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.
This is a song to get dressed to in the morning. The incantation of silver screen idols—Harpo says “you feel like Steve McQueen / when you’re driving in your car” and you think you are “a new kind of James Bond / when you’re smoking your cigar”—simultaneously inflates the scope of the mirror’s reference and, in its sarcasm, deflates its narcissism. The twinkling Swedish production—with a passing reference to Ingmar Bergman, and gossamer backing vocals by Frida of Abba—strikes me as a kind of daylight inversion of “Dancing In The Dark,” reversing Springsteen’s pulsing, echo-chamber interiority into a wry lambaste directed outward.
This was pretty much the only song by Harpo that made it far out of Sweden, but it did well when it was released in 1975, hitting #1 in Germany and Sweden, #3 in Australia and #24 in the UK.
I have always thought of reggae as a special subcategory of pop, predicated on slinky bass lines, Jamaican colors, and a slightly narcoleptic combination of Hammond organ, skanky guitar and offbeat rhythms. But the personality and the magnetic charisma of Bob Marley himself was what glued it all together, what it was about. Probably no other music genre is so singularly dominated by one artist, which is a shame, because it eclipses so much talent.
Gregory Isaacs, who passed away last year, is a legend in Jamaica and beloved by a generation of mostly British fans who grew up making out to his 45s. He is an example of how a talented artist entirely devoted to their music can create an important musical contribution that lives on through influence and local or regional popularity, while disappearing almost entirely from mainstream recognition. I’m thinking of artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe who at the time of her death was virtually unknown, yet influenced the entire wave of black popular music that swept through the American Century; and who even now is not half as well known as say, Mahalia Jackson; or Joe Tex, and his pivotal and yet ultimately forgotten place in the Soul pantheon, eclipsed quite completely by James Brown. Similarly, Isaacs will never enjoy the kind of iconic and messianic status that Bob Marley has. Nevertheless, you can hear his voice on parish roads in Jamaica and in local clubs and record stores. Far more than Bob, it’s his voice that you want the DJ to put on when you’re looking across the bar at someone and hoping for a dance. The pop icon status cuts both ways. Bob Marley is what they play on loop back at the Radisson Negril, for the tourists who get home high and tipsy, wishing they had stayed on.
This is not a question of authenticity versus commercialism. On Night Nurse (1982), Isaacs’ breakthrough album for Island records, the lovers rock ballad is updated with light touches of British new-wave synth riffs. Isaacs produced the record himself, and the production is clearly calculated to capitalize on English cross-over potential. In general, Isaacs’ output gave only an occasional nod to rastafarianism, largely steering clear of overtly political songs. His sound wasn’t rootsy or rugged; he was a suave lover man, the Cool Ruler. On stage he carefully cultivated this look, always sporting wide-brim hats and affecting a pimp strut, playing up the dapper don flair of a bow-legged, lanky player about town.
Isaacs’ originality is entirely in the grain of his voice, and his awareness of its charms. His delicate and restrained tenor evokes an aching and yet distant seduction. It is certainly lonely, as is appropriate for the lovers rock ballad which he built his early career on. But it is also removed, as though his love songs were animated by a desire that has already consumed itself, and is really only meditating on the memory of its sweetness. In a number of his songs he brings almost an ambivalent feeling to his seduction. “Cool down the pace for me little woman / This is not how it should be,” he admonishes warmly on the hook of his eponymous single, backed by a light tinkling of guitar and a swooning synth progression, with the overall effect like ice cubes melting in a glass of rum. But the coolness is also in his poise, a knowing restraint that complicates the classical role of the crooner. The particular quality of his music is the way he plays around his own image of a weary, almost reluctant lover. In “Extra Classic (Sister Love)” Isaacs runs his compliments both ways, crying out, “Please don’t stay too far / You may not be a movie star / But extra classic is what you are.” Isaacs teases, acknowledging his lover’s beauty in genuine terms, while still chiding the aloofness of her pretensions; his voice is again warm and intimate, yet the casual delivery could also easily be made over a long distance phone call.
