Labels: alex, garage rock, Matthew

Labels: alex, numbers

Labels: alex, friends, power-pop

Labels: alex, letters, pop, soul

Labels: alex, drones who dream of honey-making in their unchanging hive

Video

Labels: alex, soul/wtf?

They eat chicken, don't they?
-Col. Sanders, responding to a question about black folks. (Apocryphal)

Mrs. Fried Chicken
You was my addiction
Drippin' with hot cholest-
Like Greeks with his falafel
Italians with their tomato
Pasta
What roti is to a Rasta
Trappin' me-
You and your friend Mac'n'Cheese

Finally the words came: he was going to give her "head," oral sex. He convinved himself he could "handle" her, though in mentioning the act, as if to "sanctify" it, he quickly suggested marriage and even pregnancy, singing that he was going to "knock up this woman." This is one of the moments in which he actually called out her name - "Oh, Janis!" - exploding with an anguished shriek, a cry of limitless pleasure and pain. Like a little boy afraid of jumping off a diving board, Marvin built up his courage - "soon," he repeated, "soon" - trying to convince himself he was man enough to do the job. He viewed oral copulation as a complete commitment of his affection. For Gaye, the act was the highest expression of his love since, as he told me several times, it was something he didn't enjoy. It's no accident that "giving head" was joined to the notion of conception and pregnancy, further validating his feelings of sacred romance and familial sanctity. In fact, in November of 1975, Janis did give birth to her second child, Frankie Christian "Bubby," born a day after his namesake, Marvin's Brother.

Labels: alex, chicken, sex

Labels: alex, rock and roll

Labels: alex, hip-hop, soul

Two weeks prior to the Drifters' "On Broadway" reaching its chart peak, the group returned to the studio to record another song by the same four co-writers, but not before it had undergone a revamp. Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the same year in which police dogs were trained on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama and Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of that state's University in an attempt to block the entrance of the school's first black pupils. [A sidenote, from John McPhee's 1969 book about Arthur Ashe: "Wallace is beautiful. He's doing his own thing. He's actually got a little bit of soul. What I worry about is people who say one thing and do another. Wallace is in his bag, and he enjoys it." - ed.] Sympathetic to the Civil Rights cause, Barry Man and Cyntia Weil wrote for the Drifters a protest song, "Only in America," the lyric of which included the lines "Only in America, land of opportunity, do they save a seat in the back of the bus just for me/Only in America, where they preach the golden rule, do they start to march when my kids try to go to school...." When Mann and Weil played [a draft of the song for Leiber and Stoller], the producers opined that it needed humour, suggesting a rewrite from the opposite viewpoint. Thus, the song was remodelled from a WASP perspective and recorded by the Drifters on the very same day that Martin Luther King was placed in solitary confinement in Alabama. Atlantic's Jerry Wexler felt that whether percieved literally or with irony, the track had little airplay potential and could in fact cause trouble for his company and the group, nixing its release.

Labels: alex, hip-hop, pop, soul

Labels: alex, calypso, kitsch, pop

He had a party
He had a band
And a thousand loving friends
He had his reasons
Or so he thought
This should be where the story ends:

Ron Klaus
Wrecked his house
Down on Indiana Street
Ron Klaus
He wrecked his house
Now it's lying at his feet

He threw the doors
Out of the windows
And the windows out the doors
He brought the outside
Into the inside
And the ceiling to the floor...

I I like everything that comes out on 4AD -
You like everything that comes out on SST -
You like almost everything that comes out on Homestead -
I like everything I get in the mail for free!

As in the new millennium catch-all that is the term "indie rock?" I mean, it's a huge field, but when we're talking a specific, sort of defined sound that syncs with that term alone, I think of (often bland) bands like Tapes'n'Tapes, the National, the Arcade Fire, etc. As far as a shared aesthetic, I'd say it's generally straight-ahead guitar music with a few meticulously considered deviations (recently horn orchestrations and Americana influences) that inhabits that sort of middle space between mainstream rock and the experimental underground. In other words, it's pop music for people who define themselves in opposition to pop music."

- Andrew Phillips, music editor/writer


The way I see it there are two kinds of genres - genres that represent living subcultures and genres that are purely marketing constructions (examples of the latter might include 'folktronica', 'IDM', 'electronica',... genres that no musician really claimed while the terms were first being bandied about, more as umbrella terms than as descriptors of unified movements, although then next-gen musicians sometimes claim these terms for their own, these media-created terms that described no living movement at their inception can actually birth a subculture that really *is* aligned around them). So those type of genres have two faces or phases that occur at different moments. Whereas genre-terms I regard as more meaningful-- things like punk, hip-hop, indie, genres that describe living subcultures where the terms are propagated by the musicians and THEN picked up by the media, which have lifestyle accoutrements and organic social dimensions etc..,, these also have two faces or phases, but they unfold simultaneously. So "indie" viably means two things: the fundamental one is music that is recorded outside of the major label system (& this category is very confused now b/c so many "indie" labels are structured so much like major labels and/or have commercial ties with them, and b/c unlike in the late 70s/early 80s when arguably American indie rock was born, there wasn't the massive touring and commercial infrastructure for indie rock that exists now, which made the term less shaky and more meaningful, with bands genuinely just finding their own way around the major label system not settling for this institutionalized subcurrent to it that exists now...plus with the current shakiness of the label system, categorizing a band by their label-affiliation is making much less sense than it used to.) & so the other thing that 'indie' means now is mainstream, record industry bands who emerged from this organic indie scene, who appropriated certain very visible musicological strains of it, and who are "indie" in the same way that a mainstream band can be "punk", we can say they are a punk band and while being mainstream violates every tenet of organic punk-movement culture, people will know what we mean. I guess the bottom line you're asking which of these definitions is the "right" one, and I think they're both right... what can I say, I'm a descriptivist at heart."

