This is a long, intense album. Many of the songs are over ten minutes long, and none of them are under six minutes. The band excels at building to climactic crescendos, and the longer songs often have multiple builds and releases. It is a dense, layered album. There’s a 32-piece orchestra. There’s a choir. Vocalist Patrice Quinn sings on several songs. It’s a huge album, and a lot of music to try to digest at once. 

Musically, “The Epic” has almost nothing to do with electronica or hip-hop, and a lot to do with funk, 70s jazz fusion, and late 60s jazz by the likes of Pharoah Sanders. It has the audacity and grandness of jazz at the turn of the 70s, when Miles was doing “Bitches Brew” and 30-minute long songs about the nature of the universe were de rigeur, only without the acid-damaged sloppiness of that period. “The Epic” is long, but it is also focused. It rarely devolves into noise, although Kamasi’s tenor saxophone occasionally screeches or squawks during solos. There is a strong melodic imprint throughout the album, and even at its most chaotic it never goes into free jazz territory. It’s at times reminiscent of John Coltrane’s “Ascension” only in its unrelenting intensity.  

Kamasi has played with Chaka Khan and Raphael Saadiq, and there is a heavy funk and R&B swing to “The Epic.” This grounds the album and makes it more accessible for a non-jazz audience, while still being jazz. “The Epic” is funky, it’s groovy, and it has a solid rhythm section. There’s a rock aggression to to the drums, although they maintain the swing of jazz. There’s also a playfulness to the music that makes it constantly inviting. “The Epic” is in many ways a protest album, but it maintains a sense of joy and hope that keeps the listener rooting for it.  “Leroy and Lanisha,” for example, has a nice easy groove that is contrasted by Kamasi’s almost angry solos. “Re Run Home” has a latin feel, with some funky bass thrown in for good measure. Then they fall back into the nice easy swing of the standard “Cherokee.” 

The size of the album, while daunting, is also to its advantage. With two drummers, two bassists (including Thundercat), and a whole mess of other musicians and singers, “The Epic” has an incredibly full and rich sound. The band is under no pressure to truncate their solos, or trim down their ideas. Remarkably, there is very little fat or filler on the three discs. None of the songs feel like they could have been left off, and the songs don’t drag on, even when they are approaching the fourteen-minute mark. 

As I mentioned before, “The Epic” is to some extent a protest album. It feels part of a thematic, sonic, and aesthetic whole with D’Angelo’s “Black Messiah” and Kendrick’s “To Pimp A Butterfly,” from the references to 70s African-American culture to the black-and-white album covers. The music is often angry and sad, but always maintains a sense of hope and celebration. The few songs with lyrics on “The Epic” are celebratory. “Cherokee” is about a Native American warrior. “Henrietta Our Hero,” possibly about Henrietta Lacks, celebrates “our hero, shining fearless and bright.” “Malcom’s Theme” turns Ozzie Davis’s eulogy for Malcom X into a song, and ends it with a quote from Malcolm himself calling for religious and racial tolerance. On “The Rhythm Changes,” Quinn sings:

“Our love, our beauty, our genius
Our work, our triumph, our glory
Won't worry what happened before me
I'm here”

What I love about “The Epic” is how successfully it builds on the history of jazz music while making it contemporary. It is an album that pushes boundaries and yet is always listenable and relatable, even at its most intricate and complex. It never feels too smooth, too noisy, too noodly, or too traditional. It takes chances and succeeds at every attempt. It’s a jazz album for people that think they don’t like jazz albums, and one that I hope will help revitalize the genre.

Thoughts on Charleston

9 people, all African-American, were murdered in a historic African-American church on Wednesday by a white supremacist trying to start a race war. The right and right-wing media seem to be bending over backward to leave race out of the equation. The killer is already being given the 'crazy weird kid' card.

Fuck that.

This wasn't the act of a crazy kid. This was us. We did this. By playing into tribalism, us vs. them bullshit thinking. By framing political arguments as "taking back our country." By pretending the 1st commandment has exceptions, and the 2nd amendment has none. By othering and demonizing the people we call our opponents. By ignoring racism. By ignoring discrimination. By looking away from our painful history. By constantly arguing that the only answer to gun violence is more guns. By being too cowardly to call the gun lobby on their shit. By being cowards. By not taking responsibility for our situations and our actions. By not learning from the hundreds of other mass murders that happened this year. By assuming the perps are lone wolves.

This is not a politically popular message, but there is no them, there is only us. Everything we do, we do to ourselves. We are inextricably interconnected, and all of our actions have an effect. The killer wasn't a weirdo or a lone wolf. He was one of us, who was following a script that was written for him, who was following the ideology of the right-wing to its logical conclusion.

