Detail from a liquor advertisement, n.d.
Excuse this, another in this ongoing series of lengthy excerpts — but so deservedly in this case: Stephen Burt’s loving tribute to Timothy Alborn on the London Review of Books’ blog. Alborn, history professor, Harriet Records founder, and publisher of Incite! is an example that this writer, and Ply more generally, is consciously echoing:
Alborn’s writing at its finest is short-form, impressionistic, non-technical criticism at its finest, with jokes. Pittsburgh singer Karl Hendricks sounded better solo than with his first rock band because ‘Like some other people I know, he’s much easier to take when he’s in a room by himself than when he’s surrounded by friends.’ Incite! #3 (1987), written just after Alborn finished his first year of graduate school at Harvard, recommends
listening to ‘All Hung Up on What Used to Be’ by the Flies and pretending it doesn’t apply to you… hiding from your friends by working with your enemies, overworking until you’re not sure anymore which ones are which, and avoiding the stench of it all by putting the needle down.
As Incite! went on it became less slapdash and more intricate, closer in look and spirit (though not very close) to illustrated Victorian miscellanies. Most things that Alborn reviewed were related to music – singles, albums, live performances – but he also examined the Slinky toy, the semi-academic British magazine Anarchy, dugongs and United Airlines.
Fanzines were a kind of reviewing, but they were also letters to strangers, distinguished by informality and sincerity, by enthusiasm and relative brevity, and by the anti-elite attitude of punk rock, even when the individual zine writers favoured far softer sounds. Sometimes strangers wrote back, and sent their own zines, or became contributors to Alborn’s. Incite! #27 (1994) took as its theme ‘epistolarianism’, life led through the post:
One of the perks of my job is that I get money to travel to distant libraries and read other people’s mail from one or two centuries ago… People should read these and remember why letters are better than phone calls or fanzines or just about anything else.
Actually I think I decided the first printed issue of Ply will be the second issue, because printing would only ruin the perfect, tardy-to-the-point-of-nonexistent quality of Ply No. 1.
Detail from a movie advertisement, 1977
Tony Herrington, on The Wire’s blog, battling against the underexamined assumption that “disco sucks” (does anyone still think that?), imagines disco as a form of protest in a capitalist wasteland:
The wisdom (if we can call it that) on disco that prevails in multiple subcultural nooks and crannies from Noise to alt.rock to Improv is that it is suffocating escapist froth, a retreat from the frontline of the Real into a dressed up, dumbed down, perpetual denial state of corny, showbizzy razzle-dazzle, all flaunt and flirt, oblivious to everything other than the solipsistic desire to go bang with all your friends at once, night in, night out. (Is it necessary to point out that such judgments rarely seem based on close encounters with disco’s actual milieu, let alone a close analysis of the actual music, which in its original state melted a complex of Afro rhythms – Bronx salsa, gospel and R&B, samba and Afrobeat – into a mix that was insouciant enough to suck up Broadway showtunes, Hollywood musicals, early synth experiments, jazz, minimalism and exotica? But then disco is the ultimate example of a genre whose complex reality and backstory has been obscured by its subsequent global commodity status, as the music that taste forgot, the sound that sucks.)
But as those revisionist disco historians Peter Shapiro and Tim Lawrence have already demonstrated, disco’s detractors should consider a couple of other angles on its supposedly head-in-the-stars refusal to grapple with the issues, its decadent insistence on fun and frivolity in the face of all the urgent evidence to the contrary (and is it necessary to reiterate the WASP-ish dimension to so much anti-disco rhetoric?)
