Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Joni Mitchell

Yes. End of story.



I recently re-discovered Blue (1971), her fourth album, after admittingly not understanding it in high school. Its forte is a classically-grounded melodic and harmonic know-how to put poetry to music. It's even bouncy at times!

So, excited about Joni as I was, I got Court and Spark (1974), her sixth album, and listened to it today. It's too interesting not to mention. Of course I can't make any sort of real judgment after just one listen (especially given an artist of her depth), but I can say for certain that it's a weird kind of musics that sounds smooth, efficient, and meaningful. "Jazz folk-rock," Wikipedia calls it.

I hear she's got other great albums. I'm not surprised. GO BUY SOME. Or pirate them, I don't give a shit. Click on her lovely face to get a list of all her releases (in a new window, or in a new tab if your browser has them).

Sunday, August 23, 2009

It Was a Good Day - Ice Cube (1992)

last night, after watching an epic triple feature with Mark (Kill Bill, Vol. 1 -- The Holy Mountain -- Kill Bill, Vol. 2), i was driving home exceedingly high around 5am. earlier in the day, i had taken my ipod out of the car because it was dead and had also somehow managed to remove all the music from my iphone. so i was left to choose between Adam's 2008 summer mix and the radio. i had been listening to the mix earlier in the day, so i switched over to the radio, trying to pick up whatever i could. what could i pick up?



that's right. WILD NINETY FOUR NINE, THE BAY AREA'S PARTY STATION. anyway, whatever they were playing pleased me enough for the short car ride home, so i left it. when that song ended, though, "It Was a Good Day" came on. and it kicked my ass to the curb. i know i've heard this song a couple times back in the day, but it must've floated out of my memory at some point. well, it came back and it came back so good.

rapping over a 1977 slow jam called "Footsteps in the Dark" by The Isley Brothers, Ice Cube only needs 4 minutes and 20 seconds to make you feel as good as he does. except he doesn't make the same mistake of interrupting the jam to coo high-pitched love lines... he just lets it play right on through until the end of the song.

and by the end of the song, your ears will be begging for the beat to be brought back.



in the meantime, Ice Cube lets you know how he feels: pretty goddamn good. for solid reasons too: mama made a good breakfast, cops didn't give a shit that he ran a red light, he fucked a girl he's had an eye on since high school, he's stoned, he's drunk (didn't puke though), and, to top it all off:

"today i didn't even have to use my AK.
i gotta say it was a good day."

who the fuck rhymes "AK" with "good day?" a man who feels good, that's who. take me there, man.

watch.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

This Magic Moment - The Drifters (1960)

"this magic moment."

when Ben E. King rips out that first line of the song, i can't tell if he's talking about love or music. i guess it doesn't really matter.

this entirety of this song i get chills, as the Drifters belt out beautiful lyrics over swirling strings in the background, supported by a basic rhythm from the kit. i say i can't tell whether King is singing about love or the very music he's making, because i feel towards this song the way somebody might feel towards a loved one.

it's so different, so new. sounds i've never heard before, and they're hitting my ears right now. every instrument, pouring wine so sweet, intoxicating me, embracing me in a warm insulation that i feel can never end, forever until the end of time...

and, of course, like any beautiful song, its perfection is unexplainable. it's all magic.

here are the lyrics in full:

this magic moment

so different and so new

was like any other
until i kissed you

and then it happened
it took me by surprise
i knew that you felt it too
by the look in your eyes

sweeter than wine
softer than the summer night
everything i want i have
whenever i hold you tight

this magic moment
while your lips are close to mine
will last forever
forever til the end of time

magic magic magic magic

i music love.

listen.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Four Organs - Steve Reich (1970)

it starts with an innocent maracas player, alone in his robotic, unaccented shaking for almost four seconds. but, even though the shaking continues nonstop and steady for the rest of the fifteen minute song, the shaking is never left alone again for longer than a moment.

