Wham!, “Last Christmas” (1984)
At the Ply Christmas party, this just plays on repeat as everyone drowns in whipped cream eggnog. Close attention to the acting in the wine sequence is well rewarded. Next year I’m going to make a special point of booking that ski resort double-date well in advance.
Johnny Kemp, “Just Got Paid” (1988, US #10)
Yesterday afternoon I tuned in to the reliably old school Kiss FM and caught the apex of its new jack swing segment. The DJ billed the set as a celebration of “homegrown artists,” underscoring the extent to which that particular sound became synonymous with black New York in the early nineties. The culture of new jack swing, with its aura of sophistication, seemed to augur the sort of bustling buppie urban life that awaited middle-class youngsters like me. That was our vision of adulthood.
The triumph of hip-hop, among other things,1 changed all that. Donnie Simpson went out and Joe Clair came in, though that’s a crude way to put it. New jack swing was, I suppose, the last great iteration of a certain kind of black urbanity. Its visual aesthetics were rooted largely in mid-century jazz and R&B culture—baggy, bright-colored suits, wavy or processed hair, goatees, horn-rimmed glasses, etc. The music itself combined smooth vocal arrangements and sunny keyboard vamps with funk breaks or loud, drum machine beats. Today it sounds surprisingly sprightly. In my mind, it also remains freighted with notions of what was or could have been, for the version of black city life to which new jack swing supposedly formed a sonic backdrop disappeared, by all accounts, a long time ago. The ideal, needless to say, lives on for some.
A few years ago I ran into Johnny Kemp at a house party in Hamilton Heights. I learned that he still performs in clubs and lounges uptown. New York is funny that way.
1. Crack cocaine, mostly.
The Clean, “Odditty.” Live at the Rumba Bar, Auckland, 15 May 1982.
In honor of the 30th birthday of the groundbreaking New Zealand indie label, here are some highlights from the incredible show they put together in Auckland only a year into their endeavor:
A very early incarnation of the Tall Dwarfs backed by The Clean (wearing paper bags).
The Clean doing “Two Fat Sisters,” — prompting one YouTube user to declare them “New Zealand’s Velvet Underground.”
The Chills doing the very cut of “Flamethrower” that was pressed to vinyl (though the sound is not the same) and
A rowdy version of The Chills’ “Bite,” guest-starring a large part of the Nun roster.
Crowded House, “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” Directed by Alex Proyas, 1986.
This song is the carpeted waiting room of God’s lobby. Decorated like an upscale motor lodge, but still a lobby for God, and so of heaven. Trimmings of commerce linger on its edges—the smell of mall pretzels, makeup counter ladies spritzing perfume on passersby. Volatile compounds of minted, cinnamon’d gum displays; the sterilized crinkle of prescription bags. A black town car you’re traveling to the airport in—cold and dawn, but the heat’s on in its back seat, you watch the sun rise, you start counting the steps to the door of your heart. You are going up and down an escalator in many locations at once. So many of its phrases overhanging their lines’ meter, dragged over and under the bruleed guitar sounds like tide pulls. Hear it at night and it’s a prom dance, balloons slowly volleying off of dancers’ feet. Hear it in the day and it’s like cold medicine—a cottoned veil over your thoughts, now both wistful and automated. So diffuse; broadcast from underwater transmitters. Argonauts set sail to it. The refrain seems to be written on the walls, on the t-shirts of ghosts you walk among. Don’t let them win.
In the waiting room there are velvet plush pews that smell of Catholic incense and Little Pine car freshener, and you kneel on them for the organ segment, look up through a stained glass cupola in expectation of the crescendo. As you kneel, you commune with every loneliness you’ve ever known, each of them folded together and suddenly sweet, berries studding the strange candied cream of the song.
This post originally appeared on Mere Duchess.
Video for Lana Del Rey, “Video Games” (Stranger Records, 2011)
I am on board with this. Though I don’t really buy her schtick—the vaguely vampy, quote unquote Los Angeles, quote unquote 1955-1965 James Dean, drag strip chicken, stretch pants and stage jewelry sort of thing—I am more than slightly in love with the way this chorus unfolds. It’s long, and takes its time winding around a number of different sonorities, all while making some totally tired sentiment sound alluring and profound. That she’s singing about what I can only imagine is dirty, dirty sex in the same breath as video games, and in such a way that you can easily assume that she’s actually talking about video games, is an added bonus. She probably did not understand what JT was talking about back in “Ayo Technology.” She was probably also like 15 when that came out.
This post originally appeared on The Jazz Face.
Video for The Go-Betweens’ “Head Full of Steam,” originally released on Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express (1986).
From Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide (originally printed in the 31 March 1987 Village Voice):
Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express [Big Time, 1986]
The lyrics, which set oblique but never opaque romantic vicissitudes against a diffidently implied existential world-historic, aren’t the secret of their lyricism, and why should they be? These Aussies make music, with Robert Forster’s intensely sincere vocals and Grant McLennan’s assertive but never pushy hooks pinning down the melodies. Granting all reservations about the form itself and with apologies to skillful romantics from R.E.M. to XTC, there are no popsters writing stronger personal love songs. I doubt there are any page poets envisioning more plangently, either. A-
Kim Carnes, “Bette Davis Eyes.” Directed by Russell Mulcahy, 1981.
