What was once a collection of items I truly enjoyed wearing now appears to be a bunch of unsightly second-hand rags that have taken up conference in my dresser. I’m hoping that it’s my perception that’s changed and that I didn’t actually always look like a wild, Hospice dumpster-diving fool, as my reflection now shows me to plainly be. I am wondering where all of my friends have been and why they did not tell me I had really fallen off the wagon. Probably they were too busy pointing and laughing at me to say anything.
I have a lot of sunglasses, none of which I really like. There is a pair of shiny blue aviators that I’m partial to but the lenses are too dark and scratched to be practical, turning me into a sort of spastically blind Stevey Wonder when I don them and thereby neatly negating any amount of cool I hoped to gain by wearing them at all.
My poor attitude towards my wardrobe leads to me wear black leggings and a grey sweatshirt a lot, making me feel like a mom running errands before school gets out and soccer practice begins. To counteract this I lean heavily on an expensive black leather jacket I recently purchased, which shifts me to the opposite side of the fashion spectrum closer to “old man on the prowl.” When I am wearing this jacket older men often nod and smile knowingly as they pass.
Often for the sake of expediating my departure from the house I will not even look in the mirror knowing it will only discourage me, which is how I ended up at the gym yesterday wearing a pair of wetsuit pants with my underwear so badly bunched up I appeared to be romping around in a full diaper. Realizing this early on and even then much too late, I had to rely heavily on denial to get through the rest of my routine, imaginging that the many men and women continually pointing and guffawing in my direction were actually just impressed by my strength and good form and all agreed that I was a pretty good lookin babe.
I have recently been thinking about throwing away absolutely everything in my closet and starting from scratch, but im pretty sure I’ll just end up replacing it all with the same old crap in a slightly different shade of black. I have also been trying to realistically imagine myself in anything but jeans and tank tops, but cant. Dresses make me feel like a silly, dolled up housewife, ditto for skirts. There are always jumpsuits, but I have entirely abused these practical one-pieces over the last year and I know it. So I’m left with jeans and t-shirts. Which I’m already wearing.
Are bathrobes in? Maybe I can just swaddle myself in one of those and call it a terrycloth gown.
When a Billboard Magazine writer first penned “Rhythm and Blues” in 1949 as a less contentious term for what the publication formerly charted as “race music,” the genre was understood to describe “a vigorous new sound that combined elements from gospel, swing and blues” and within a decade grew to represent the Motown sound of the 1960s. Fifty years later Rhythm and Blues is still understood to describe music pulling from these roots as championed by artists such as R. Kelly and Whitney Houston, but is also subject to much abuse when contentiously applied to any singing, black artist.
Intended as a label for a new wave of hipster friendly rhythm and blues, the clever penning of 2011’s “PBR&B” had many listeners charging critics with labeling pop artists as R&B based primarily on race rather than musical influences. And while genres can and do evolve, the R&B argument of what the genre is and who is and is not making it, is often fraught with prejudiced categorization with any cooing white artists being labeled “blue-eyed soul” and a black artist making that same music as R&B.
Anyone who listened to James Blake’s full length LP this past year would classify its breakbeat heavy sound primarily as dubstep, but several tracks that would normally qualify as R&B are not. In it’s own review, Pitchfork indicated that Blake’s music pulled heavily on “the sound of a Southern black gospel choir” topped with a “white-boy coo.” Likewise, several of this year’s top albums by artist such as Frank Ocean and The Weeknd were labeled as R&B (targeted as the PBR&B variety) despite having more in common with top charting pop and hip hop artists than anything based in gospel or blues.
In a well articulated article by AWL, Jozen Cummings charges that the classification of an artist based on what we see rather than what we hear regardless of their musical classification is a form of musical segregation which is not only lazy and myopic, but is patently offensive to both artists who are truly making R&B and those who are not. “R&B as a genre has evolved over the years, no question, but the artists we associate with R&B evolved as well, sometimes moving beyond the genre with which they were first associated.” Cummings says.
So what is this new guard of artists such as Drake, The Weeknd, and Frank Ocean if not R&B? Sitting down to listen one can recognize a common thread of louche and emotionally vulnerable subject matter, a quality which began to dominate listeners’ attention with Drake’s Thank Me Later which debuted in 2010. Drake continued in this vein with 2011’s So Far Gone, a wide open, smooth talking 80 minute journey awash with both the braggadocio that hip hop has come to be known for while simultaneously laying open the fragility of that very posing like glass castles waiting to tumble amongst the maelstrom of fame.