This combination of suavity and restraint yields a catalog of songs that foreground intimacy, but leave much of the personality of the singer out. It’s hard to know where the real feelings of the Cool Ruler lie. Like fellow Jamaican crooners Jackie Edwards and Alton Ellis (the voice behind the rocksteady classic “I’m Still In Love With You, Girl”), he seems at times to be more of a spectral presence than a driving force in reggae, the way Marley was. The flip side to this is that a lack of mainstream success has made Gregory Isaac’s cool style difficult to recuperate. His drug problems in the eighties and his consequent scuttling from Island Records ensured that he never made it into the MTV era. But the early capping of his career has also freed his voice, allowing his songs to work as personal markers, as intimate vignettes. They are not anthems or cultural markers like Marley’s magnificent incantations, but songs that fit a certain kind of not-so-innocent nostalgia; love songs that express precisely how it feels to remember dancing with a girl, remember the flirtations of a summer, to re-enact the ambiguous gestures of courtship. When Gregory sings on the track “Tune In,” in his sweet and ethereally high hummingbird register, “Meet me on the corner / Of the avenue / And I’ll be patiently / Waiting there for you” it is impossible to tell whether the poignancy of his imperative lies in his wish that such a meeting will take place, or that it already has, perhaps many times before, and the song is simply his expression of the same desire vividly restored.
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.”
It’s a mystery to me how Ian Matthews makes as much out of “Mobile Blue” as he does. The original, recorded by stalwart Nashville songwriter Mickey Newbury, is built around his coarse, hoarse instrument. The lines — “Drunk and down and out and making time / With anything that comes my way” — are often twisted around over the top of bars, like barbed wire. It’s hard to imagine its being picked up by Matthews, the original male singer for the English folk group Fairport Convention. With the clean, reedy intonation of a choir graduate and the same studiously correct phrasing, he seems just the wrong person for the job. But maybe — this seems often to be the case — it’s just because of that. In any case, he was more a follower of American folk forms than English. The LP it appears on, 1972’s Journeys from Gospel Oak, is based firmly in those traditions. And it’s one of those oddities — a grab bag of mostly covers, recorded hastily to fulfill a contractual obligation — that, through the consistency of the band and its unfussy production, sounds like it sprung into existence not in five days but instantaneously.
In “Mobile Blue,” Matthews simplifies the phrasing, drawing out the nuance of the lyrics, and they benefit from it. Newbury makes a lot of significant details: being caught with “some wired-up chick from Jacksonville / And brother did we look like we could fly” (I believe present-day Jacksonville retains the appropriate evocations). And regretting it, staggering to the Greyhound station to get back to his baby — yelling out “put me on that dog take me away.” The craftsmanlike construction of the song combined with its weird, penetrating diction reminds me of Jimmy Webb — whose “Bride 1945” Matthews also covers on the record.
When Wire’s Colin Newman introduced the swift svelte stab of ‘12XU’ with these words (on their 1977 debut album Pink Flag), he doubtless intended a sardonic swipe at the so quickly sublimated, normalized expectations of a Punk audience already willing to hear the shock of the new parlayed into fresh orthodoxy; already favouring the recognizable classic over the fractured innovation that was ostensibly Punk’s point. If the song itself, with its faux guttersnipe delivery and mad dash to the 1 minute, 55 seconds mark, was a knowing parody of expected Punk moves, the intro was a neat rejoinder to the audience’s hankering for newly canonized favourites: in short, for repetition.
When the band performed Pink Flag once more at London’s Barbican Centre earlier this year, and Newman duly delivered the pointed preface to ‘12XU’ right on cue, it was doubly difficult to know just what manner of repetition was being canvassed 26 years on. Here it was again. Again: though not quite; now laden with the weight of a nostalgia that threatened to consign the whole performance to the status of mere heritage event; yet also, somehow, in its uncannily accurate reanimation of a dead time, quiveringly and weirdly alive.
Such is the nature of repetition. On the one hand, there is nothing so predictable, so tiresomely unwelcome, as the ideal copy: it is a marker of a merely traditional, conventional desire for consistency, a loyalty to a past that, repetition assures us, has never really gone away. Repetition, as some of our most lingering modern cultural beliefs inform us, is nothing but a serial disorder: a compulsion equally tragic and pathological, so the argument goes, in both its contemporary manifestation as revival or nostalgia and in its classic form as cultural continuity, the way ‘we’ do things. On one reading, repetition is a sort of endlessly reflected dementia: echopraxia (the thoughtless and meaningless repetition of the actions or movements of others) or echolalia (imitation of speech).
But repetition is also the indispensable condition for all kinds of cultural values: from a coherent sense of a self that we carry from one moment to another, to the notion of scientific truth. How valid would an experiment be if it could never be repeated? What would a human history look like that was incapable of discerning, in the tumult of events, surprises and cataclysmic upheavals, some strand of repetition? In fact, at precisely those moments when history seems to convulse in the agony of innovation and renewal, repetition is not far away. The very word ‘revolution’ implies a movement of return, a spectral rehearsal of what has gone before that, so the revolutionary believes, can be made to live again …