I'd love to say that this will lead to something, but if 20 white children getting killed didn't do shit, then 9 blacks being killed will do even less. Because the right secretly agrees with at least part of the killers message, ie there is a them and they are taking our country and we (by which they mean white people) need to take it back.  We are already resorting to the same arguments, the same bad thinking, the same bullshit that got us where we are.

But I think something is changing. I think that things are getting so bad that maybe we will do something. I think america is like an addict, who has been sleeping in his own shit for years, and has woken up covered in shit for the hundredth time, and is starting to think that maybe he has a problem. Only half of his brain is saying that his problem is he isn't doing ENOUGH drugs, or the right drugs.

My thoughts and prayers are with those killed, and their families, and with the victims and families of the Muslim students killed earlier in the year, and the other hundreds of victims of senseless killings in this country every year.

Half Time

It’s June, so that means it is time to talk about my favorite albums of 2015 so far, in alphabetical order:

A$AP Rocky, At. Long. Last. A$AP.
Bell Witch, Four Phantoms
Earl Sweatshirt, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside

Joanna Gruesome, Peanut Butter

Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp A Butterfly

Liturgy, The Ark Work

Oddisee, The Good Fight

Salva, Peacemaker

Tree, Trap Genius

Kamasi Washington, Epic

P.M Dawn Review

P.M. Dawn,
Of the Heart, Of the Soul, and Of the Cross: The Utopian Experience
Island/Gee Street, 1990
Originally posted on RapReviews

For a time in the late eighties and early nineties, many people involved in hip-hop thought that the number one threat to the culture was hip-hop going pop. Hip-hop was first and foremost from the streets and for the streets, and the idea of a rapper trying appeal to (white) mainstream pop culture was deeply offensive to many people in hip-hop. The fear was that this vibrant culture, which represented the voice of young black America, would be co-opted, defanged, and watered down by the mainstream. White people were going to steal and mess up hip-hop just like they did jazz and rock n’ roll. 

As a result, rappers that had crossover success into the pop mainstream were scrutinized, ridiculed, and cast out of hip-hop by its gatekeepers. There was no regaining cred once you went pop. That’s part of the reason why Vanilla Ice is doing reality shows and robbing houses, and why MC Hammer hasn’t had a top 10 hit since parachute pants went out of style. Tribe Called Quest, 3rd Base, NWA, Ice Cube, and even the Beastie Boys called out rappers’ attempts to go pop in song. The best way to lose your cred as a rapper circa 1990 was to appear to be courting the mainstream. 

People took this seriously. Serious enough to fight over it, and not just on record. Ask Prince Be of psychedelic hip-hop group P.M. Dawn, who was punched by no less than the teacher himself, KRS-One. In an infamous event, KRS-One and his crew stormed the stage while P.M. Dawn were performing at the Sound Factory in New York in 1992, punched Prince Be and threw him off the stage. KRS-One was allegedly reacting to feeling disrespected by Prince Be in an interview, but to many hip-hop fans, it seemed like he was defending real hip-hop against interlopers. But did hip-hop need protection against P.M. Dawn? Were they a lame attempt at pop crossover, or a group trying to do their own thing that got unfairly targeted? At the time, I thought that KRS-One was being a bit of a bully coming after Be. Let’s revisit P.M. Dawn’s debut and see if history is on their side.

P.M. Dawn started in the late 80s by brothers Attrell and Jarrett Cordes, aka Prince Be and DJ Minutemix. They were signed to now-defunct British label Gee Street, home to other leftfield hip-hop acts like Stereo MCs, Jungle Brothers, and Gravediggaz. In some ways you can credit (or blame) De La Soul for P.M. Dawn’s success. “Of The Heart, Of the Soul, and Of the Cross: The Utopian Experience,” came out two years after De La Soul’s “3 Feet High and Rising.” It feels inspired by “3 Feet High,” not only in De La Soul’s hippie vibe, but their use of nontraditional samples. De La Soul proved that rappers could work outside the confines of soul and funk. They sampled Steely Dan, Hall and Oates, and Johnny Cash, and turned those samples into solid rap songs.

P.M. Dawn took this one step further by sampling New Wavers Spandau Ballet’s ultra-white, ultra-wimpy ballad “True.” They flipped that sample into gold on “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” combining it with the drums from Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid In Full” to keep things hip-hop. The song was a #1 hit, helped  “The Utopian Experience” sell over 500,000 copies. 

