The new book is a panoramic tour of the musical world, touching variously on Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, Brahms, Marian Anderson, Frank Sinatra, Cecil Taylor, Led Zeppelin, Björk, Radiohead, Mitsuko Uchida, Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Luther Adams, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Bob Dylan, and the Malcolm X Shabazz High School Marching Band. In the Preface, I say that the aim is to “approach music not as a self-sufficient sphere but as a way of knowing the world.” (via Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Listen To This)
CAN NOT WAIT
Dreams — Langston Hughes (Feb. 1, 1902 - 1967)
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.(Photo of Langston on a Harlem street, 1958 - by Rob W. Kelley, LIFE)
By Douglas Wolk
When My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless arrived in late 1991, it was shockingly fresh, an overwhelming, densely beautiful record that seemed to bear almost no relation to anything that had come before it. Within months, baby bands started springing up that had clearly been inspired by Loveless to make music along the same lines; MBV’s torrential live performances only added to their legend, and so did the recorded silence that followed the album (punctuated only by a few superb remixes that bandleader Kevin Shields has done for bands like Mogwai and Primal Scream, and a cover of Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time in the World”). When the band returned to performing in 2008, they repeated their Loveless-era set, underscoring the idea that their watershed album was a unique artifact.
In fact, Loveless was the convergence of a bunch of streams of music: the raw, frothing torrents of late-’80s and early-’90s underground rock, the cult of massive noise that had developed in composition circles, the will to push the guitar into new realms of expressiveness that came from hermetic folkies as much as rock ‘n’ roll showboaters, the ongoing revolution in electronic dance music (and the way other rock groups were trying to figure out how to integrate its innovations), and the early-’70s German bands who had replaced the familiar forms of pop songs with hypnotic drones and rhythms, among others. Its roots go all the way back to the earliest experiments by musicians and composers who found that studios and recording tape made it possible to come up with sounds no instrument had ever made before.
The sound of Loveless is so massive and impressive that it can be hard to notice the songs beneath it, as distinctive as they’d be on their own: the jet-engine tone of Shields’ guitar all but obliterates his and Bilinda Butcher’s voices at times. The longer you listen to the album, though, the easier it is to notice the component parts of its barrage, and to hear echoes of musical history in them. Here are a few antecedents for MBV’s masterpiece — some obvious, others not so obvious.
This photograph by Joseph Nettis taken from a 1962 Life World Library book called The Arab World was Steve Keene’s inspiration for the cover of Pavement’s Wowee Zowee. (via Bryan.)
Sonny Sharrock: Greatest. Guitar. Solo. Ever. (via BurntToastShow)—Finally got to hear this in its original context today, which makes it make a lot more sense. It happens 11 minutes into a 15-minute track (“Philly Dog,” on Herbie Mann’s “Live at the Whisky A Go Go” album); the band has been cheerfully jamming on a danceable little 12-bar blues riff, a totally pleasant soul-jazz thing. And then Sonny Sharrock steps out and basically invents no wave.
Franco TPOK - Tokoma Ba Camarede Pamba (via rahndi) Franco and Tout Puissant OK Jazz rip it up on an abbreviated (only 6:14!) version of their 1980 Zairean hit. Starts slow. Then the beat kicks in. Then the dancers show up. Oh man, the dancers.
One of the lesser-known Beat novelists and poets has his birthday today: Kenneth Patchen, b. Dec. 13, 1911 (d. 1972)
Patchen was never formally afiliated with any literary movement -but was first a fellow traveller of the Surrealists and Dada, and later often considered to share the Beat sensibilities.
What is unusual for Patchen is partly his extensive collaborations with musicians, artists and other writers, partly his own ability to mix media and art forms…
Below, one of his picture poems: What the Story Tells Itself
“Space Oddity” has come to define Bowie, perhaps because it’s as protean as its creator has tried to be. It’s a breakup song, an existential lullaby, consumer tie-in, product test, an alternate space program history, calculated career move, and a symbolic end to the counterculture dream—the “psychedelic astronaut” drifting off impotently into space (Camille Paglia suggested the last); it’s a kid’s song, drug song, death song, and it marks the birth of the first successful Bowie mythic character, one whose motives and fate are still unknown to us. (via Space Oddity « Pushing Ahead of the Dame) —If you have any interest at all in David Bowie, you need to be reading this fascinating, beautifully comprehensive blog.
