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Wednesday, August 01, 2007
ROCK BOTTOM RISER
Smog
Rock Bottom Riser EP
Drag City : 2006
[Buy it]
ROCK BOTTOM RISER
Gudrun Gut
I Put a Record On
Monika : 2007
[Buy it]
CRAZY
Gnarls Barkley
St. Elsewhere
Downtown : 2006
[Buy it]
CRAZY
Lil Wayne
Da Drought 3 [mixtape]
Young Money Entertainment : 2007
[Buy it]
YOUNG FOLKS
Peter Bjorn & John
Writer's Block
Almost Gold : 2007
[Buy it]
YOUNG FOLKS
Kanye West
Can't Tell Me Nothing [mixtape]
??? : 2007
[Buy it]
If you're like me, you wake up every morning certain in the belief that somewhere in the world, you have a doppelganger intent on finding and utterly destroying you, a nemesis that is exactly your mirror image. You know that on the day when you and your nemesis finally meet, one of you will leave this world. You know that you are the truth and the nemesis is the apparition, although you often wonder if the nemesis feels the same way.
I've always wondered what it would be like to be a twin - to essentially know one's nemesis from birth. Anyone who's seen a couple soap operas knows that each set of twins contains one twin of perfect goodness and one of utter malevolence. Check out these babies above. Which one will be evil? Science can predict a baby's sex and birth defects, but is still powerless to divine which twin will go all the way through Eagle Scouts and which will poison the reservoir.
Tales tell of people who can look at a baby chick (which, externally, is completely sexless) and divine whether it's male or female based solely on intuition. Perhaps someday one of these rarified intelligences will rise up with the power to intuit the evil twin, and will ascend through folklore to attain the mantle of the saint. Until then, we watch our twins with unblinking eyes, looking for flashes of eruptive evil, always a revolver under the bassinet.
The doppelganger phenomenon isn't limited to people - songs have doppelgangers too, and we have to presume, for the public weal, that the same principle applies. So today we're looking at three sets of musical twins. First we have Gudrun Gut's sublimely counterintuitive overhaul of Smog's "Rock Bottom Riser" - a folk dirge from the respectful yet playful perspective of a person with a twenty-five year foothold in the Berlin musical underground.
And I know very well that no one needs or wants to hear "Crazy" or "Young Folks" ever again. The former has been covered by pretty much everyone who played a concert in 2006, and the whistling part of the latter has become so iconic that, according to recent studies, you can play the drum beat to a room full of people and upwards of ninety percent of them will begin to whistle it, even - and this is the truly shocking part - even those who have never heard the song.
Nevertheless, I've posted them both for reference, so we can compare them to mixtape shenanigans by Lil Wayne and Kanye West. (On the mixtape, West goes on to rant about everything from inaccurate cover stories in Rolling Stone, which he "accidentally" (but I think with subtle derision) insists on referring to as "Rolling Stones," to how he's "emotional, not political." It's pretty entertaining, but prolonged exposure to the "Young Folks Whistle" has been shown to cause aphasia and suicidal euphoria in lab rats, so I'm not posting it, because Moistworks is for the childeren. Even the evil ones that will have to be destoryed.)
My most fervent hope is that, somewhere, out in the vast readership, a special reader exists, blessed with the intuition to determine which version is a force for good and which is it diabolical foil. There can only be one! Feel free to make your way to the comments box and we'll see if we can hash this thing out.
posted by Brian
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