As you can probably tell from its title, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” was not your typical rap song. It took a psychedelic approach to hip-hop, turning what could have been a standard love rap into something weirder:

“A careless whisper from a careless man

A neutron dance for a neutron fan

Marionette strings are dangerous things

I thought of all the trouble they bring

An eye for an eye, a spy for a spy

Rubber bands expand in a frustrating sigh

Tell me that she's not dreaming

She's got an ace in the hole, it doesn't have meaning”

There’s another major influence on P.M. Dawn, beyond De La Soul and the Beatles’ during their Magic Mystery Tour period: the hip-house sound of Soul II Soul. P.M. Dawn used similar drums on their songs, and also combined R&B and dance music with hip-hop. A song like “Paper Doll” has as much in common with “Back to Life” as it does with anything De La was putting out. In fact, when I was looking for this album to review, I found it shelved in the R&B section of Amoeba Records  rather than the hip-hop section. It is just as much an R&B album as it is a rap album.

One of the selling points of P.M. Dawn when they came out was their new age hippie schtick; it certainly set them apart from any other rap group out in 1990. Just look at the video for “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss.” They are fully decked out in African-print t-shirts, headbands, John Lennon glasses, and have bracelets for days. They took the Afrocentrism of the Native Tongues crew and gave it a sixties twist. Even today, their sound and lyrics set them apart from most other hip-hop. 

While “The Utopian Experience” has psychedelic elements, P.M. Dawn weren’t eating mushrooms and dropping acid as much as they were new age mystics. As a result,  “The Utopian Experience” feels more new agey than trippy, and the lyrics are sometimes a little goofy. The album certainly isn’t as drug damaged as Redman’s “Dare Iz A Darkside,” or as trippy as Edan’s “Beauty and the Beat” or Quasimoto’s “The Further Adventures of Lord Quas.” On “Even After I Die,” Be is talking to God, with lines that are alternately deep and silly:

“The thought of You just reeks with divinity

A spark by my heart is the symbol of the Trinity

I can understand that the stakes are high

But I'd really like to know what I've done and why

I'm floating in a sea of doubt when it comes to that

It seems as though all of my thoughts are now acrobats

I am you, now that's a thought to renege

But in the thought that stops it seems to get big

I wonder why Father, why it is? What it is?

Because I am what I am, what gives?”

One of the legacies of “The Utopian Experience” is how it predicted hip-hop’s shift towards embracing R&B, embracing pretty production, and embracing psychedelics. Listening to the album today, it’s hard to imagine a rapper getting mad at how pop it is. Nowadays, even the toughest rappers sing their hooks and rap over pretty beats, A$AP Rocky is rapping about dropping acid, and there are multiple sub-genres of alternative hip-hop. 

That wasn’t true in 1991, when I first bought this album. I was looking for hip-hop that was less nihilistic than the West Coast gangsta rap that was all around me. At the time, I was excited by the idea of someone taking hip-hop in a different direction and making music that was more concerned with spiritual questions rather than macho posturing. As much as I wanted to love “The Utopian Experience” as a sixteen-year-old hip-hop fan, I had a hard time getting into it. Listening to it twenty-four years later, it holds up better than I remembered, although some of the problems I had with it at 16 still hold true.

For one thing, the lyrics aren’t always great. As I mentioned before, there is some goofiness to Be’s attempts at being deep and metaphysical. His drippy, “what is reality, man?” gets old, and his mystic pacifist vibe doesn’t make him the most engaging rapper.  Also, their attempts to mash up hip-hop, house, and R&B don’t always work. “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” and “Paper Doll” both sound really cheesy to my ears now, and their dance song “Shake” downright bad. It is also dated in the way that all old hip-hop is dated: Be has a 90s flow and Megamixx is using 90s tech to make 90s beats, all while wearing some serious 90s fashion and rapping about 90s things. The datedness works in its favor at times: “To Serenade A Rainbow” and “Reality Used to Be A Friend of Mine” reminded me of early De La Soul and “Comatose” sounds like an Ice Cube beat. If you are a fan of early 90s hip-hop production, there are some gems on “The Utopian Experience.”

Beyond the 90s production, what makes “The Utopian Experience” worth re-visiting (if you can find a copy - it’s out of print, possibly because of sampling issues) is the way in which Be and Megamixx pushed hip-hop out of its comfort zone. It was gutsy for Be and Megamixx to be as wimpy as they were on this album. It took courage to make a song that sampled a new wave ballad, or was built around a Beatles sample. They made music with none of the posturing, either lyrical or musical, that was the basis of most hip-hop in 1990. Be’s lyrics aren’t about bragging, cutting down sucker MCs, or partying. They are about talking to God, questioning the nature of reality, and talking about love in metaphysical terms. True, they were following on the heels of De La Soul, who had started the whole hippie rap thing (and just as quickly vehemently disowned it), but P.M. Dawn took it further than any other group. Even in 2015, most hip-hop is confined to themes of urban America. Very few artists use rap music to explore other realms of thought and realities the way P.M. Dawn attempted to. If anything, rap post-1990 became even more obsessed with “keeping it real,” even when that meant fantasies of violence and wealth that bore as little resemblance to day-to-day life as what Be was rapping about. 