- Brian Howe, poet/critic


Indie is short for "independent." There are four major labels: EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner. If a label ultimately answers to one of those four companies - if one of those companies has the power to make direct decisions about what the label does, or signs its paychecks--then it has a dependent relationship with that company, and the artists affiliated with it aren't "independent" either. That's a definition, not a value judgement, although it sometimes has value judgements attached to it. And it's a very useful tool for understanding where certain recordings and artists and labels fit into the economic matrix - what resources they have available to them, etc.

"Indie rock" has a generally understood meaning, largely associated with what a bunch of guitar bands on independent labels did in the '80s and '90s. It is, in fact, a subset of rock released on independent labels - an aesthetic that got its name from its economic circumstances. But the reason it got its name that way is that the idea of deliberate financial independence from a few large companies was, and sometimes still is, an important part of the intention and meaning of a lot of "indie rock" artists' work. To claim that a band can be "indie" without being financially independent of the major labels is to pretend that industrial capitalism does not exist.

- Douglas Wolk, author/critic


The way I see it, "indie" is a definable genre, not just a declaration of limits vis-a-vis the market (since, after all, there are tens of thousands of variously rebarbative musical units far less market-friendly than anything that can be labeled "indie"). If punk is descended from the Stooges, indie is descended from the Modern Lovers. Both subgenres come down from '60s garage rock, but indie takes the introspective, romantic, self-conscious, self-doubting road. Indie is usually friendly, catchy, and openhearted enough that it seems as though it should be accessible to all and therefore mass-popular in that old AM-radio way, but in fact it represents a formerly centrist aesthetic that's been pushed out to the fringes by a bunch of large historical forces. Its self-doubt, a crucial element, also tends to limit its appeal, and I'll let you guess what demographic unit feels sufficiently secure to countenance it. When something that sounds indie makes it to the big show, it's usually either because a freak weather pattern broke its way, or else because an indie wrapping coats something slick and shallow. Indie is a lot like the kind of American novelists who are kept in print by the French. Jim Thompson may speak to the soul of the nation, but Americans would generally rather read James Patterson.

- Luc Sante, writer


Wait - I thought the "indie" aesthetic being referred to was actually the "alternative" aesthetic; "alternative" more aptly referring to, say, Nirvana on Geffen, whereas "indie" would have referred to Nirvana on Sub Pop. Or is "alternative" now a sanctioned Billboard category like Country and Western? Anyway, as Tom Frank aptly put it around fifteen years ago in THE BAFFLER, "Alternative to what?"

Indie, anyway, does appear often to be a marketing term (albeit an intrinsically fraudulent one) referring more to a certain flavor of product issued by the majors (whether labels or studios) than to independently produced and released works. As far as the aesthetic it espouses or implicitly promises, it seems generally to be a tepid one, at least by my lights (same with the average "indie" movie).

(I think, incidentally, that the idea may be spreading to publishing as well -- look at Soft Skull's acquisition by Counterpoint. They're really acquiring an attitude, not necessarily just a backlist.)

I have to confess to being somewhat disturbed by your students' unquestioning absorption of the corporate line in this instance, particularly since it's music in which they, especially, have historically had a stake. The carelessness with the language is surely opportunistic for the record companies, but inexcusable in students charged with the task of thinking critically. We're in Orwell territory here; If "indie" doesn't actually mean it, then "organic" doesn't have to either, and we can all easily extrapolate from there.

- Christopher Sorrentino, novelist


My heart wants to side with the indie-economic-model hardliners but my head says that, semantically, that fight is lost: "Indie" has been redrawn by common usage just as "alternative" was before it - the most common musical strains in an oppositional subculture crossed out of that subculture, and the label crossed with them. "Indie" now connotes such a hodgepodge of economic, social and aesthetic associations that it is irrelevant. We can be rueful about that over beers, but that's about all.

So everyone please abandon ship on the word "indie" just as happened with "alternative." The principle of autonomy doesn't have to go with it.

Then again, considering that the four major labels are at the moment losing their hegemonic power like oil tankers spilling crude into the sea, maybe that's not currently the most compelling battle. If your main paycheck is coming from your songs being sold to commercials and TV shows, but you're on a non-major record label, are you still meaningfully economically independent from large entertainment
conglomerates? And as critical as we want to be of popular-culture economics, the indie/alternative subcultures have had their share of pathologies and snobberies that might warrant as much a "good riddance" as a sentimental tear.

The bigger question is whether the autonomy of the "indie" movement from mass entertainment was in fact as sociopolitically progressive and artistically liberating (not the same thing) as people attached to it believed in the 80s/90s - the populist question. And even if it was, as the major labels flounder to redefine themselves, what does true independence in the age of digital reproduction look like? What might "selling out" be?

Maybe the expiration date of the word "indie" provides a good, temporarily unlabelled moment to look at things anew.

- Carl Wilson, author/critic


Apologies for being obvious, but Indie used to mean 'not on a major label' - and the DIY attitude that that implied - and that was the only time we all knew precisely what it meant. When the major labels sniffed money, and bought the bands, it couldn't mean precisely that anymore - perhaps the word should have been more strictly applied at this time: "you were Indie yesterday, but since you signed that contract, you're now Modern Rock" - so it came to refer to the type of music which embodied that spirit, or was at least influenced by it, whatever the profile of the label.

"...with the current shakiness of the label system, categorizing a band by their label-affiliation is making much less sense than it used to."
Hits the nail on the head, and true for a long time.

