Detail from an advertisement for breakfast, 1970s
The always delightful Robert Wyatt discusses his motive for covering the Monkees, in an interview with Pitchfork:
I didn’t like the fact that hierarchies had developed between what people thought was “serious” rock music and pop music—that was all rubbish. I was very uncomfortable with that. That was exactly the kind of situation I thought our generation had got rid of. I’ve always admired pop music, because I think it’s the modern post-industrial folk music. Everybody can join in, you don’t have to be a specialist. You can sing along with it. But there’s not much room in pop music for all the things I want to do. It’s a bit like food: I like all kinds of interesting food, but in the end, I can just sit down with an egg sandwich and really feel great.
Photograph by Ralph Morse, 1948
Over on The Mire, Tony Herrington delivers a defense of Herbie Hancock against Adam Harper’s charges of appropriation:
Where Adam experiences “Watermelon Man” as an inert distillation of an ancient and complex and living communal music, I hear an integrated musical performance riven with tension and currents that run fast and deep. (And if Adam really wanted to make a point about how such an alien genre can be killed stone dead by careless sampling, then citing Deep Forest would have rammed the point home more thoroughly, not to say conclusively.) Adam wasn’t impressed with that album title either (“It’s called Headhunters for God’s sake!”), but I’ve always read it as a sly deployment of the kind of militant semiotics that would be mobilised to fuller effect by P-funk and the Hiphop Nation – as in: Headhunters as proselytizers for a new tribal aesthetix, mind expansion for headz, etc.
More rumination on Herbie’s idiosyncratic fusion career in the rest.
Still from an automobile advertisement, 1970s
Hold on to your hats, it’s a new issue of Terminal Boredom: in two installations: A-M and N-Z. Rich Kroeniss chimes in on the new Personal & The Pizzas single:
Personal & The Pizzas “Dead Meat vs. Joanie” 7” The Total Punk offshoot label of the Floridas Dying empire debuts with the latest two song lunch from Personal & The Pizzas (or Pizza, as there seems to be only one other band member here), and it starts with a Stiv-solo style leather jacket power-punker called “Dead Meat” that I think has a motorcycle chain solo on it. Tough as grease. “Joanie” mashes together “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” and “Swallow My Pride” (and maybe a dozen other Ramones cuts) with a ballsy little fuzz guitar thing for an ode to eating out and Happy Days perhaps (insert garage Fonzie gag here, harhar). Total ‘End of the Century’ vibes. Scum stats: 600 pressed, hand stamped and totally punk. “Peter Davis = dead meat”?! (RK)
Also includes reviews of Pygmy Shrews, Sic Alps, Nobunny, X-Ray Eyeballs, Thee Oh Sees, a new release of 1995 demos by Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, and lots of other indie gutter snipes. Go get em.
Detail of a photograph in Life magazine, 1958
Tom Ewing writes in the Guardian of listening to Nevermind for the first time, in 2011.
We crave surprise: could there possibly be any left in Nevermind? A little, as it turned out. When I played it — finally! — what jumped out was Krist Novoselic’s bass sound and its constant malignant gravity, sucking songs down even as it keeps them brisk. It sounds, as it happens, very much like how I thought “swamp rock” might. I knew to expect a blend of ugliness and pop crispness, but I had to hear Nevermind to realise how little the two resolve, making the album sound alienated even from itself. I had some prejudices confirmed, too — the zombie lurch of Cobain’s singing is comfortably the weirdest thing about the record, and it seems a gloriously uncanny twist of rock history that it became so imitated. But I still can’t actually stand hearing it.
"The file of great ideas," 1948
Charles Keil wrote the majority of Urban Blues (University of Chicago Press, 1966) as a master’s thesis in anthropology at Yale, when he was 25. An elegant, yet thoroughly academic work, it veers between contemporary, personal interpretations of Malcolm X and confident applications of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism while laying out interviews and impressionistic sketches of live gigs. All of this in a then unheard-of effort to analyze a contemporary musical idiom—electric blues.
In an encomium of Keil’s career in a 1998 issue of the Village Voice, Robert Christgau observed that Keil’s anthropology was itself really just an excuse to write about music. It’s true: as in many of the worthwhile products of academia, Keil is manifestly more interested in his subject than his praxis; but it’s significant that the devices of anthropology don’t seem to encumber him either—if anything, much of the persuasive power is conveyed by the terms of the study. Christgau contextualizes the book as “Laying out scholarly debts, pinpointing the mouldy-fig fallacies of the gullible blues buff Samuel Charters and the sacrosanct amateur culture theorist LeRoi Jones, offering up a credible phylogeny of blues and a knowledgeable account of the then uncodified concept of soul, and—crucially—paying detailed, candidly enthusiastic attention to both artists and fans, Keil not only broke academic ground but wrote more eloquently than all but a handful of the thousands who followed.”
