December 3, 2023
I
recently purchased a 1980s double LP compilation of Sam Cooke's hits
called The Man and His Music, and it has been a revelation. I've loved
his swan song before his premature death, "A Change Is Gonna Come," for
years -- and listening to it again now, I was reminded what a
remarkable performance it is -- but I knew his other classics only from
other people's versions (and EVERYBODY was covering his songs back in
the day). But his own versions -- "Chain Gang," "Cupid," "Another
Saturday Night," the surprisingly gritty "Shake," the lovely "Bring It
on Home to Me," and the aforementioned finale: just WOW.
October 18, 2023
I purchased Summer of Soul on DVD some months back, and finally got around to watching it last night. It's a 2021 documentary produced by Questlove of the Roots that centers on footage from a series of concerts in Harlem's Mt. Morris (now Marcus Garvey) Park in the summer of 1969. The film is smart and moving, with reminiscences by attendees and activists, and some stellar performances by artists ranging from Sly and the Family Stone and the Fifth Dimension to Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight and the Pips (their powerhouse version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine") to Nina Simone to B.B. King to gospel acts like Pops Staples and the Staple Sisters and Mahalia Jackson (the volcanic power of whose performance brought me to tears). If you have an interest in the period, or just want to see some terrific performances, this film is definitely worth your time. You can watch the trailer on YouTube here.
September 6, 2023
My love of popular music began with 1960s American and British rock in high school, and then branched out to include British punk and post-punk my first two years in college. I didn't move outside this Anglo-American bubble meaningfully until my junior year at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, when I discovered the German groups Can, Neu!, and Faust. As I later learned, the former two along with Kraftwerk (who I knew at the time from their single "Autobahn," which I'd heard in high school) had a big influence on many of the British bands I liked so much. Among these German groups, Can was far and away my favorite. Dark, propulsive songs like "Paperhouse" (Tago Mago), "Mother Sky" (Soundtracks), and "Father Cannot Yell" (Monster Movie) spoke to my struggles, but I also liked the fact that they could be more upbeat as on "Halleluwah" (Tago Mago) and some of the achingly pretty songs on Future Days. More generally, their records entered the more expansive view of the world that some of my courses from my freshman and sophomore years had opened up to me. The fact that Can's first two vocalists were African-American ex-pat Malcolm Mooney and Japanese immigrant Damo Suzuki helped model the possibility of an international community, one not as confining as my little hometown or the predominantly white, upper-middle to upper class world of my college. In the decades since, I've embraced a lot of other German groups from that era, along with groups from the rest of Europe (including the former Soviet bloc) and beyond, but Can retains a special place in my heart.
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July 4, 2023
The Fourth has never been a big holiday for me, and I have really ambivalent feelings about it this year. On the one hand, the aspirations of the democratic experiment launched by a group of broad thinking cis, straight, white men over two centuries ago are still there. On the other, retrograde forces are busting their balls (gendered cliche intentional) to snuff out those aspirations and make so many of us permanent second class citizens. The perversion of the nation's highest ideals by these forces, from SCOTUS' cynical dismantling of progressive legal protections to the batshit absolutism of 2A fanatics, has been depressing, and frightening, to witness.
I went to bed last night thinking about one of the first sociopolitically oppositional songs I ever heard, "Hungry Freaks Daddy" by the Mothers of Invention. An FM station based in central/western Maine used to play it when I was in high school, and the song's edgy, sarcastic putdown of mid-'60s conformism really spoke to me, since little seemed to have changed in the intervening decade-plus in my little hometown.
Mister America, walk on by
Your supermarket dream
Mister America, walk on by
The liquor store supreme
Mister America, try to hide
The product of your savage pride...
It wasn't until I left for college that I had access and started turning on to late '70s punk (ironic use of '60s countercultural cliche intentional), and what might charitably be called my gradual political awakening began in earnest. But I also picked up copies of the Mothers' first two LPs, Freak Out and Absolutely Free, which I still have.
(Clicking on the image will take you to a YouTube version of the song.)
I'm
a fan of first-wave British punk, and Northern Ireland band Stiff
Little Fingers' early records have long appealed to me both for their
sound and for their sharp political lyrics. Perhaps my favorite song by
them is "Tin Soldiers," the final track on their second LP, Nobody's Heroes. It's the story of the young men who follow conventional wisdom ("He joined up to get a job / And show he wasn't scared...He joined up cos Dad knew best / To do right by his son...") and soon find out what they've signed up for:
You sign away your name...
You never see the truth
You sign away your youth
You go and join the queue
Do what they want you to
They'll take away your name
They'll treat you all the same
Though on its face this is a very different experience from anything I went through, the general sense of compromise and loss spoke to me, and Jake Burns' enraged lead vocals and the sheer power of the music, in particular the urgent hyper-thump of Ali McMordie's bass and the simple distorted howl of Burns' guitar at the song's conclusion, still send chills through me.
It was only today, though, when I listened to the song for the nth time during a work break, that it suddenly spoke to me on a very personal level: the cost of acceding to what everyone told me I was...dad (family/community/etc.) knew best...signed away my name and my youth (and much of my adult life)...In that moment Burns' rage was mine, and the song's roaring wind-down with the rhythm section driving the protesting guitar to the end dictated by the choices made--a final note like the door of a jail cell or crypt slamming--encapsulated all the pain I still feel about those lost decades.
Signed away your life
Signed away your life
(Clicking on the image will take you to a YouTube version of the song.)
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