that's because at 0:04, the organs come in. four organs, to be exact. and when they do, you know it's Steve Reich minimalism at its finest.

i don't know anything about music, so i'll let Wikipedia describe exactly what happens in this song from start to finish: "the four organs, harmonically expound a dominant eleventh chord (D-E-F#-G#-A-B with an E in the bass), dissecting the chord by playing parts of it sequentially while the chord slowly increases in duration from a single 1/8 note at the beginning to 200 beats at the end."

now, to make this a little more visual, Reich's vision for the piece (as given at the premiere): "I had the idea that if a group of tones were all pulsing together in a repeating chord...one tone at a time could gradually get longer and longer.... The tones would simply begin in unison...and then gradually extend out like a sort of horizontal bar graph."

playing on organs popular in rock & roll at the time (think The Doors), the organists play longer and longer, more and more sustained tones, building on top of each other the entirety of the song. one chord. one chord the whole time. one chord over and over and over again. one chord, in the beginning, just an eighth note. then a quarter note, half note, whole note. one chord played for minutes at a time, by the end of the piece. with the omnipresent shaking as a foundation, they construct an upside down pyramid, working their way to textures so thickly layered that at one of the early performances, they nearly drove a poor old lady to insanity.

allmusic describes the first couple performances of the piece in 1971, when "Imagine," "My Sweet Lord," "Maggie May," and "Brown Sugar" were the world's biggest hit singles:

In 1970, Reich received a phone call from the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas asking for some new orchestral repertory, and he jokingly responded, 'Of course, my new piece Four Organs." To his great surprise, Tilson Thomas agreed to Reich's suggestion. While it was anything but symphonic, Four Organs was performed by the Boston Symphony in Boston's Symphony Hall in October, 1971, along with works by Mozart, Liszt and Bartok. The stoic New England audience took the work in stride, but a more volatile New York audience was less approving when it came to Carnegie Hall in 1973. Shouts, boos, cheers, threats and counter-threats by patrons broke out during the performance, and one elderly lady even banged her shoe on the edge of the stage in an attempt to stop the music. The New York Times critic Harold Schonberg reported that "the audience behaved as though red-hot needles were being inserted under fingernails." Nevertheless, Reich soon became a hot commodity and his reputation took off soon after the notorious concert.

as Meryl expressed last night, by comparing this reaction to that of Edouard Manet's Olympia, which also sparked controversy when it was shown in 1863, it seems that there's something to pieces of art that make people want to tear it to shreds. she said, "if your art upset a lot of people, you're probably doing something right." i think that's exactly what happened here.


one chord, two words, three syllables, four organs, five musicians, six stars.

listen.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Blue Monday - New Order (1983)

Xanthe and i were shocked today when we found out that our friend Donni didn't know what a subwoofer was. i tried punching her (on beat) to explain. when that didn't work, i played this song.



the biggest selling 12" single of all time, "Blue Monday" is the best New Order song and it's one of my favorite dance songs ever.

when i listen to it on headphones, as i am right now, it's a comfortable living room experience. i'm just sitting here, turning up the volume an increment or two every half minute, bobbing my head with that standard house beat (with the occasional machine gun twitter), letting the guitar sidewind down my face, hearing monks proclaim their love for divinity and listening to divinity (in the form of synthesized strings) puke its love for monks.

then the vocals come on. then its 5 more minutes of dance rock power pop new waves. wonderful.

then there are the times the song is blasting out of speakers. maybe i'll just play extremely loudly in my own room, like i did for Xanthe and Donni this morning, or a dj will throw it on at a club. this happened pretty much every night i went out in Athens, and pretty much every time it happened, i let go of everything to get up and dance. and if i was already "dancing," i dropped the act and actually started dancing (because you're only dancing when you ignore yourself and submit yourself to the air swirling air around you.)