Keil’s footnote about LeRoi Jones1 is typical:
Perhaps I should both mollify and amplify this accusation [about LeRoi Jones’ ethnic affectation] slightly with two brief but relevant comparisons. Jones’ more recent anti-white tirades and plays have stirred up some needed controversy but lack power when compared to the pro-black statements of Malcolm X. There is, I think an important difference between a man who burns up hatred as a fuel and one who parades and peddles the stuff as art—the pragmaticist who holds some things sacred, and the polemicist who finds all things profane. They are perhaps equally capable of dramatizing the terrors and atrocities that currently sustain the “American way of life,” but that man who can diminish some of the terror as he exposes it is at a premium. Similarly, men like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman who attain a certain hard-won serenity through their musical struggles should perhaps be differentiated from musicians like the late Eric Dolphy, whose scrambling, strident, and sometimes brilliant improvisations sounded like those of a driven man looking vainly for solid footing. Like Dolphy, Jones has often produced more fury than sound.
1. Some quotes and discussion of Jones’ Blues People have appeared on this site.
Advertisement for hair products, 1975
Food for thought from a Pitchfork interview with Kelefa Sanneh:
Pitchfork I like your idea of Atlanta as a city without a base sound, that it’s just all these micro-scenes that keep popping up. It might be the only really important rap city with no actual singular sound to claim.
Sanneh Or that it seems strange to be loyal to one sound in particular because there are so many traditions. I was listening to the amazing mixtape by Mr. Collipark that recently came out—it has cover art that looks like the first Snoop Dogg record and it’s called Can I Have the Club Back Please. But “bringing the old Atlanta back” could mean any number of things. It’s not that there isn’t nostalgia, but all the traditions are piled up on top of each other. That’s made it flexible enough to accommodate any movement that comes along.
Other cities have struggled with this. For the last five years, the Bay Area has been struggling with hyphy. Did they embrace it too much? Have they moved beyond it? It’s not like they ever stopped making great music, but it seemed like they were struggling with this perception that artists and fans in Atlanta don’t seem to struggle with so much. They don’t seem to get as hung up on it as people do in New York, which is probably the capital of hip-hop people getting hung up on stuff.
Another thing that’s interesting about Atlanta is that it’s a real magnet. A lot of the people that define that music aren’t from there; they’re drawn there. Gucci Mane comes from Alabama. Waka Flocka was born in Queens. The amazing producer Lex Luger comes in from Virginia. T-Pain’s from Florida. Even when Lil B launched his own first co-sign post Pack, he goes and hooks up with Soulja Boy. Machine Gun Kelly, from Cleveland, goes to Atlanta and hooks up with Travis Porter. I think one reason why the city has sustained itself so well is that it has welcomed artists from all over the place.
Pitchfork Yeah, even Ludacris is from Illinois.
Sanneh Right. There is this industry infrastructure. Maybe it’s because Atlanta is known as a comfortable place to live if you’re African-American and have some money, and people generally enjoy living there. Can it become the Nashville of hip-hop? With Nashville, it’s not even about a Nashville sound anymore. It’s just that if you want to go into country music, that’s where you go. It’s not impossible to imagine that Atlanta can get there.
Detail from an advertisement for broadcast television, 1950
Forgive another Simon Reynolds comment. (You’d think I’d read the book already but honestly! I’m waiting for the library to process it. Or someone to finish it.) In Michael Azerrad’s review of Retromania in the Wall Street Journal, he summarizes one particularly pessimistic point like this:
But all this would be just fodder for interesting party conversations and much-commented Facebook status updates were it not for this statement by the brilliant cultural theorist Jacques Attali: “Music is a herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society.” That music has stopped changing, Mr. Reynold suggests, reflects something gravely amiss in the wider culture. Sounding like Oswald Spengler (whom he in fact alludes to), Mr. Reynolds sees retromania as the leading edge of a fin de siècle cultural morbidity. “When you look at the culture of the West in the last decade or so—the dominance of fashion and gossip, celebrity and image; a citizenry obsessed with décor and cuisine; the metastasis of irony throughout society—the total picture does look a lot like decadence.”
I’m not going to try to contend with this until I’ve actually digested the book. But it reminded me of José Ortega y Gasset’s classic reading of “decadence” in Revolt of the Masses (1930):
The man of that plenary epoch just past, who sees everything from his own view-point, will suffer from the optical illusion of regarding our age as a fall from plenitude, as a decadent period. But the lifelong student of history, the practised feeler of the pulse of times, cannot allow himself to be deceived by this system of optics based on imaginary periods of plenitude. As I have said, for such a “plenitude of time” to exist, it is that a long-felt desire, dragging its anxious, eager way through centuries, is at last one day satisfied, and in fact these plenary periods are times which are self-satisfied … perfectly rounded-off, dead within.
Do we not here touch upon the essential difference between our time and that which has just passed away? Our time, in fact, no longer regards itself as definitive, on the contrary, it discovers, though obscurely, deep within itself an intuition that there are no such epochs, definitive, assured, crystallised for ever. Quite the reverse, the claim that a certain type of existence—the so-called “modern culture”—is definitive seems to us an incredible narrowing down and shutting out of the field of vision. And as an effect of this feeling we enjoy a delightful impression of having escaped from a hermetically sealed enclosure, of having regained freedom, of coming out once again under the stars into the world of reality, the world of the profound, the terrible, the unforeseeable, the inexhaustible, where everything is possible, the best and the worst. That faith in modern culture was a gloomy one. It meant that to-morrow was to be in all essentials similar to to-day, that progress consisted merely in advancing, for all time to be, along a road identical to the one already under our feet. Such a road is rather a kind of elastic prison which stretches on without ever setting us free.