And now Indie, or Alternative, is a "branding tool" that annoys. But those who still use the word in conversations (rather than marketing meetings) are generally understood to refer to music made regardless of the mainstream, for the love of doing it, regardless of technical perfection, profit etc.... or any combination of the above. I can't speak for those who use it in marketing meetings, but I assume they refer to that, but also to another meaning, which as with all sales terms is a slippery catch-all concept, comprising everything from "people with goatees and tattoos who are, to our delight, happy to make money" via "The spirit of the Kids and their Nike revolution" and "What's New" to "That music I may or may not like that will make me money".

One is a devil-may-care philosophy, the other its commodification - sorry: I can't think of a less Cultural Studies word right now! (Commoditization may be more up to date in Business School.)

Maybe Alternative Music nowadays is like Alternative Medicine?

- Wesley Stace/John Wesley Harding, author/musician


The first entry cited in the OED comes from a 1928 edition of the NY Times: "Indies, independent producers of pictures." More to the point however is a 1945 Billboard heading: "Indie diskers new collection ache for publishers royalty." What's relevant is the association of the term with vendors rather than with artists themselves. Additionally, there is the English idiomatic use which refers to scruffy but apolitical music as far back as Happy Mondays and Stone Roses. The term is now used internationally in this manner to class music as a broad commercial category. I think the term is helpful in the U.S. for drawing a line between groups who are oppositional (punk, free jazz) and groups who are totally cool with making it (indie). It's worth mentioning, however, that "indie rap" still seems to describe a fairly cohesive venue for intelligent, countercultural music (J Live, The Coup). But I think the elliptical return of the early citations is relevant: film and music, in a standard bid for commercial synergy, converge somewhere around the end credits of most romanticized youth dramas (Garden State's anointment of The Shins being only the most obvious example). As it stands now, indie means operational freedom from social consciousness; it's about as atomized and self-interested as the Victorian Novel. Actually, we can go slightly further by noting the current coincidence between Jane Austen films (affirming the virtues of marriage and estate ownership) and the commercial fiefdom of indie (affirming the virtues of Urban Outfitters and Apple). Both, I think, offer the consumer a provisional show of "hardship" (or authenticity) before moving on to an easy retirement.

-Blake Schwarzenbach, musician/professor


my "alternative" OED, different than the usual overground edition cites "in-die" as opposed to "out-die" ie to die on the inside generally defined as selling fewer records than everyone believes you should have and/or having driven a seemingly popular or commercially viable style or approach into mercantile disrepute versus "out-die" to die on the outside to sell more records than is seemly or good for the state of your carbon footprint and/or soul in the larger sense of such things hence the paradigmatic in-die band would likely be big star -- taking beatle-esque pop hooks, attractive hair, hetero love motifs and settling into underperforming "cult" inner-death (i.e. no one else really cares) status while paradigmatic "out-die" band is certainly the rolling stones -- who dragged oppressively morbid delta blue fetishivism and drug-death-spiral somehow through four decades and counting of overdog arena-selling "outer-death" (i.e. we're all appalled to have to witness their dollar-soaked decrepitude)

a simple measure of the difference is often the function of a cover song -- out-dying cindy lauper propelling in-dying jules shear number onto the charts vs. in-dying galaxie 500 or yo la tengo burying out-dying kinks or george harrison tunes in the "in-die pantheon"

one of the paradoxical cases is the velvet underground, long understood as the "ur-in-die" band but they were actually out-die -- leveraging john cage dissonance, cellos, homosex motifs and bad singing into some shred of popularity and lasting fame -- yet the innumerable bands adopting them as a model have achieved treasured "in-die" status (i.e. gloriously no one cares)

(meltzer would have taken this and run for fifty pages, whereas I have to get to work)

-Jonathan Lethem, novelist

Labels: alex, indie

Live

Labels: alex, soul, soul/garage-core

I know the pussy's mine
So I'ma fuck a couple more times
Then I'm through with it
There's nothing else to do with it
Pass it to my homie, now you get it
'Cause she ain't nothing but a bitch to me
And y'all know that bitches ain't shit to me...

Labels: alex, hip-hop, sex

FANCY

NINE BELOW ZERO

These can never be true friends: Hope, dice, a prostitute, a monkey.

-Indian proverb

Labels: alex

BODEGA

GHETTO BIG MAC

SHUT THE FUCK UP, JARED!

Labels: alex, ghetto tourism

The wine is the blood of the white man, San Domingo!
We will drink the white man's blood, San Domingo!
The bread we eat is the white man's flesh.
The wine we drink is the white man's blood

Q: Elaine, how old are you?
A: 29
Q: How many children do you have?
A: 14
Q: How old were you when you first started working in the fields?
A: 8
Q: You've been working 21 years in the fields?
A: That's right.
Q: Elaine, do you ever think you'll be able to get out of this kind of work?
A: No, sir.

Labels: alex, slavery

OLD GREGG/LOVE GAMES

LOVE GAMES (LIVE)

LOVE GAMES (LIVE ACOUSTIC)

TEENAGER IN LOVE

A PRIVATE DANCE LESSON WITH...

A VALENTINE FROM EVA

Labels: alex, love

ALABAMA (LIVE)

Something got a hold of me
it must be the Lord
Something got a hold of me
it must be the Lord
Something got a hold of me
it must be the Lord
Something got a hold of me
it must be the Lord
I can't sing right, I can't play right
I can't walk right, I can't talk right
I can't eat right, I can't sleep right
I can't do nothing at all.