Whether or not these artists are expanding the definition of R&B or have left that realm to explore the delicate boundary of a new era of pop and hip hop is yet to be satisfactorily addressed elsewhere in the blogosphere, but perhaps it is easier to let the music simply speak for itself.
For a fuller discussion on this subject I have to recommend both the SOTC blog post which seemed to kick off the argument, and its most thorough response from AWL.
My listening party is not quite as it was depicted in the promo-video for Bad As Me, but it is not entirely dissimilar. In Tom Waits’ version, there is a stack of old stereos piled up behind a desk with a tuner, a glass of water, and a ringing telephone. At my desk there is only a computer and a cup of coffee, the telephone in the corner more of a notion than necessity. From the east-facing window looking out over the Long Island Sound, the hot orange glow of sunrise streams in, illuminating the cold, bare walls. Beyond the office lay the vast concrete and steel expanse of a nuclear power plant, where hardened old men drag themselves along echoing corridors, burdened by the weight of respirators, protective clothing, and canvas bags of freshly oiled tools.
I believe Waits would appreciate this scene. Over the course of nearly 40 years and 17 studio releases, the troubadour of doom has crafted an intricate saga acted out by tired working stiffs, old drunks, and drunk loves- all in the image of himself. With a little variation, the essence of the music stays the same. It is a salty, dimly lighted romance. It is barroom piano heartbreak; the solitude of loneliness; the joy of open roads; half-remembered images of roses, whiskey, foreign ports, and depression era snapshots. In the end it is a celebration of life’s vicissitudes, where pain and sorrow must face the miracle that we are still alive at all.
The first release of new material since Real Gone in 2004, Bad As Me has come treading in to meet a party of many high expectations. Will it be a new era of material departing from his well-worn themes? Will it surpass the success of Real Gone? Will it give me what I want? Does he still have “it”? Speaking of these suppositions in a New York Times interview Waits says, “It always seems to be like bakery goods or fish. People want to know if it’s fresh.”
Like many of his past releases, Bad As Me includes contributions by a number of notable musicians. Keith Richards, Les Claypool, Flea, and as usual Marc Ribot, a longtime collaborator lesser known as the front-man of Los Cubans Postizos (The Prosthetic Cubans), which is the most excellent band name ever. The previously mentioned piece in the Times notes that the musicians were brought in individually to record rather than all at once, and that Waits would prompt them with different motivations saying “ ‘I want you to play like you’re 7 years old at a recital. I want you to play like your mom’s in the room. I want you to play like you’re miles from home, and your legs are dangling from a boxcar. Or play like your hair’s on fire. Play like you have no pants on.’ ”
Eight songs into the album, the title track and sole single “Bad As Me” is the first glimpse of the glitter and doom that fans have come to expect. Highlighted by Ribot’s Cuban inspired riffs, it is a high-energy confession of complicity, reveling in its own immodesty. “You’re the letter from Jesus on the bathroom wall/you’re mother superior in only a bra/ you’re the same kind of bad as me.” As Waits cuts between the limits of his range with high wailing verses and deep rumbling moans he admits, “No good you say? Well that’s good enough for me.”
“Kiss Me” is the ballad highlight, a lounge number with the perfect balance of nostalgic imagery and emotional tension that keeps the listener cloudy headed and coy to the very end. It’s easy to imagine Waits leaning comfortably against a piano with as much magnetism as Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday as he slowly drawls “I want to believe our love’s a mystery/ I want to believe our love’s a sin/ I want you to kiss me like a stranger once again.”
“Hell Broke Luce” is the album’s heavy hitter, the title pulled from a knife-point inscription on a cell wall in Alcatraz with all the aggression to match its origin. With the gruff stomp and hand clap percussion reminiscent from Real Gone, the pace is relentlessly driving as the tale of a drug-addled veteran unravels, punctuated at its height by machine gunfire and the chilling military refrain of “Left! Right! Left!”
The album’s closing track “New Years Eve” is a moment of waking relief after troubled dreams. While it may feel like an abrupt change from the penultimate “Hell Broke Luce,” one need only see it as an emotional continuation from the opposite perspective, the story of a tired man looking after worn and tired friends. Backed by warbling guitars and Parisian accordion, the lyrics paint a half-spoken montage of fleeting joy and subtle sorrow as the chorus lapses into refrains of “Auld Lang Syne.” With the imagery of 4 AM fireworks, diamond stars, sobering black coffee, and the wail of police sirens, it is a beautiful reminiscence of a finally silent night, calmly resigned and emotionally loaded, a beautiful conclusion to a brief and somber narrative.