Be’s altercation with KRS-One happened in 1992, a year after De La Soul disowned the D.A.I.S.Y. Age on “De La Soul Is Dead,” and a few months before Dr. Dre’s “Chronic” came out and changed the sound, subject matter, and coastal epicenter of hip-hop. P.M. Dawn’s 1993 follow-up “The Bliss Album…?” went gold, so neither “The Chronic” nor KRS-One’s public rebuking of them seemed to have hurt the duo’s prospects. The two albums they released after that failed to chart, and since then Be has had multiple strokes and amputations; his cousin Dr. G tours under the P.M. Dawn brand, but without either founding member. A quarter century later, “The Utopian Experience” doesn’t feel like a lame crossover grab, but rather an attempt to somewhere totally different with hip-hop. It’s unfortunate that so few artists followed the trail that P.M. Dawn made; hip-hop could use more weirdos and outcasts.

Georgia Anne Muldrow Review

I reviewed Georgia Anne Muldrow's latest at RapReviews this week.

Also, I love Noz's response on his Tumblin' Erb site to the question, why do you say hip-hop journalism is over? He is making some clear references to Pitchfork and their Chief Keef debacle. That explains why he doesn't write for them anymore. Noz writes:

"There’s no infrastructure for it. All of the old guard hip hop institutions have become tabloids or aggregation zombies. And yes you can go write about hip hop music at a fashion magazine or an “indie rock” website or maybe the culture vertical of a multinational corporation that also sells dishwashers and tiny confederate flag lapel pins. You can make $45 a week accumulating content there and theoretically do some good work before you burn out or the building burns down but you aren’t going to be a hip hop journalist exactly. At best you’ll be a tour guide. Your job will be to explain hip hop to readers whose interest in the subject runs no deeper than their desire to add a tab for Significant Rap Talking Points to their Cultural Investment Portfolio. Because of this the core hip hop audience will forever approach your work with a hint of skepticism (rightfully so). And every time you file an article you will have to cross your fingers and hope the sloppily reported wow aren’t rappers with guns cool video documentary that your bosses’ bosses just got a few young black men sent to jail behind doesn’t pop up as a related link.

Imo hip hop journalism is about being a voice and responsible advocate for the primary consumers and producers of hip hop music. It’s about contextualizing the culture for people who are of the culture or at least seriously invested in the culture. It means telling stories about entire communities and sometimes even about humans who aren’t famous recording artists/being groomed to become famous recording artists. As far as I can tell none of the publications that still have an audience and a budget for covering rap music are especially concerned with any of that."

I never fit his definition of hip-hop journalist - I've always been too far outside of the culture to pretend to accurately represent it. I've written as a fan but as an outsider. And to be clear, what I mean by that is that I am a middle-aged, middle-class white professional who writes about music made mostly by poor African-Americans (although also plenty of middle-class and wealthy African-American, as well as people of other races and other socio-economic backgrounds). I don't go to shows, I don't live this culture, I'm not involved in the making and performing of it.  I hope I make that clear in my writing. I try to respect the culture, and the people involved in it, and not represent myself as something I am not.

What I'm Digging: Windhand

I got Windhand's 2013 album Soma when it came out, listened to it, and then forgot about it. I almost deleted it from my iPod but figured it was a good commute album. Then I got into Bell Witch's album, and decided to revisit the doom metal I had. I came across this song, which I barely listened to in my initial spins on the album, no doubt because it takes a few minutes to build. But when it does, it has this gorgeous melody on the chorus, which combines perfectly with the wall of fuzz from the (4? 5? 10?) other guys in the band.

So yeah. I dig it. Here's a video of them playing it live in Bulgaria, of all places.
Two side notes: 1. So, the rhythm guitarists job is basically to bang his head and strum that one chord super loud for eight minutes? He's like the dude in Arcade Fire who bangs his head and hits a drum. Or Bez from Happy Mondays.
2. The singer has said that she can't eat before shows because they are so loud and heavy it makes her have to shit.

Oddisee Review

I reviewed Oddisee's The Good Fight at RapReviews. I'm a fan. Nice counter-programming to the standard mainstream bullshit.