Labels: alex, blues, country, geography, jazz, old-timey

Today the Gods
Can't make us quake
We see our lives as situations
Eyes are eyes, and teeth are teeth
But mine are rotten underneath

Years and years have passed
Since the Puritans invaded our soul
Just like those Arab terrorists
You never know

Labels: alex, geography, jazz, rock and roll

• People in Alaska arrive in Alaska by crossing over a land mass which covered the Bering Strait tens of thousands of years ago
  
• People in Alaska have a median income of 3.6
  
• People in Alaska are 5 years of age or older
  
• People in Alaska are not people in Alaska
  
• People in Alaska are polar bears
  

On the way back to the house I passed the local movie theater on Prytania Street, where "The Mighty Quinn" was showing. Years earlier I had written a song called "The Mighty Quinn" which was a hit in England, and I wondered what the movie was about. Eventually I'd sneak off and go there to see it. It was a mystery, suspense, thriller with Denzel Washington as the Mighty Xaveir Quinn a detective who solves crimes. Funny, that's just the way I imagined him when I wrote the song "The Mighty Quinn."

A-
Denzel Washington, the police chief Xavier Quinn, from The Mighty Quinn (1989). The general idea is mostly that he's chasing his childhood friend Maubee, who is accused of murder. Quinn considers his case with a lieutenant:

XAVIER: You think Maubee did it? Cut a man's head off?
JUMP: That fucker, he does that! That's why he's like that!
XAVIER: Try and make sense when you talk, Jump.

Denzel gets to do a vague West Indian accent, wear a white suit, and sing.

XAVIER: I had the blues
I had the blues so bad
It put my face in a permanent frown
But I'm feeling so much better, I could cakewalk into town . . .

and

I woke up
One morning
Felt so good I got back into bed
Put that big leg over me mama
I might not feel this good again . . .
Watch me cakewalk, y'all.

The black people in the movie sing "Quinn the Eskimo" at him a lot, and drink beer, and go to work; the white people in the movie lurk around being racists, attempt and fail to sleep with Denzel, and try to overthrow governments. Some of the black people try to sleep with Denzel, too, but that's neither here nor there. Overall it's a pretty accurate picture of the universe. There is no actual cakewalking, which, as I understand it, was a dance that took as the source of its name competitions held by slaveholders, with slices of hoecake as prizes for the best dancers.

A couple hundred people singing in an island juke joint sound like this:

Come all without,
Come all, within
You aint seen nothing like the Mighty Quinn.

No, actually, that's not what they sound like.

Labels: alex, country, geography, reggae, rock and roll, rockabilly, soul

The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears. ~W.H. Auden

Labels: african, alex, blues, doo-wop, gospel, holidays, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul

Labels: alex, holidays, new year's mix

Labels: acid rock, alex, rocksteady, soul

Labels: alex, kids

Labels: alex, repost, soul

Labels: alex, youtube

ALL MY FRIENDS
LCD Soundsystem
All My Friends
EMI : 2007
[Seriously, Buy It]

A POEM OF STALIN : EPILOGUE : AVE MARIA
Alexander Galich
A Poem of Stalin
Singing Poets of Russia : 1998
[Some record store in Brighton Beach; I forget which]

HEROES
David Bowie
Heroes
RCA : 1977
[Buy It]

POETS
ARRESTED FLIGHT
Vladimir Vissotski
Le Vol Arrete
Le Chant Du Monde : 1977/1981
[Buy It]

I don't have a lot to add to Hua Hsu's deeply personal description of the new(ish) LCD Soundsystem single except to say that I couldn't stop listening to it last weekend. Which was in most ways a great weekend - a friend's film screened; I went to to the beach, and to a lovely party. Saturday was a perfect day. And Sunday I drove out of town to see what's left of the family.

Dad - who was born in Moscow, in '36 - talked a bit about his political life; a subject which seldom came up when I was younger, in part because my father is genuinely modest about it. He and my mother were what you might call mid-list dissidents. Close friends with the Russian balladeer Alexander Galich (at home, I have a childrens' book, about giraffes, translated in Galich's hand from the German), and with Andrei Sakharov (there's a photo, somewhere, of me crawling under the kitchen table and Andrei Dmitrievich crawling after me).

They copied and smuggled documents, met with Western journalists, wrote and signed petitions, taught in the "underground university," supported the spouses and families of jailed dissidents.... That sort of thing. When Keith Gessen, who was then writing for FEED, wrote about ex-Soviet dissidents living in America, my family name served, in some small way, as a passport.

So, I'd known about raids by the secret police, samizdat, and the constant threat of imprisonment. But I always thought it was mom who'd more or less politicized my dad (if anything, I'd pictured my father as something of a playboy).

My father's best James Dean

My maternal grandfather - an aeronautics engineer - emigrated to the USSR in the early 30s, to help build Socialism; he was arrested and killed, most likely just hours, or days, after his arrest and/or interrogation, in '37, when his wife - my grandmother - was two weeks into her first and only pregnancy. (She continued to hope, and never remarried; that's the only-surviving photo of my granfather, in his Soviet cap, way at the top of this post). My mother - who grew up dirt poor and fatherless, and died at the age of forty-two - had no love for the system.

My parents' wedding photo; that's me at 10 months

But, as I was saying, my dad talked a bit the other night - among other things, about Hungary in 1956, and about sneaking out alone, at the age of nineteen, to plaster the Moscow subway with hand-lettered leaflets protesting Soviet imperialism. (Typewriters were closely guarded in the Soviet Union and, hence, easily traceable.) Even after Stalin's death, this would have gotten him an automatic ticket to the Gulag. It's worth mentioning that my father's background was very different from my mother's: Her mother taught at the Gnessin conservatory, but was paid bread crumbs, and sent what she had to the Lubyanka, where she hoped her husband might be. (Officially, he was being held "without the right to correspond;" unofficially, this meant a bullet in the back of the neck, but at the time, no one knew, or wanted to believe it). She and my mother starved while my father - the son of a party member - lived in relative comfort.