everything is perfect in this song.
the bass drum is perfect.
the synths are perfect.
the bass is perfect.
the hi-hat is perfect.
the snare is perfect.
the guitar is perfect.
the synthesized string section is perfect.
the singing is perfect
the synthesized horn section is perfect.
EVERYTHING IS PERFECT.

listen.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Patty Waters

Patty Waters is a mysterious jazz singer who made two recordings in 1966 for the obscure free-jazz label ESP-Disk. One of these albums was called Sings. The cover:



The first half is fourteen minutes worth of seven songs, for solo meandering/wandering piano and searching/lost female voice, with titles like "Moon, Don't Come Up Tonight" (because her man isn't coming), "Why Can't I Come to You?" (because he doesn't want her), and "I Can't Forget You" (with key lyrics, 'Since you don't want me / It makes me want you all the more'). Blunt.

The second half is fourteen minutes worth of a freaky horror-jazz take on the traditional folk song "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair," in which the word "black" is repeated almost ad nauseam in every vocal style known to Ms. Waters, from manly growl to high-frequency shrill to Damo Suzuki/Eye/Yoko Ono-begetting noise-making.

For reference, here is the cover of her other album, College Tour:


I bought this and now I'm sharing it! So you have no excuse not listen to it: the musics

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Lily Allen

Lily Allen is serious paprazzi material (in the UK). She's popular because she's young, hot, and she sings about daily things such as boyfriends, fucking, and drugs, and because the music is slick pop with big electro beats. She made it big in 2006 thanks to MySpace, released an album and some singles, one of which, Smile, I think even US kids know, and in 2008 recorded her second album, It's Not Me, It's You, released just this February, 2009.

yes, really

Anyways, I have this album, and here is what I think:

4.5 stars: 50 years from now, 4.0, but for its daring approach to pop and ridiculous popularity, a strong 4.5, resting largely on her voice and on her lyrics, the former so silky you think she was born singing like this, the latter direct and natural, a good quality in music this poppy. Play it very loudly so you hear all the nuances.

Lily Allen: smarter and more talented beyond either her popularity or her typical fans.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

How I Fell in Love (with Belle & Sebastian)

Let me qualify: this is actually how I fell in love with Dear Catastrophe Waitress. And let me be blunt: I was stoned.

Now let me clarify my bluntness: this album, along with If You're Feeling Sinister, had sat in my library for ages, largely un-listened. Pot was the impetus necessary to lose any pre-conceptions about bands and albums and what I have or haven't listened to yet, so that I could, among other things, put on some headphones and get lost in a maze of shuffled music. And it doesn't surprise me at all in retrospect, that as with any relaxed, bias-free and intimate listen, I discovered truths previously invisible. And thus, my entry into the world of these lovely Scots.


The sound is gentle. It's the soundtrack to the lives of lonely high school boys and girls who, instead of becoming angsty, rebellious, or destructive, continue to believe that life can be beautiful, lovely, and maybe even lively. Where both groups embrace the all-too-important fact that life's (often) a bitch, one throws a finger in everyone's face and the other hangs on to who-the-fuck-knows-what. Hope, probably.

The music's romanticism is sharp, and so, as Chopin's was grounded in "harmony, counterpoint, and fugue," so is Belle & Sebastian's grounded in reality and in the honest belief that life can be beautiful. As such, the album becomes wistful, blurring the line between being pensive and being content. Its joie de vivre means when it's happy, it's exuberant. Its romanticism means when it's sad, it's either nostalgic or just selflessly hopeful, roaming along in a haze of comfortable familiarity (which is always changing).

Rarely does music, lyrics, and statement (otherwise known as swagger in bands like Bad Company) come together so well on an album as they do on this one. And I ask you, how can anyone so me-against-the-world love the world so much? Key theme: books.

By the way, the musicianship is astounding; tight, lyrical, and professional. Thus, a song like Asleep on a Sunbeam still wins, and when those horns drop in you'd think the album had peaked.

Album Art (One Dominant Color)