While not as chockfull of gruff heavy hitters or swooning ballads as previous efforts, Bad As Me does stand out as a concisely edited album of quick poetic couplets, blues and Latin informed riffs, and even a few subdued, sneak attack tracks that seem forgettable at first but grow on you over time. Who knows if it will stand out as a favorite in the end? Perhaps it already is. We may just need some time until we know it ourselves.
If you haven’t seen the Tom Waits Private Listening Party, view it here and now:
This is some Sonic Bullshit. In what might be the worst news ever, Matador records released a press announcement stating that Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth are separating after 27 years of marriage and 30 years as band mates, which just goes to show once and for all that there is no such thing as love.
Not only were Moore and Gordon the ultimate, the final word, in the absolute coolness of rock n roll and love and possibility in one magical ball of creative energy and originality without succumbing to all that terribly responsible dull stuff that “growing up” and “getting married” usually signifies, but now the band, THE BAND, is hanging in limbo. Will they or won’t they keep on? For now, the press release states that they will continue with their planned South America dates through November, and after that… ¿Quién sabe?
Rob Sheffield put it beautifully a couple of days ago via Rolling Stone:
For all but a tiny minority of Sonic Youth fans, part of loving them is vicariously over-identifying with the Kim-and-Thurston bond, as these two psychic hearts explored screaming fields of sonic love.
No love, no youth, no psychic hearts. If it seems selfish to be taking the news so personally then I’m guilty. I have taken the music very personally, I have grown with it, grieved with it, and now it is the cause of my grief. Where’s my Ecstatic Peace shirt? I’m going into mourning.
While you’re here, check out the video for “Bull in the Heather” featuring Kathleen Hanna bouncing around and irritating everyone while Thurston leads a white pony around the lawn. This is the first Sonic Youth song I ever heard and still remains my favorite today nine years later:
One more to seal the deal. This one has a multi-jump, post-makeout stage dive scene which is not to be missed:
*Feature image by Anders Jensen, licensed under Wikimedia Commons
First of all, when your one and only hit called “Gucci Gucci” condemns wearing major label clothing and you then become the record company’s next big thing, it’s difficult to find something to wear to the VMAs without looking like A) a liar, or B) an idiot.
So is it any surprise when Kreayshawn showed up on the red carpet in a sparkly Minnie Mouse dress ranking her amongst many media lists’ VMA Worst Dressed? Of course not. It’s a matter of honor. Especially as “Gucci Gucci” remains some of her only material for a national tour the SF Weekly christened as “false, even silly — and unsustainable.”
I do have to hand it to her though, those underage nuddie pics that were stolen off her phone and posted to Twitter are mighty cute. You know, for an under-age topless rapper posing with what appears to be a giant stuffed… banana? Am I allowed to talk about this?
Amongst accusations of inappropriately co-opting “the struggle” while using the n-word, and failing to answer for the complicated questions of race, gender, and art that critics continue to hurl at the 21 year old, the leaking of nuddie pics (even cute ones) seems to be the last straw for the disillusioned Swag Spice. Yesterday saw the artist venting via Twitter (actually by her and not hackers this time) about her long week of Hollywood bullshit (“This all happened right when my rosary broke”) which was quickly followed by a post on her Tumblr entitled “I AM MAD.”
Now you all proud of yourselves? You done made a little girl cry and all she ever wanted was look nice at Thrift Town.
In case you haven’t seen it, below is the video responsible for it all:
First of all Bon Iver, drop the quaint woodsman thing, it’s too hot for wool. Secondly, with James Blake? Why don’t you guys just jack each other off and get it over with instead of pandering a track to your upwardly-mobile and bearded fan base that sounds like someone is drowning Prince?
The debut track of what the duo is calling Fall Creek Boys Choir features neither creeks nor boys choirs, but a repeating clip of what sounds like either inhaled hiccups or an owl hooting in reverse. And didn’t we all agree that if you have as solid a voice as Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon wields with such fluidity, there is absolutely no reason to use auto-tune? This defies both good sense and good taste in one fell swoop. Mauvais hiver! Try again Bon Blake.
I cannot recommend you check this out, but for your own morbid curiosity you can find the track below.
When 21-year-old Canadian artist Abel Tesfaye released his debut House of Balloons under the moniker The Weeknd earlier this year, the internet was overrun with suspicion about who was really behind the production. Repped by fellow Canadian artist Drake via Twitter, the word on the blogs was that Drake’s producer Noah “40″ Shebib was the man behind the magic, a rumor later proved untrue. Whether The Weeknd is truly a young man’s clever debut or a well-timed, well-backed production, House of Balloons has gained a large fan base as much for its intense mood as its sadly depraved subject matter.