My step-mother shook her head, slightly, while dad talked. And he said, "What? It might not have been the worst thing, to have been arrested." Which provoked something midway between silence and a fight between them. But it struck me because, dumb as it sounds, it was my father's version of a feeling I'd grown up with, too: That the people around me had been tested by fire, in ways I never would be. Had survived terrible things, but learned things about themselves that most of us will never know.

But while I'd always thought environment had a lot to do with my parents' politics, this weekend, I came around to the fact that my father's politics, at least, were hard-wired. That, to paraphrase e.e. cummings, there was simply some shit that he would not - could not - eat.

I'm not sure what else to say about this, here, except I also noticed this weekend that, as he poured us another shot of Lithuanian vodka, my father's hands were shaking - trembling - and that his skin had lost a good deal of its elasticity. I believe that people have internal ages, which don't really change: I've been something of an old man ever since my mother died. But my father is an eternal teenager. And yet, my father is seventy now, and every new thing I learn about him makes me that much more painfully aware of how much I don't know, and won't ever learn about him. That not only do most of us never, truly, know ourselves - but that neither do we really learn about the ones we're closest to. I know that I do what I do for a living, now, because my parents did what they did, then. But why, exactly, did they do what they did in the first place? And, of course, another question presents itself: What, if anything, does any of it amount to?

And so, the reason I bring all of this up is to explain why my nearly-perfect weekend brought me very near to tears....

A family photo; Moscow, just before exile/emigration, 1975

Labels: alex

Labels: alex, jazz, kids, soul

Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that.

-Britney Spears

Labels: alex, pop

Men when free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

-D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classical American Literature

Video

Labels: alex, rock, soul

Labels: alex, garage rock, gospel, hip-hop, soul

Labels: alex, old-timey, reggae, soul

Labels: african, alex, cuban, funk, jazz, rockabilly, salsa, soul

Video

Sam Cooke, the Franklin Sisters, Ann Peebles, the Ruffin Brothers (& Dennis Edwards!), Jessica Simpson, the Womack brothers, James Carr, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Wilson Pickett, Shelton Brooks, Albert King, Bobby Rush, Ruth Brown, Joe Tex, Jackie Ross, Nina Simone, Kelis, The Pointer Sisters, Nat King Cole, Darlene Love, Al Jarreau, Toots Hibbert, & Terrence Trent D'Arby....

Labels: alex, contests, soul

?

?

Surprise Us:

& Make Us Love You:

Tell The Truth, But Eschew The Obvious -

& Off Point:

& Omit Those Words That You Find To Be Needless:

Labels: alex, country, gospel music, indie, pop, radio, reggae, soul

Labels: alex, blues, jazz, rock, rockabilly, western swing

Avant-garde. Sophisticated. - Jon

Happy birthday! -for some reason on this occasion, at this point in time, I offer you this song. - Tom

In the 1920s and '30s, men in jug and jazz bands said "Yowza!" almost as often as they said "Yas, Yas!" - a tendency exhaustively exhibited in the late recordings of the Memphis Jug Band, viz. "Ruckus Juice and Chittlin'," "Gator Wobble," "Insane Crazy Blues." These exclamations, forever gone from the language, come to mind whenever i see Joanna Yas - and not merely for her name. Without question, Joanna embodies all the qualities any reasonable person would associate with such terms. So, in the spirit of her birthday, don't just call Joanna "Yas," call her Joanna "Yowza." I do. - Andrew

Happy Birthday Joanna. Bert Jansch is coming so I got you a ticket. xx - Sam

Joanna is impossibly sweet and refreshingly tart and really really saucy and if I were a country there would be a national feast day every May 18th where we would eat food dressed with a complex and delicious sweet and tart sauce called Joanna Sauce and then we would spend the next 364 days wishing we could have some Joanna Sauce every day. - Ethan

By Joanna Yas I am always slanted and enchanted. She is the queen of whatever borough she graces, and for her next year I and many others wish lots of further success and love and happiness, local and otherwise. Love - Matthew

WORD YOU USED TO SAY
Dean & Britta
Back Numbers
Zoe/Rounder : 2007
[Buy It]

Last week was the Open City Magazine Spring Prom. Joanna reigned queen. For me, it was high school all over: I was drunk, idling by the bleachers, nursing sweaty-palmed crushes on people other than my date. The Open City version was held at a bookstore, so there weren't any bleachers. But they'd turned the biographies table into a bar, so I idled there. For that night I was stalking Britta Phillips, of Dean and Britta, of Luna, and of my first adolescent stirrings at the hands of a capable woman, Jem and the Hollograms.

Jem was the holographic alter-ego of Starlight Records founder and ceo, Jerrica Benton. Nights on Sunset, Jem would shatter hearts with skirts the violating shades of the Genera-brand rainbow, set pubescent imaginations afire with her rhinestone-studded fingerless gloves. During the day, a demure Jerrica padded those same fingers through Starlight's double sets of books, doing the complicated arthimetic of keeping her original indie label afloat, all the while fending off boozy passes from A and R sleazemen looking to buy their way onto the Starlight.

Jem was the inspired marketing ploy of the Hasbro Toy company, and Britta Phillips was her voice. So when Britta Phillips appeared on the invite as a patron of Open City, I set myself to finally meet Jem.