For instance, rather than ‘speaking truth to power’ in the nominally engaged manner of protest songs of all stripes (rock, folk, R&B) – songs whose visceral platitudes and patinas seduced their audiences into thinking they were right there on the barricades, fed their sense of moral superiority in the taxonomy of cultural consumers – what if in its original incarnation, disco’s inclusive dancing-in-the-ruins vibe actively turned its back to the cynical machinations of prevailing elites and hierarchies? Consider the climate and conditions in which disco emerged, which is to say the dog days of the early 70s in the necropolis of Manhattan, when America was freezing in the chill winds of global economic meltdown and rampant political conservatism, and the pitiless systemic response to Vietnam protests, civil rights and the rise of identity politics. Now consider the possibility that, instead of knuckling under to this harsh 70s reality, disco proudly and defiantly resisted it by having the nous and the nerve to walk away, disappearing into a polymorphously perverse autonomous zone where none of it mattered, and where divisions of class, race, gender and sexuality were allowed to dissolve in a cavalcade of esoteric rituals that suspended time for as long as the night allowed.
In what follows, he traces how “revolutionary gestures become stadium grandstanding.”
Detail from a camera advertisement, 1970s
There’s a terrific review of two recent David Bowie biographies by Thomas Jones in the new London Review of Books. Jones is unusually fluent with musical particularities as well as the complex interworkings of pose and culture, of performance as an aspect of the artist’s self-presentation and as a construct built out of the components of its musical idiom. For example, he glosses part of Paul Trynka’s biography Starman:
Trynka doesn’t often go into details about the music, which is perhaps just as well. In his discussion of ‘Starman’ he talks about its ‘opening minor chords’ when they’re nothing of the kind, and says that ‘the key changes from minor to major’ at the chorus. But there’s no key change, and it’s important that there isn’t: the effect Trynka’s hearing, the sense of ‘release’ and ‘climax’ he gets when the chorus kicks in, would be lost if there were. What happens is that for the first time, the melody hits the tonic; Bowie gets through 15 bars in F major without singing an F, and then on the word ‘starman’ he hits two of them, an octave apart. The octave leap is, as Trynka says, ‘an ancient Tin Pan Alley songwriter’s trick’, and the steal doesn’t stop there: the melody of the chorus is ‘lifted openly, outrageously’ from Judy Garland. Bowie privately called the song ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’, and before long was singing Yip Harburg’s lyrics as well as Harold Arlen’s tune in live performances of ‘Starman’.
In creating Ziggy Stardust, Bowie was acknowledging that it was no longer possible, if it ever had been, to make ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ rock’n’roll, especially if you were a skinny white boy from Bromley. Since all pop music was imitation of one kind or another, and since there was little point in producing another collage of obvious pastiches, however accomplished, the only way forward after Hunky Dory was to invent a new idol, an amalgam of all his heroes (including Iggy Pop and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, both of whom he’d first heard on a trip to America to promote The Man Who Sold the World in 1971), the ultimate fantasy rock god. Obviously he couldn’t himself be that impossible figure, but he could pretend to be him, act the part as it might be played on a music-hall stage, and in the process become something else, something more interesting and possibly even something new – synthetic not only in the sense of ‘inauthentic’ but in a dialectical sense, too. Ziggy Stardust is an archetype of the popstar that has yet, as the cover of French Vogue attests, to be superseded.
Advertisement for processed meat, 1980
Alex points out Jonathan Bradley’s provocative characterization of Lil B’s “February’s Confessions” and B’s “based” style more generally:
The whole based steez is a bit of a scam, really. Lil B’s style isn’t confessional: rather, he performs the act of confession. Where traditional rapppers, ones supposedly unburdened by Lil B’s unfiltered honesty, bare their selves on record, they do so in service of imparting actual emotion: see, for instance, Scarface expressing the mute emptiness of grief, Pimp C aching with weary malaise, or Tupac Shakur fearful and fatalistic. Game is more unfiltered, Tyler more self-critical, Boosie more desperate. “February’s Confessions,” by contrast, reveals undefined people want Lil B’s money, that undefined friends treat him differently now he’s famous, and other undefined non-friends want to be friends now he’s famous. His revelations tend toward hippie mysticism like “Live your own life and be happy for the moment.” But because he raps in a hushed voice in elegiac tones over a slow, piano-driven sample, and claims to have a lot of shit on his mind, he sounds as if he might be baring his soul.
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.