I find this song to be extra fancy. Elegant and odd. When I was in the UK for a while, this was for whatever reason a blockbuster on the dance floor. Discotheques stood in for fratty house parties for college students there, so it was the kind of thing where you’d be snockered off of e.g. currant juice and vodka under blinking cruise ship lights, and this song would transform the teeming crowd of Top Shoppers into a tearful, swaying mass of jubilance, the way, say, “Livin on a Prayer” does for the Natural Light crowd here stateside. It’s always been one of my more vivid personal references for the way culture decants unevenly over the earth.
The song’s not especially danceable (which made the Brits’ enthusiasm all the more charming) but it does have this lovely lachrymose quality that mimics that sliver-thin edge of inebriation that exists just between its best sincerity and its worst mawkishness. It’s the kind of song to usher in last call with—not a floor closer, but one to start the process where everyone left starts to hunker down and accept that they’re not going home with anybody.
Also, I’d like to do a redo of this song called “Kim Carnes Hair” that would go “She’s got Kim Carnes hair” and it would be about me. Her suit is fierce. Her bone structure and attendant makeup is a way that was only allowed/actively encouraged during Reagan’s first term. Every mannequin that ever wore a shoulder pad was modeled in some way on Kim Carnes. Makes me want a nice firm wedge of burgundy blush to joist my cheekbones.
This video is the common ancestor of “Don’t Come Around Here No More” and “Walking on Broken Glass.”
This post originally appeared on Mere Duchess.
In this post over at The Paris Review Daily I describe a recent solo piano performance by Jason Moran at A Gathering of Tribes. One of the things I didn’t have the chance to discuss in the piece is what makes Moran such an important figure in jazz. That would probably take a book. But if you listen to a song like “Refraction 2” you’ll see how Moran, like all great jazz artists before him, has mastered the tradition and absorbed the popular idioms of his time. Anyone who listens to contemporary jazz will quickly see that the overwhelming majority of artists, both “avant-garde” and “mainstream,” work within a paradigm that is fifty years old, some of them, such as Wynton Marsalis, with remarkable skill. I enjoy Marsalis, but offhand I can’t think of a single composition of his that sounds like it could have only been made during his particular active years. As with most of Moran’s music, “Refraction 2” sounds completely contemporary. It isn’t hard bop or free. It isn’t soul jazz or post-bop. There’s no name for it really, but I think what distinguishes it, in part, from earlier jazz is how Moran draws so naturally from hip-hop. He shows an understanding of how both forms operate. Jazz, particularly hard bop, which originated in New York City, predates what you might call “Cadillac music.” Most hard bop is busy, even when its funky. Rap music, as it has evolved from the disco-derived music of late ’70s NYC, has become increasingly about repose, grooves. You ride to it. These are two different, though not necessarily incompatible, paradigms. Moran has successfully integrated them (with elements of free jazz and post-bop, of course), and you’ll notice that the result is something new: jazz for our time.
Song: Max & Intro, “Beogradska Devojka” (demo); Video from Pejzazi u magli (Yugoslavia, 1984), dir. Jovan Jovanovic.
The prevalence of YouTube as a song sharing platform has lead to some ugly commonplaces: songs for which there were never videos are paired with slideshows, or lyrics processed through home video editing dissolves. But occasionally a fan will adapt an existing video for the song, and this can be a remarkable product of the internet age: a sublime combination of unusual sources and a disregard for older music-video conventions. There was, for example, the memorable combination of Ariel Pink’s “Beverly Kills” with a Friskies ad. Above is (as far as I can make out) a deft bit of editing by photographer Alex Gaidouk, who compressed an obscure Yugoslav film about young heroin addicts, Pejzazi u magli (1984) to fit an obscure single by fellow Serbians Max & Intro, “Beogradska Devojka” (1985).
From Piano Blues, from the Blues series by Martin Scorsese. Directed by Clint Eastwood, 2003.
Nat “King” Cole was arguably the greatest jazz pianist of the 1940s. His music displays breathtaking technical fluency, impeccable rhythm, and sophisticated taste. He played everything beautifully—down-home blues, straight-up standards, even classical (see his stunning interpretation of Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C Sharp Minor”). Cole’s style had a profound impact on the jazz world. Many later pianists acknowledged his influence on their music, including Thelonious Monk, Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, and Ray Charles. Listening to Cole alongside Evans and Jamal, for instance, which I have been doing for a while now, is especially instructive because it demonstrates how Cole’s tricky combination of texture and precision has become the sine qua non of all truly great piano trios. His instrumental recordings are among my personal favorites. Although I own albums by other prominent pianists from the 1940s, I enjoy Cole’s the most. He’s less ostentatious than Art Tatum, and his revolutionary combination of piano, bass, and guitar makes him feel more modern than Earl Hines. The video here is excerpted from Clint Eastwood’s solid documentary about jazz piano.