I never got to meet Britta. Or Jem. I'm not even sure if she was there. But I did meet Alex. I don’'t remember spilling anything on him nor borrowing any money, so I was surprised to get an email from him this morning.

I was more surprised to hear that Joanna was celebrating a birthday this week. For I was certain that Joanna and I had agreed not to age. Admittedly, this is more of my hang-up than hers; I'’d been hiding from my birthday for years when the subject came up. But when I voiced the idea last summer, she seemed open to it, we tried it on that night.

I'’m not pathologic about it. I had just planned on a few years off from birthdays, lingering at 28 until some greater sign was delivered upon me, something that told me it was alright to move on, call it time served. For me, birthdays always meant reconciling with accomplishment, or lack thereof, of pride in what you'’ve achieved. Years have passed. I’'ve remained birthdayless, as if that is all it will take to live a life where compromises and commitments don'’t have to be made, to live past the markers of adulthood that try to box us into predictability and labels. The labels that would have us choose between becoming a holographic rockstar or successful entrepreneur. The same labels and predictability that Jem and Jerrica laid to waste.

But Jem, if attendance at the Open City fundraiser is any indication, doesn’'t exist. Joanna does. Joanna, who commands the impossible task of keeping an enviable literary magazine afloat by day, who ravages the hearts of audiophillic moistdorks - and few others - by night. No holographic alter-ego. No shortage of foiled passes from drunken agents and editors, either. As for rhinestone-studded fingerless gloves, well, you can ask her.

Jem was lucky. She was a cartoon, held frozen in the slutty florescence by the colorists at Hasbro. Jem never had to choose whether or not to celebrate a birthday. But with all she had going for her, she’'d be right to indulge the passing of a year with one hell of a party. So I'm certain that Jerrica Benton would never hide from her birthday. Because i know that Joanna wouldn'’t, either.

Happy twenty-ninth, boo.
love mike

Labels: alex, joanna, rock

Labels: alex, radio, soul

Love: we are those beings who must, at all times, give our all. To be decieved has no real meaning for us, for we act under immense pressure and the object has the sole functionof unleashing this. Thus we are as naive as children when it comes to judging the loved one. Even when a lover only desires flirtation and a touch of sentiment we are so dazzled that we want to give her everything - our very soul. We are ridiculous, but for good reason.

- Robert Musil, Diaries 1899-1944

Labels: african, alex, bluegrass, blues, calypso, reggae, soul, soul/garage-core

I am! I am Superman!
And I know what's happening!

Labels: alex, curios, indie, rock and roll

I'm an Alex Abramovich fan, but I have a feeling he takes himself way too seriously.
- Dane

Labels: alex, writer's week, youtube

Labels: alex, soul

Video

T)axes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies making me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
And as if all that shit wasn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
With Whitey on the moon
Her face and arm began to swell.
But Whitey's on the moon
Was all that money I made last year
For Whitey on the moon?
How come there ain't no money here?
Hmm! Whitey's on the moon?
Y'know I just 'bout had my fill
Of Whitey on the moon
I think I'll send these doctor bills,
Airmail special
To Whitey on the moon

Labels: alex, jazz

Promo

Monterey

Smothers Bros.

Why can't my songs about trouble be popular? I ask. But people are tired. Sometimes people are tired of thinking of difficult and unpleasant things.

-Miriam Makeba

Dear Moistworks folks,

as a reader from Europe I wonder if there has been,
say in the last 12 or 24 months, a song (or songs)
which, in your opinion, said something meaningful
about the war in Iraq and the "war on terror" - we all
know the classic anti-War songs, and, yes, of course,
Neil Young did his (rather uninspiring, unfortunatly)
share, but I sometimes have the feeling that it is a
curious thing that this war is not really really
really a big thing in contemporary music. This war is
different from other wars, and so should the music
"about it". or not ?

Labels: alex, gospel music, reggae, rock, soul

Labels: alex, rap

Video

Video

Labels: alex, funk, rock, soul

Video

Labels: alex

Susan Choi
Rick Moody
Jenny Offill
Dana Spiotta
& Christopher Sorrentino

Labels: alex, writer's week

Hey, Joe Bataan! Whatchoo doin' on my record?!?

Labels: alex, soul, spanish grease

Labels: alex, soul

Labels: alex, funk, reggae

I am going away to the great house farm,
O yea! O yea! O yea!
My old master is a good old master,
O yeah! O yea! O yea!

Labels: alex, gospel music, soul

Labels: alex, nas, rappers in their youth

Labels: alex, nas, rappers in their youth

Truth be told, Hill[the guy who put the Velvet Underground Acetate, which MW posted here, up on eBay]'s not the most passionate of Velvet Underground fans. A recent graduate, in history, from Concordia University, he's president of the self-founded Irma Thomas and Minit Records Fan Club (Thomas is a New Orleans soul singer, Minit a now-defunct indie record label) and the publisher of a music fanzine called $2 (Comes with Mixtape).

"Right now I'm getting caught up in Christmas," he said. He'll be shutting up Backdoor Records and Pastries shortly to head out to Vancouver to visit his parents. Then early in the new year, he's off to Taiwan for a visit he describes as "part holiday, part scholarly."

One label that's made inroads into the twenty-something market is John Fahey's Revenant, a two-man startup dedicated to "raw music with a strong spiritual core." Thanks to sleek packaging and articles in major rock periodicals, Revenant is spreading the old time gospel sound far beyond the borders of the Yazoo/Folkways audience. Though not limited to roots releases - their most ambitious project to date is a five-CD set of Captain Beefheart rarities - Revenant has managed to sell 10,000 copies of Dock Boggs' 20's recordings. Though hardly impressive by major label standards, the figure is more than many indie cult bands have mustered, and indicates a burgeoning market for the music. "I think people are interested in not being fooled," Dean Blackwood, Fahey's partner, e-mailed me recently: "Irony is a very important tool in the 'post-modern' age - people my age tend to use it as a primary mode of expression... I think a lot of people are just sick of it and want something direct and raw, much like they wanted when they found Elvis in '54-'55 or punk in '75 or garage rock in the '60s."