Auxx and Salva Reviews

I reviewed Harmonics Contrast by Auxx the other week.

Then I reviewed Salva's Peacemaker.

Then I got busy and didn't do any writing.

What I'm Digging: Electronic Music

Maybe as a result of listening to mostly dark and heavy metal music for much of the past year, I've been listening to electronic music a lot recently. I feel like I needed some lightness in my life.

Ikonikia's 2013 album is a full of 80s-inspired beats. 

Fatima Al Qadiri makes the kind of music that they must have played at the noodle bars in Blade Runner.


Bonobo, whose "Cirrus" video I saw at a dance performance by Polibolus.

What I'm Digging: Bell Witch

Bell Witch are a Portland doom duo comprised of a bassist and drummer. They make heavy, glacial music that combines elements of doom, Pink Floyd, and ambient music. Their latest album, Four Phantoms (on the unstoppable Profound Lore label), is four long songs about spirits who have died violently. Two of the songs clock in at over 20 minutes. It is all about textures and atmospheres. It's at times brutal, and at times really beautiful. All at that agonizingly slow doom pace. I can't stop listening to it. Good stuff.

I Went to A Show: Liturgy at the Chapel 5/1/15

I didn't go to a single show for the first two years of my daughter's life. I finally broke that spell in April by going to see Belle and Sebastian. Last night I went to my first heavy music show in years when I went to see Peacers, Liturgy, and Lightning Bolt at the Chapel in San Francisco.

I think the Peacers is fronted by the guy from Bay Area garage band Bare Wires. Either way, they were a sloppy garage/noise band whose songs seemed more like sketches or ideas than fully fleshed out songs. They weren't terrible but I wasn't a fan. They did make Liturgy seem all that more amazing, because Liturgy were the exact opposite. There was no scrappiness or sloppiness to them at all.

I really like their latest album The Ark Work, but it is a challenging record. It is synth-heavy, and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's new hip-hop influenced moaned singing style doesn't always work. I wasn't sure how it would translate live, but it totally worked. They became more guitar-oriented, and since the synths were coming through Hunt-Hendrix's guitar, there was less cacophony than on the album. This allowed the epicness of the songs to shine. They operate as a whole, building to "Reign Array."

There was also a trance-like effect of their music. I went to the show with my brother-in-law, and both of us have young children and are up early. He mentioned that Liturgy was sort of putting him to sleep, even though they were really loud and heavy. Which isn't a sterling compliment, but it points to the drone-like elements of their music. It is similar to techno music in its abstraction, the way it builds, and the non-reliance on traditional song structure or singing to drive the songs.

Drummer Greg Fox is the key to the band. Hunt-Hendrix may write the songs and lyrics and own the concept of the band, but Fox is what keeps it going. He is by far the best drummer I have seen play. He plays fast, precise, and complicated patterns, almost all of which are some variation of a sixteenth note. The rest of the band were all strumming as fast as their wrists would allow, and it was up to Fox to create the shape of the songs. He was incredible, and a blast to watch and listen to.

The band was a little subdued, which may owe to the fact that they weren't headlining. They basically stood there, only occasionally banging their head. I think part of it was that there is so much technical precision required in their songs that they were busy trying not to fuck their parts up.

They closed with "Generations," off of their last album. The crowd finally snapped out of their stupor, and a little most pit started, although the kind of most pit that 30-something hipsters start. No one was in danger of breaking a limb or even their glasses.

Hearing Liturgy live really made The Ark Work make sense to me, and brought it to life. I don't totally understand Hunt-Hendrix's philosophy, and his moaning singing sometimes sounds weak and shitty, but I really admire what he is able to do and the force and vision behind their music.

We left before Lightning Bolt because I had a train home to catch, and the idea of getting an extra hour of sleep was more enticing than seeing a band I had never listened to. True to form my kid woke  up cranky and sad and I was very glad I wasn't hung over.



This are some clips of different live shows that gives some idea of what they are like:

You're Breaking My Heart: "Chalet Lines"

One of the most depressing things I've learned through the dysfunctional us vs. them political divide in the U.S. is even things we all should really agree on can be the source of intense debate. Like that torture is wrong. Or that rape is a bad thing and is a problem. A friend of mine and I had a joke a while back "I'm coming out against rape." The joke being that rape is such an obvious thing to be against it that it is hardly brave or even notable to take a public stand against it. That joke isn't so funny anymore. When the Democrats made rape on college campuses an issue, the right's response was "come on, it isn't REALLY an issue, and what was she wearing anyways? Wasn't she sort of asking for it?" (I don't think the issue has been handled brilliantly by the left, but when we can't agree that rape, as an act, is a thing to be against, we are fucked as a society.)