Still from a pharmaceutical advertisement, 1950s
In the 11 June 2011 New York Times, Evelyn McDonnell on Ellen Willis’s posthumous essay collection, Out of the Vinyl Deeps:
This middle-class child from Queens was not so broad-minded when it came to race. As she confessed in “Pop Blues” in 1968, as a teenager, she actually preferred the white pop versions of 1950s R&B songs. Her predilections were typically “rockist,” as some writers (including her erstwhile lover Robert Christgau) would later call the white, guitar-driven, ’60s-shaped chauvinism of a generation of critics. There are no articles here about James Brown, Al Green or even Labelle. Willis described Joplin as “the only ’60s culture hero to make visible and public women’s experience of the quest for individual liberation.” Great: even the world’s foremost feminist rock critic didn’t give Aretha Franklin respect.
It’s obvious that race plays a role in the consumption of music in America. The enormous popularity and success of performers like Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, Elvis Presley, and Eminem—artists of varying talents, to be sure—is due in no small part to the fact that they are white. Many American consumers are drawn most to art that reflects how they view their cultural identities (hence, in the lit world, the oft-heard complaint that one cannot “relate” to a book’s characters; usually this is code for “these characters do not come from where I come from”). Being able to relate to the human qualities embodied in a work of art is valid and probably necessary. But when human is defined narrowly (though this is never stated directly, oh no!) as “white” or “my very limited cultural experiences growing up in suburban Cleveland” we’re not really dealing with artistic appreciation, are we? We’re dealing with adolescent solipsism, which, unfortunately, many people do not outgrow.
But that’s not what I find irritating about the characterization of Willis above. After all, in “Pop Blues” she’s talking about her tastes as an adolescent. And even if she continued to inhibit the development of her humanity into adulthood by hewing strictly to artistic experiences that reflected her provincial outer-borough upbringing, which appears to have been the case, that’s her right. What irritates me is the way in which her “rockist” paradigm continues to be celebrated. Every fucking week the Times has an article about Bob Dylan. Seriously, look it up. Rock music did not change the world, at least not in any significant political way. It was not a social revolution. A “culture hero” is only relevant insofar as he or she contributes something to cultural production, i.e. art. To applaud anything else is to abandon music criticism for simple fandom. I suppose that this is in part what bothers me about rock music as a cultural phenomenon, the churlish cultural chauvinism that surrounds it and inflates its cultural importance. That and, to quote Lester Bangs, it’s “merely a bunch of raving shit.”
David Bowie, ‘Low’; Nick Lowe, ‘Bowi’ EP (1977)
David Smay summarizes Nick Lowe’s career on Hilobrow:
Nick Lowe can look out over his agreeably beaky nose and survey a career that stretches from Camden to Nashville. It’s the career of a mischief maker who weaseled out of his record contract with UA by submitting songs like “Let’s Go to the Disco” by The Disco Brothers, but accidentally had a hit in Japan in that same gambit with “We Love the Rollers” by the Tartan Horde (a Bay City Rollers exploitation track). My favorite Lowe stratagem was to release an EP named Bowi in rebuttal to David Bowie’s contemporaneous album Low. Yet all this playfulness obscures his legitimate talents as a songwriter. Surveying that career we watch a gift for melody, pop hooks, storytelling and irony subsumed by drinking, smoking and fucking. Rock star stuff. But where that story would typically end, we instead find a renewal as in the last decade Lowe reinvented himself as a master of rue, without losing any of his earlier gifts. There are very few songwriters who’ve written anything as heartfelt, funny, horrifying and ironic as “Marie Provost,” where he took a chapter out of Hollywood Babylon and milked it for both pathos and laughs, and then lived long enough to write a song as dire as “The Beast in Me.”
Still from an advertisement for a soft drink, 1975
From an interview in Freize between Dan Fox and Simon Reynolds about the latter’s new book, Retromania (which I will be reading and likely quoting from shortly):
DF In Retromania you talk about the changing economy, from ‘primary production’ music made in the 30 years after World War II, which you describe as being blue collar, to ‘postproduction’ music, which is more white collar in terms of skill sets used. This reflects changes in the broader economy: wealth generation via manufacture versus wealth generation via signification in entertainment and media.
SR Fredric Jameson wrote about how the culture of late capitalism reflects this increasingly gaseous, ungrounded nature of the economy. It struck me that many of the most innovative periods of pop music come from a time when the people making it grew up around industry or agriculture. There’s something about a culture that’s based around making stuff that’s bound to affect music making in some way. Now, increasingly music making is done with computers, and it’s about knowledge games, which is a level of abstraction up from just making things. ‘Over-accumulation’ seems like a good way of describing how all this music history has built up. What we’re living in is a salvage economy, like a flea market: there’s this mound of stuff accumulated and people are going through it like rag pickers, looking for elements that could be reused.
Lots of other insights in the rest of the interview.