More than anything, it's Revenant's refusal to segregate its old time releases in a folk music ghetto that gives me hope for the next wave of roots music releases. Surely, seeing Charlie Patton, Charlie Feathers, and Cecil Taylor side by side in their catalog is a sign that the next generation of folk fans will judge the music I love on aesthetic, rather than ideological terms. "We are not in the business of writing theses and finding music to support them," Blackwood said. "If we don't think the music makes for compelling listening independent of some sort of analytical framework, we do our best to leave it alone."

Labels: 5% rap, alex, gospel music, new year's mix, spanish grease

Labels: acid rock, afro-beat, alex, autism, girl groups, infidelity, keith richards, marriage, new year's mix, the hajj

Well in the days of old King Sol
Every night was a crazy ball
The cats smoked hay through a rubber hose
And the women they wore transparent clothes...

Labels: afro-beat, alex, calypso, new year's mix, prince charles, rock and roll = gospel music, soul/garage-core, spanish grease

one realizes that he regards people as mere congeries of conditional reflexes.... At the same time, of necessity, he sees the statistical majority as the great Reality.... Like a Lord of Masscult, he is - professionally - without values, willing to take seriously any idiocy if it is held by many people... The aristocrat's approach to the masses is less degrading to them, as it is less degrading to a man to be shouted at than to be treated as nonexistent. But the plebs have their dialectical revenge: indifference to their human quality means prostration before their statistical quantity, so that a movie magnate who cynically "gives the public what it wants" - i.e, assumes it wants trash - sweats with anxiety if the box-office returns drop 5 per cent.

In order that everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first necessary to procure a phantom, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage...
-Kierkegaard, The Present Age

[As] the middle distance fell away, so the grids (from small to large) that had supported the middle distance fell into disuse and ceased to be understandable. Two grids remained. The grid of two hundred million and the grid of intimacy. Everything else fell into disuse. There was a national life - a shimmer of national life - and intimate life. The distance between these two grids was very great. The distance was very frightening. People did not want to measure it. People began to lose a sense of what distance was and of what the usefulness of distance might be.... The grid of national life was very large now, but the space in which one man felt at home shrank. It shrank to intimacy.... In the vast distance between the protection and the protected, there is space for mirages of pseudo-intimacy. It is in this space that celebrities dance.

What is it?... Two abilities: to do a very complex kind of work, involving electrons, and then to cover the coldness of that with a hateful familiarity. Why hateful? Because it hasn't anything to do with a human being as a human being is strong. It has to do with a human being as a human being is weak and willing to be fooled: the human being's eagerness to perceive as warm something that is cold, for instance, his eagerness to be a part of what one cannot be a part of, to love what cannot be loved.

Who's to say what's right these days?
What, with our modern ideas and products?
-Homer Simpson

Tina and [Ben] Goldberg [the CEO of Mercury records], I knew, had certain mutual (synergistic) interests. Mercury, it was shortly to be announced, would be putting out a CD series of New Yorker writers reading their work. They also supported similar charities... and were loosely attatched to the same circle of tastemakers in New York City. For me, accepting the assignment would inevitably mean functioning not only as a reporter, but also as a kind of broker in a negotiated relationship between Tina and Goldberg, who were themselves functioning as brokers in a negoitiated relationship between Si Newhouse and Polygram. I knew I would be wading a little bit deeper into the vast, tepid swamp of Buzz, with its surrounding cedar bogs of compromise. On the other hand, the idea of a rock prodigy - a kid who had learned to be a rock star from watching rock stars like Kurt Cobain on MTV - did sound like a good story.

Very rarely are [game show] contestants asked about the old history, the history before demographics became the New History. When this older, more distant world is invoked, it is made obvious that this world is mystifying and too difficult to be comfortable with. One game-show host asked a question about the First World War and then described the First World War as "certainly a military event of considerable importance." He was assuring his audience that the First World War was popular in its own day.

The Wu didn't seem to know about anything that happened before 1975, which was around when they were born. If you told Ol' Dirty Bastard or GhostFace Killah about, say, World War II, he might say "Whoa, that's some marvelous-ass shit," as though history were just something to roll up in a blunt and smoke. But the Wu were real artists: they got that post-Jamesian flow of urban consciousness that goes through everyone's mind just right.

Labels: alex, joe bataan, johnnie ray, obituaries, wu-tang clan

Labels: ahmet ertegun, alex, atlantic records

Labels: alex, blues, rhythm and blues

To play it safe is not to play.

- Robert Altman

Labels: alex, obituaries

Labels: alex

Those tapes were all intentionally about the art form of using a little girlish voice to say really dirty things and play with pedophilia. That's my way of fisting all the people that I believe exploit a woman's sexuality. - Liz Phair

"Exile in Guyville," a song-for-song answer to the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street," seemed shockingly new not only because Ms. Phair, in her cracked, monotonous voice, sang about sex so diffidently and explicitly but because Guyville was such a recognizable, ordinary place - a collective village of young Americans whose defining idiom was ironic detachment. [This is Meghan O'Rourke, writing in the New York Times a few years ago.] Ms. Phair's particular gift lay in her sharp-tongued charting of everyday emotions. Nearly all the songs were about romantic yearning, getting together, breaking up; the album was like a sophisticated self-help manual, whether you heard her songs as cautionary tales or as encouragement to take more risks. She wittily nailed the sulky disagreements of relationships, how quickly the trivial could provoke a sour truth: "And it's true that I stole your lighter/ And it's also true that I lost the map/ But when you said that I wasn't worth talking to/ I had to take your word on that."Her voice always held a back-story of suppressed emotions, the kind it's hard to get into a pop song; when she said "That's just fine with me" in response to a sexual proposition, you heard everything that wasn't fine, and also all the reasons she didn't want to get into it.