While sex and drugs have always been part and parcel of la vida rock n roll (or R&B in this case),House of Balloons is an intense, bare-all journey through a desperate cycle of excess. Backed by slow, sparse beats and down-tuned progressions, the mood is dark and exhausted as it rises to support Tesfaye’s clean and well-tempered, melismatic voice. Overall, there’s nothing spectacular about it, but the formula is so refined you can’t stop listening. It is, as Tesfaye describes, addicting. As in the chorus of “Wicked Games” the lyrics’ poetry is wrapped up with unavoidable heartbreak as he sings “bring your love baby/ I can bring my shame/ brings the drugs baby/ i can bring my pain.”
If House of Balloons stood out for its honest, bare-bones aesthetic, Thursday, the second release of the artist’s planned trilogy, is a little more dressed up. It’s less desperate, more enticing, but overall harder to sink your teeth into. While Thursday lacks the solid track-by-track progression of its predecessor, both releases are ultimately stronger as a sum of their parts than by individual songs.
The Weeknd is just one of several R&B groups gaining appeal to a wider fan base over the last couple of years. Artists such as Drake, Frank Ocean, The-Dream, and How To Dress Well are among those being credited with renewing the appeal of R&B music by refreshing their approach to the genre and breaking into the hipster (read “white middle class”) audience. Village Voice writer Eric Harvey cleverly coined the indie-friendly wave PBR&B, sparking discussions across the board about the “gentrification” of R&B. Questions such as “is it only R&B because the artist is black” and “is it still R&B if fans of the new wave reject traditional artists in the genre” are still to be definitively answered.
Check out The Weeknd track below featuring a manipulated sample of Beach House’s “Master of None”.
*feature image pulled from The Weeknd’s primary site XO Till We Overdose. See their tumblr of the same name here.
Prescription For a Healthy Art Scene is a collaborative project currently hanging at cafe/boutique/gallery space Bows and Arrows in Sacramento, CA. Featuring innumerable one of kind t-shirts, more than 30 artists came together to illustrate 23 tenets laid down by Davis-based artist Renny Pritikin entitled “Facets of A Healthy Art Scene.” The mini-manifesto covers all the bases, calling for affordable live/work spaces for artists and an adventurous and informed audience, and even specifies the need for hangouts/parties/salons/bars where a sense of community is manifested.
Community is an easy thing to call for, but how does one actually create a happy, healthy scene without it falling prey to defensive, alienating cliques? I don’t’ have these answers, surprise!, but in asking questions we at least become more aware of what we do and do not want.
A healthy art scene needs a healthy community based on mutually supportive artists and writers who foster a positive, creative economy despite creative and cultural differences. This positive economy is so important, I believe it ought to be it’s very own articulated tenet.
I give you tenet #24 (or 23, depending on your version of the list): A COMMITMENT TO MUTUAL SUPPORT AND RESPECT AMONGST COMMUNITY MEMBERS IN FOSTERING A POSITIVE, CREATIVE ENVIRONMENT.
The SFMOMA blog had another tenet to add after reviewing Pritikin’s list in an entry here. Their demand? “COMMUNICATION AND DIALOG WITH ARTISTS/CURATORS/WRITERS/ETC OUTSIDE OF THE LOCAL DEMOGRAPHIC ENCOURAGING SHARED THOUGHT AND COLLABORATION OF IDEAS WHILE ALSO CREATING INPUTS AND OUTPUTS FOR POTENTIAL EXHIBITION OR PUBLIC DISPLAY OF THESE SHARED INSIGHTS.”
Feeling creative yet? Support an artist and boast your healthy community spirit with a one of a kind screen-printed “Prescription” shirt available over at Bows and Arrows while supplies last.
BBQ is an American tradition, just like beer and fireworks. Every American knows this, which is why we celebrate our Independence Day with this loud, meaty, drunk triumvirate. “We are loud, meaty, drunk people!” the popular saying goes, and I defy you to tell me otherwise. Even vegetarians, even vegans, even conscientious objectors are loud, meaty, drunk people on the third and Fourth of July. It is an established fact.
A vegan roommate of mine once spent every night for a month pounding gluten protein into rubbery wads which he would then marinate in an amalgam of liquid smoke and secret sauces to approximate the flavor and consistency of meat. What it tasted like was largely that of paper mache dipped in ash and it retained its original wad form no matter how hard you chewed.