Which brings me to Belle and Sebastian's "Chalet Lines," from their 2000 album "Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant." The song is a harrowing tale told from the perspective of a woman who has recently been raped. It is a quiet song that conveys a range mixed emotions: despair, shame, depression and anger.

"He raped me in the chalet lines
I had just said no for the final time
Although it’s last month it’s like yesterday
I missed my time, I don’t think I could stand
To take the test, I’m feeling sick
Fuck this, I’ve felt like this for a week
I’d put a knife right into his eyes
My friend can’t see
She asks me why I don’t
Tell the law
Oh what’s the fucking point at all"

It kills me. Every single time I listen to it. Goddamn.

What I'm digging: Broken Water

Speaking of shoegaze, there is a newish band from Olympia that have a new take on the shoegaze sound, Broken Water. Or maybe not so new since they basically sound like they could have put this out in 1993. And the video totally reminds me of my days hanging out in SF and Sacramento in the mid-90s, being poor, playing music, going to shows, wearing thrift store clothes.......

Anyways, I'm into it.

You're Breaking My Heart: "Last Good Sleep"

You're Breaking My Heart highlights songs that make me want to cry.

I go through periods of feeling fed up with rap music. I feel like I am too old, too white, too straight to be listening to it. What the fuck does my life have to do kids bragging about getting wasted, having sex, partying, selling drugs, and/or shooting people?

And then I'll hear a song that reminds me what I love about the music in the first place, namely the way it gives a voice to populations that don't often have a voice, and the way it lends itself to more thorough examinations of issues. Rock songs can be meaningful too, but a rap song will often have two or three times the number of words per song - a rapper can say more than a singer.

Which brings me to "Last Good Sleep," the 1997 song by Company Flow. Company Flow were a Brooklyn trio who were basically trying to make hip-hop like EPMD in an era where rap was first trying to go pop in a big way. CoFlo were part of the true school revival of the late 90s, artists who wanted to make the kind of hip-hop that got them excited about the genre in the first place. Up to "Last Good Sleep," their songs had been your typical rap songs about being the baddest MC etc.  And then El-P decided to write a song about his abusive stepfather.

The song is told from his perspective, and describes the night his stepfather nearly beat his mother to death. The song describes El-P's feelings of guilt, horror, regret, and remorse at not doing more to stop the abuse. That is a heavy, heavy trip to lay on a little kid.

I cannot listen to this song without tearing up. It's one of the saddest songs I know, because it deals so honestly with pain.

He describes waking up and hearing them having the usual argument they had when the stepfather was drunk:

Timepiece must've read early morning at least
So I lay deaths cousin, woken by the sonics of the beast
That somewhere deep beneath me a fracture had seized at my neck
Breath was it, a flag that marked the end of my peace

Conference of the birds I heard my mother dove cry
Not absurd just routine I'd learned

Just keep my fucking grill locked and hope the entropy stops me process
Stepfathers got to fight verbally when his livers soaked
And products come in bottles stuck with drunken last nerve up too close

But I couldn't sense the distinction from the other nights livest wires
Ceremony's sparked again a dry one in comparison to this one
Handing crutches to my psyche, I was tripping
Huddled up clutching sis I think I heard a dress ripping

He then starts to second guess his inaction, reliving the moment and asking himself why he didn't step in when he realized how bad it was:

(I should've reacted to that)
But I didn't know the extent, please
(You could've caught him in time)
Yeah, that thoughts occurred to me constantly
Now I've been digging my head and I don't know what he wants
From me until one of us is dead I suppose

That's why at night I cover my ears in tears
The man downstairs must have had too many beers
Now every night of my life he beats his wife
(Until the day I die)

He goes on to talk about how he that was the last night he slept without having nightmares about the abuse:

And slept my last sleep while I counted clone sheep
And dreamt about nothing for the last time ever

The ignorance was blissful just a recollection
Of the gift of innocent times from a merciful deception
Woke to hazy landscapes to find my world
Defied the laws my mind mandates
Patching jugulars with Band-Aids

The turn on you laid well above my bed
Were here and only barely through the shock
Of what her broken face told me

Again, he excoriates himself for not doing more to stop the abuse:

(You should have known what happened)
I was young and oblivious, 

(he almost killed your mom)

If I knew I could have done something
(You'll never see him again)

And here is the fucking kicker:

Yeah, but I see him every night
And cover my ears in tears as he beats his fucking wife

I've never been in an abusive relationship, or had an abusive parent, but I can only imagine the pain and shame and sense of powerlessness. Hip-hop is all about bragging and boasting (including about beating up girlfriends, but that's another issue), so the fact that a hip-hop song would describe domestic abuse so clearly, and with so much vulnerableness, is truly remarkable. It's one of my favorite songs, and a song that always breaks my heart.