To the Editor:

Re "Liz Phair's Exile in Avril-ville" by Meghan O'Rourke
June 22

Once upon a time there was a writer named Chicken Little. Chicken Little worked very hard and took her job very seriously. Often, she even wrote. One day, just as Chicken Little was about to have an idea, she heard something falling on her roof. "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" she shrieked, spilling green tea and vodka all over her work station. This commotion awoke her three readers, who lived with her in her hut, and all three rushed outside to see what had happened to the sky. After enduring several anxious minutes alone, Chicken Little was relieved to see her readers return.

"Oh, Chicken Little, it was just the trees dropping their buds on a beautiful spring day," they said.

Chicken Little tried not to show her disappointment. Not long after, as Chicken Little was poring over some back issues of other writers' material, she felt another idea about to form in her mind.

"Truth . . . no . . . Lies . . . no . . . ummm . . . ummm . . . Conspiracy!"

She was just about to write this down, when a great clattering and scraping began above her head. Clutching her PC to her breast, she swung her head wildly to and fro.

"The sky is falling! This time, the sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

She meant to alert her readers. She felt very responsible for them. They played outdoors, mostly, and had very open minds. The three readers rushed back into the hut, very concerned, and when they saw the look of dread on Chicken Little's sweet face and her finger pointing skyward, trembling, they immediately turned around and rushed back out to see what was the matter. For a few breathless moments, they could neither confirm nor deny, then they all saw the same thing at once.

"Chicken Little," said the readers, "it's only two squirrels chasing each other in amorous conquest, skittering over the eave of our house."

"It's quite funny, actually," added one of the readers, "you should come and see."

But Chicken Little was annoyed.

"I have work to do!" she fumed. "Besides, I wasn't speaking to you. I was performing a haiku," she fibbed, faxing something.

Well, time passed, and the readers grew, and so did Chicken Little, but not very much. The light inside the hut was dim, and she worked in a huddled position for long hours. She grew paranoid. She began to think she wasn't sure anymore. She began to fear she didn't know. Then, just as her resolve was nearly wiped away clean, she heard a sound that was not very loud. She cocked her head from side to side, her little neck pouch jiggling, and pecked at a few pebbles lying around her desk. Yes, the sound was definitely there. In fact, it was coming from all sides now, the sound of a million tiny things dropping on her roof. She peeked out her window and saw a million tiny things dropping from the sky. All her chicken senses gathered in supreme vindication. She opened her throat as wide as it would go and crowed, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling! By God, any moron can see the sky is falling!"The peacefully sleeping readers were aroused, but did not pay attention anymore, so used to her hysteria were they by now that her crowing became one more familiar noise in the chattering nighttime forest."The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Chicken Little screeched, terrified they would not heed her and would be found the next morning, buried among the intellectual debris. She pecked and pecked at them with her sharp little beak until they finally agreed to be awakened. The three readers rose up and shuffled outside to be greeted by a warm, summer rain falling steady as a heartbeat, wondrous and quiet as unexpected relief from pain.

"Why, Chicken Little," said one reader, "it's only a summer shower come to feed the land. It feels great!"

Chicken Little cowered in the corner as a fork of lightning licked the trees.

"It's dangerous!" she cried, "you could slip on the wetness! You could catch a nasty cold! You could get electrocuted!"

The three readers laughed, and went back out to experience the mystery of the storm, without thinking, without deconstructing, without checking what the other would do first.

"Listen to me! Listen to me!" cried Chicken Little, as she watched their backs turn. The three readers stopped at the door and called out before leaving: "C'mon, Chicken Little. Hurry up,you're gonna miss it!"

LIZ PHAIR
Manhattan Beach, Calif.

Labels: alex, rock

Labels: alex

Labels: alex

Labels: alex

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Oakland duo the Coup (Boots and DJ Pam, the funkstress) rank in the top three as far as underrated rap groups of the '90s go. That said, because lead MC Boots has no problem suggesting that big corporations are colluding with Satan and that corrupt cops disgust him ("Pork and Beef" implores listeners to "throw a Molotov at the pigs"), this release won't sit well with the apolitical crowd. In fact, the original cover artwork for Party Music depicted the duo detonating the World Trade Center. It was immediately pulled following the events of September 11, 2001. Boots' revolution will obviously not be sanitized, and on the opening track "Everything" he lays down his manifesto: "Every cop is a corrupt one without no cash up in the trust fund.... Every tried man is innocent.... Every boss better run and hide." The list of witty, counterculture songs is long, from "5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO"--a crude expose of corporate "politricks"--to the poignant [ed. - omg, "poignant"?] "Get Up," where they team up with everybody's other fave raptivists, Dead Prez. Raging against machines and offering solutions to problems that plague low-income communities has never come in a funkier package--the sonic backdrop is mostly live funk instrumentation--and the sheer breadth of topics covered here makes the joints of most top-selling rappers seem inane and unsubstantial. Fans of Mos Def, KRS-One, and Public Enemy will get a rise out of this one.

Labels: alex, hip-hop