On the other hand, a meat-eating friend once seriously proposed creating imitation vegetables entirely out of meat. While the beefmatoes, steaktatoes, and all-ham carrots were never realized beyond his proposition, I couldn’t help but think that he too was overcomplicating things.
I have been a vegetarian for 11 years now and have rarely spent money on meat approximations. When I get “the craving,” I go for it, and then I repent. It’s a morally imperfect cycle, but that’s the beauty of confession. I did not intend to eat meat when I wandered into the Hagan Park All American BBQ Cookdown amidst the many other All-American activities in Rancho Cordova this past Sunday, but I did. There, I said it. Let the healing begin.
Forgive me father, for I have eaten not one nor two but three samples of BBQ chicken from three separate vendors. With banners proclaiming such squeamish double entendres as “putting pigs in heat since 2005” I should have known these stalls held nothing but dietary transgressions.
While biting into the sweet saucy meat after a decade of fairly diligent abstinence I felt overwhelmed with grief knowing that I was financially supportive of their death, and that it tasted delicious. With every bite my guilt subsumed into a panicky craving “I must have all of the meat!” I thought. I checked to see that no one I knew was watching as I coyly stalked my next drumstick.
Even now with only a day of perspective I have trouble recognizing these actions as my own. My mother, the chickens, and most importantly all the vegetarians I’ve let down will probably never forgive me. They will revoke my Official Vegetarian card, and should I ever announce to a waitress that I don’t eat meat, they will beg to differ. It’s ham carrots from here on out.
Am I sorry? Hardly. Any traces of regret I may have had have been replaced by all the excitement a Google search for “things wrapped in bacon” now inspires. As for my vegetarianism, I’m considering a political alliance with “freeganism,” the dietary faction that eats all things tempting and delicious, so long as they are merely available. Yep, it’s going to be a great summer.
*Article as run in this week’s issue of the Sacramento News and Review.
During some research I was doing on the history of X-rays earlier this week I stumbled upon an absolutely amazing picturedisc of a Ford and Lopatin single that I knew I had to have before I’d even heard the track. While frou-frou media packaging gets me every time, the featured single “Emergency Room” is not only infectious, it’s really really good (scroll to bottom to preview track).
To understand why, you have to go back, WAY BACK, to Brooklyn 2009 where electronic producer Daniel Lopatin was sitting in his Brooklyn bedroom laboratory pumping out ambient wash jams under the name Oneohtrix Point Never. Evolving as a product of a Tron and Angelina-Jolie-starring-in-Hackers era, Oneohtrix mostly sounds like you’re too stoned to listen to Boards of Canada. It comes to you in distant waves, where the breaking on the shore of your consciousness is splayed out over the course of a minute rather than a moment. Tracks like “Zones without People” undulate and constantly elude you, close enough to touch but not grasp (like that episode of Portlandia), with all the tense and melancholic tones of electronic doom a man can take.
Pairing up with Joel Ford of lesser known outfit Tigercity, the duo then known as Games continued the trajectory Lopatin was exploring as OPN. With enough synth to make you sick, Games put out a double cassette mixtape stating “we just think music should be slower…10% slower than slow.” A single track entitled “MIDI Drift” debuting on their blog this time last year describes their approach as succinctly as anything. Listening to the track “Everything is Working” from their mid-90′s Microsoft stock image EP That We Can Play, you can hear them sliding away from their works as Games into something more akin to R&B. The shift resulted in their most recent incarnation, Ford and Lopatin, a name as straightforward as their new sound.
Which brings us to the present: While Ford and Lopatin’s recently released single “Emergency Room” may signify a step away from ambient and soundly into pop, it is only one step further on a journey that has taken them (and their fans) from somewhere deep in the woods to out in the sunlight. It’s refreshing, warm, illuminating, and effortlessly their most immediately felt material to date. From the first note, the sound seems to emanate right between your ears rather than transmitting to the listener from some unseen foggy distance. It would seem that Ford and Lopalin have thoroughly explored “the undercurrents of pop music” and broken the surface with something glimmering. A truth maybe. A treasure. They have discovered something about their roots and realized an end product.
Their debut LP Channel Pressure is due out June 7th on their own Mexican Summer label affiliate Software, and was mixed by Prefuse 73.
On a barely related end-note, check out this fantastic track Prefuse 73 remixed for José González fronted trio Junip. Love it. Junip – Always (Prefuse 73 remix)
And now, the track you’ve all been waiting for: Ford & Lopatin “Emergency Room”
Feature image of Emergency Room EP from Mexican Summer, imbedded Ford and Lopatin images from Xlr8r.