Quiet

I used to think ambient music was mostly good as music for studying, falling asleep, making out, or coming down off of drugs.* I listened to some, especially Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 (which is disturbing enough to be a problematic soundtrack to studying, falling asleep, making out, or coming down off of drugs).

When I had a child, I all of a sudden needed ambient music in my life in a way I hadn't before. I needed quiet. I needed prettiness. I needed to not think, to shut out stimulus. I've come to appreciate the power of quiet.

I've gotten into Zen Buddhism and the idea of using meditation and quiet as an antidote to and a way to better understand our noisy lives. I won't go into a long spiritual/religious discourse here, but I think the little bit of meditation I've done over the past year and the extensive reading on Buddhism and Zen Buddhism especially I've done over the past four years has made a noticeable difference in my life. I try to sit every day but usually for ten minutes and never longer than fifteen. Still, I come to crave that time in the same way you come to crave exercise if you get into the practice of it. I crave that quiet.

I started meditating in earnest when I was going through a stressful period in life. Some challenges at work taking up a lot of my time and energy, and on top of that I had a one-year-old who was radically altering how I lived my life, related to the world, and saw myself.  I'd come home with so much spinning through my head that the only cure for it I could find was to sit quietly for a few minutes trying (unsuccessfully) to not think of anything.

Our world is so noisy. We are constantly taking information in. We rarely get a chance to reflect on what is real and true and what is just sound and fury. Meditating, for me, is a way to shut out all the noise and stop seeing myself through a filter of whatever bullshit has piled on that day/week/year/lifetime. It's a chance to experience life as it is for just a few minutes, without the constant stimulus.

In the same way, ambient music is sometimes a necessary salve for a chaotic and noisy life. I have several ambient albums that I listen to that provide some peace and solace and space to think. Where as a young person I'd listen to ambient to relax and chill out, as it were, in my middle age I'm listening to it to not think.

*Not that I know from experience, never having been one for any drug other than alcohol and coffee, but the proliferation of ambient "chillout" music coincided with the increased usage of ecstasy, cocaine, and other mind-altering substances in 90s electronic music culture.

Deep Thoughts on the new Kendrick and Record Store Day

Yesterday was Record Store Day. My daughter and I went to Down Home Music in El Cerrito to watch a bluegrass band. I didn't buy anything, although I have bought a few albums recently. I got the new Kendrick Lamar album, PM Dawn's first album (for a review), and a collection of Donald Byrd's albums from the late 50s and early 60s. My disc drive is shot, so I can't burn CDs anymore, which makes them less of an exciting purchase. I still like having physical copies of some stuff, and CDs are cheaper and smaller than vinyl.

I appreciate what Record Store Day is trying to do, but I dislike the jibber-jabber of it. I'm not interested in the gimmicky collector's items that only exist to separate you from your money. I don't need a pressing of Dilla's "Fuck the Police" in the shape of a cop badge.

But Kendrick's album seemed like the kind of thing I should own (even if the cover strikes me as being racist)(and by racist I mean anti-black). I love it, but dude, there are so many swears. Could he have not had every word be the n word? Maybe? No? Ok.

Deep Thoughts on Shoegaze

I love bands that have a shoegaze influence. Generally when people say "shoegaze," they mean atmospheric, heavily distorted guitar textures like those in My Bloody Valentine's classic 1990 album Loveless.

"Only Shallow" is a good encapsulation of their sound. There are heavy drums, swirling guitars, and all of it washed through layers of filters and effects. When people use the term "shoegaze" in reference to a band, it is that guitar sound that they are trying to describe.




I'm actually not much of a fan of most of the other bands that were affiliated with the first wave of shoegaze - Slowdive, Ride, Lush, Swervedriver, etc. I haven't listened to enough Swervedriver or Ride to make an informed opinion, but to my mind Slowdive and Lush were too slight and poppy. What made My Bloody Valentine exciting was the heaviness to the music. It hit hard and had a solid bottom. They expertly combined the pretty with the dissonant. Sonic Youth were obviously a big influence on My Bloody Valentine, especially on MBV's precursor to Loveless, Isn't Anything. Sonic Youth pioneered using guitars as textures vs. strictly for riffs and melodies.  In a lot of ways, it's an evolution of punk's reliance on distortion.

