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Monday, January 04, 2010
DANSE A LA MUSIQUE
The French Fries
Epic : 1968
[Out of Print]
SMALL FRIES
The French Fries
Epic : 1968
[Out of Print]
SKIN I'M IN
Sly and the Family Stone
Fresh
Epic : 1973
[Buy It]
No one needs to hear more about how Sly Stone's racially integrated, mixed-gender band, the Family Stone, fused the lean funk of James Brown to the kaleidoscopic pop of the psychedelic era and yielded some of the most rewarding music of the century. They don't need to hear about how Sly then slipped into false optimism, deep pessimism, and drug addiction while continuing to make fitfully brilliant music. And they certainly don't need me to plug my novel, "Please Step Back," which relates the story of a Sly-like funk star named Rock Foxx. So instead I have a story about three little pigs.
In 1968, on the heels of the chart success of "Dance to the Music," Sly and the Family Stone -- anchored by Sly's brother Freddie on guitar, his sister Rose on vocals, and Larry Graham on bass -- recorded a French version of the song under the name The French Fries. "Danse a La Musique" is significantly stranger than its American counterpart: it pushes the horn section back and pulls the guitar up front, eliminates most of the lyrics, and fractures the ones that are left behind. Throughout, Sly speeds up his own background vocals until they're animated-animal chirpy. (Perhaps not coincidentally, 1968 was the tenth anniversary of the first appearance of Ross Bagdasarian's Alvin and the Chipmunks.) The whole proceeding is deeply perverse; it's as if Sly would only release his song into the international market after defacing it so that it could not do the record company's bidding.
But "Danse a La Musique" was only one side of fries. The B-side of that 1968 single, "Small Fries," has a pleasant pop melody over which Sly, still using his chipmunk voice, speak-sings a story of three teenage pigs named Freddie, Larry, and Sylvester (again, shades of Alvin and his brothers, or maybe of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who were celebrating their thirtieth anniversary). The three piggies receive letters from "Uncle Samuel," ostensibly concerning military service, and each of them handles the request differently. Freddie's reaction relies upon spiritual conviction and medical exemption:One little piggy's name was Freddie
Freddie Freddie Freddie Freddie
He built a house with headaches and religion
If he had chosen to try to get away
It would have been a very bad decision The fate of the second pig, Larry, is more comic. He "tried everything in the book," but because he was "very lazy and only liked to eat," Uncle Samuel "made him a cook." In this already highly ironic world, the most ironic outcome is reserved for the third piggy, though Sly delays that part of the narrative until after a military drumbeat and some "Dance to the Music"-derived scatting. But when the third verse arrives, it arrives in style:The third piggy's name was Sylvester Sylvester Sylvester
Ain't that weird
He hated to be told what to do
But fourteen stripes has changed his mind
Now he proudly wears navy blue Fourteen stripes? Is this a distortion of patriotism, a commentary on the ways in which it is exaggerated to compel compliance? Possibly. Maybe it's just a joke. Whatever the case, this transition is figured as fiction, or rather negative fantasy: Sly is imagining what could happen to him if he were tempted by military rewards at the same time that he is insisting, by staging this scenario as a satire, that he will never submit. And yet, the power of the request remains compelling. Following the story of Sylvester the pig, Sly offers a chilling off-handed coda:Say a letter has come from Uncle Samuel
He's a dude These questions of obedience and duty, of service and selfhood, have been raised repeatedly over the history of this and every other country, and artists have always grappled with them. "Small Fries" handles them in an intensely strange manner, as befits one of the most idiosyncratic superstars in pop-music history (apologies to Shakira and Mary Margaret O'Hara). In light of the song, it's worth returning to an equally tortured, equally strange artist, Soren Kierkegaard, and one of his definitions of genius:The case with most men is that they go out into life with one or another accidental characteristic of personality of which they say: Well, this is the way I am. I cannot do otherwise. Then the world gets to work on them and thus the majority of men are ground into conformity. In each generation a small part cling to their "I cannot do otherwise" and lose their minds. Finally there are a very few in each generation who in spite of all life's terrors cling with more and more inwardness to this "I cannot do otherwise." These are the genuises. Five years later, Sly recorded the anguished, defiant "Skin I'm In," where he insisted once again on selfhood over service, even when the results are Pyrhhic:Ah, oh
If I could do it all over again
Ah, oh
I'd be in the same skin I'm in
The clothes I wear
And the things they dare me to do
Ah, oh
Places I go
Ah, oh
People I know
The things I gain
Sometimes they rain on me
Hey, hey
Skin I'm in
And the things I never, never win Is it weird to treasure your own flawed self--the self that cannot do otherwise--even as it undoes you? Ain't that weird.Labels: ben, sly
posted by Ben
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