Loveless may have bankrupted MBV's label and broke up the band, but it has inspired generations of musicians. Immediately after its release bands from the Smashing Pumpkins to Superchunk incorporated the guitar textures of MBV into their music. As a generation of kids came up listening to that album, they started making music with those sounds as well.

One of my favorite shoegaze-influenced albums is ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead's Source Tags and Codes.



Deerhunter are another band use the wall of guitar to good effect:



Metal bands were influenced by MBV as well. Deftones' 2003 self-titled album has a huge shoegaze influence, which contributed to the pretty but formless shape of that album.


Fucked Up also combine the shoegaze guitar swirls and prettiness with the ugliness and brutality of Damien Abraham's vocals. The Chemistry of Common Life is one of my favorite albums of the this century, and it's largely the multi-guitar squall of songs like "Days of Last" that make it such a powerful album:






Tombs' early stuff aslo has a strong shoegaze influence, like "Gossamer."



There's a whole subgenre of black metal called "Blackgaze" which combines black metal and shoegaze. Most of what I've heard lumped in that category sucks, to be perfectly frank. There's a cheesiness that I've never associated with shoegaze in Alcest, say. Some of it is interesting. Blut Aus Nord have made several shoegaze-influenced albums. Those elements mix uncomfortably with the evil vocals and metallic guitars that are Blut Aus Nord's trademark, but it still works. Deafheaven are perhaps the most famous and successful band to combine black metal and shoegaze. Part of what makes a song like "Dream House" so powerful is its mix of swirling guitars, blast beats, and screeched vocals. It's heavy but pretty at the same time.




Bosse-de-Nage are another Bay Area metal band who have a heavy shoegaze influence. They just released their fourth album, called All Fours. I don't totally get why they are classified as being black metal; to me they sound like post-hardcore, something that might be on Ebullition circa 1998. Again, they have prettiness that tempers the ugliness and brutality of their vocals. They also seem to come from more of a punk perspective musically, at least in the tone of their guitars and the singer's voice. All of which makes for a sound that I really like. I've been listening to  "untitled" from their first album on repeat:

You’re Breaking My Heart: “One More Hour”

You’re Breaking My Heart highlights songs that make me want to cry.

Break-ups suck. Every single break-up I’ve ever gone through has left massive scars, even though no one really did anything terrible to me like sleep with my best friend or whatever. In fact, I probably got what I had coming to me in most cases. Still, I was single for years because I couldn’t stand the thought of someone breaking my heart again. 

So imagine if you had just broke up with your girlfriend, and you had to play in a band with her every night? And imagine you wrote a song about how much the break-up sucked, and you had to sing it with her every night? Well, that’s what happened to Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney. Her and bandmate Carrie Brownstein dated, broke up, and wrote a gut-wrenching song about it that is one of their best.

The song captures the feeling of loss and squandered potential of a relationship that ends. That is what has always hurt the most when I’ve had a breakup - I felt like I was building something with someone and then it just goes to shit, and all the effort I’ve put into it was wasted. That and how much the pain lingers, even when you want all those emotions to go away. You’d think that someone telling you they are no longer into you would trigger your brain to stop being attracted to them, but no. So you end up with heartache AND longing. 

That comes through in the Tucker’s singing. The song starts with her spending on last hour in a room they shared, looking at her dresses and reminiscing. “Oh you’ve got the darkest eyes,” Tucker sings, still pining after the woman that broke her heart. Brownstein responds to her in the chorus. “I need this!” Tucker wails, while Brownstein responds, “I know it’s so hard for you to let it go/I know it is so hard for you to say goodbye/I know you just need a little more time.” 

The song ends with Tucker pleading “Don’t say another word/about the other girl.” It’s unclear whether it was Tucker or Brownstein who was unfaithful, but it is clear that Tucker did not want the relationship to end, and is having a hard time getting over it. “One More Hour” perfectly captures mess of emotions that comes with a broken heart, but without being whiney or self-pitying. It's angry, it's passionate, it's sad, it's nostalgic, and it's full of genuine emotion.

The songs is also notable because it is about a lesbian relationship, and their first no less. There are very few songs that I'm aware of that deal specifically with gay relationships, much less lesbian ones. There's a sense of betrayal in the song that I think is probably something you wouldn't necessarily hear from a woman complaining about a man who left her (or vice versa). Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I sense that the fact that it is one of her own (by which I mean a fellow woman, a fellow riot grrrl, a fellow bandmate) that is betraying her adds to the pain. You date a woman and then realize that they can fuck you over in just the same way any boy could.

Anyways, it is an amazing, heartbreaking song, and one that hasn't lost it's power to make me want to weep like a baby nearly 18 years later.