2020 did us one undeniable service; giving us a glance at a world where (to steal an observation from a friend of mine) Taylor Swift writes albums with no possibility — nor desire — of filling stadiums. Incidentally, or maybe not, folklore clarifies for me what makes her a true great*.
It’s the details. Musically, she writes perfectly for her voice, her limpid, graceful phrasing, and even in the relatively subdued surrounds here, the sound is rich and textured and cohesive.
Further, being not just a pop superstar, but a pop superstar who is also a singer-songwriter, requires some ability to convey some understanding of what it is to live a normal life. One of the many reasons Ed Sheeran and John Mayer aren’t great, for example, is that after a certain point they only sounded convincing when singing about getting laid too much, which in turn only clarified how cynical and join-the-dots their love songs always were.
Swift, on the other hand, is an extremely fine writer; capable of piling striking detail on expansive insight until you forget she can’t walk the streets without body guards. So when the general (“if one thing had been different, would everything be different?”) meets the specific (“I thought I saw you at the bus stop, I didn’t though”), I wonder who she’s lost, not whether she’s actually met anyone who had any use for a bus stop since she was 17.
But Swift goes a step further, being personable without seeming to try. Take Blank Space, my favourite pop song of that year or most years: specific to a life very few of us can fathom, but also funny and self-aware and, intentional or not, incredibly poignant.
And so to the last great american dynasty, a song which appears to take place in the Blank Space video, a song only she could write and maybe her best. The Rebekah West Harkness story is that of a daughter of privelige, an extremely rich white lady who qualifies as a feminist troublemaker only by the stratified and staid standards of a world we don’t know, but Taylor seems to.
But it’s told with such pained empathy, not to mention such detail (“The wedding was charming, if a little gauche/There’s only so far new money goes” could have been overheard in a Joan Didion piece) that by the time it ends with our narrator purchasing a 17 million dollar mansion, somehow she and her subject still command our sympathy and even our love.
*I feel I should clarify that I’m saying that genuinely, not out of fear of her loathsome, loathsome fans.
There’s something romantic about Archie Bell and the Drells. In their ragged, wide-eyed charisma, their proud Houston provincialism, one gets the image of them knocking on door after door like the heroes in a old musical, finally wearing down some grizzled booking agent with their chutzpah, their moxie, their razzamatazz.
Produced by Philly Soul luminaries Gamble and Huff — and notably raw compared to that pair’s lush and lumnious later work — I can stop dancing is the proto-funk band’s second album after they scored a monster hit with Tighten Up a year earlier.
Tighten Up is one of those anomalies — the B-side that suddenly shifts a million copies. It barely features the Drells at all, built instead on the work of Texas group The TSU Tornadoes, and Bell watched it climb the charts from while stationed with army in Germany. It’s a strange and beautiful concoction; those bright, frail guitar chords tiptoe over the bouncing assurance of the bass, the insistent feather-light drums, all tied together by our rambling band leader.
I suspect at the time,Can’t stop dancingwould have been taken as a sign of the band’s limitations. There’s lots of covers (including an odd version of (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay with the lyrics re-jigged to describe Bell’s army experience) and we’re 8 seconds into the album before they re-purpose the Tighten Up riff on the title track.
But unto itself, its a delight. That glistening Gamble Huff patina, the bells, vibes and horns means there’s something pretty on every track, but it’s also lively, raw and raucous. This tension finds its best expression on the ballads. Love will rain on you might be the as good as anything they ever did.
The group’s later albums would take the Philly sound further, smoothing out the edges with billowing strings and big expansive drums. This approach would produce some more great songs (There’s gonna be a showdown, Here I go again) and some underrated disco fun — the group’s appeal was always charisma and enthusiasm rather than a joined up “artistic vision” so it makes sense their sound followed the charts.
Still, this record displays something at the band’s core, which was slowly eroded thereafter – the ragged, rambling show-offs of Jammin’ in Houston:
Bookmarks is an increasingly infrequent* collection of recommendations, recent addictions and subjects for further study.
I suspect you’ll know, within seconds of the intrusion of the drums, within a few seconds of that keen full-throated screech whether The Taxpayers ragged melodic folk-punk is exactly the liberation you needed; if not, they’re over pretty quick but I included two, in case it is.
I’ve nothing much to add to the discourse around Cardi B/Megan Thee Stallion‘s WAP, except that there’s a strong 90s nostalgia in seeing conservative commentators into such a fizz over the lyrics of a song. At least after Columbine there was something at stake, something more troubling than an expression of female sexuality so magnificently filthy it would make Prince blush — extra marks for prompting Ben Shapiro and others to reveal they think female arousal is a medical condition their wives never contracted. For good measure, I’ve also included is a kindred spirit from City Girls — more playful and pragmatic than WAP‘s snarling Eros — that’s been unfairly overlooked in my view.
Miiesha sings with such intelligence, deftness and restraint that Black Privilege would be recommended even if it didn’t contain a couplet as “stop you in your tracks” good as “Survival ain’t that beautiful/I just made it look this good for you”.
Glass Animals occupies that most dangerous of territory– soulful white boy cooing sweet nothings. But the neon-coloured-cloud sound has a richness and texture, at once lively and comforting and frankly, I’m sufficiently charmed.
I’m embarrassingly late to the haunting stomp of Mo’Ju’s Native Tongue — but here we are. And if you need it, here you are.
I didn’t know I so badly needed a new single from Ghanaian veteran Pat Thomas. Thomas’s career spans 50 years and had bridged colonial rule and independence in his home country. While’s he’s never encountered a genre he couldn’t exploit for a single and do something fun with, he’s a true master of Highlife, a genre that absorbed a series of foreign influences, melded them with traditional sensibilities and then spat them back out into the world. The syncretic approach continues with Bome Nkomode, which couples his aesthetic with that of his afro-pop compatriot SSUE.
And the great Gordon Koang has an album out and it simply glows. Go buy it.
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*I’m not sure what it is about 2020 that so savagely wounded Bookmarks, probably one of the more useful and least self indulgent services Dancing to Architecture provides. Well I ‘spose I do: the need for comfort listening, a profound exhaustion with takes and boredom at the sound of my own voice, and perhaps a lack of one of the main ingredients required to properly engage with and share new culture, particularly pop; I’d rather lost my taste for fun.
I guess the point is, maintaining enthusiasm sometimes takes as much work as maintaining perspective or equilibrium or any number of more serious and “weighty” states. And I needed (and need) to remind myself that the exertion pays off.
You’re going to think I’m being unfair. You’re going to hear the snippets I attach and you’re going to think this is a good-to-great soul album. And yes, you can peel 30 seconds from any given track from Roberta Flack‘s third record, 1971’s Quiet Fire and hear a collection of great musicians by lead by a sensitive and smart interpreter.
You’ll hear track one, the driving rocksteady beat of Go Up Moses, or the echoing blues take on the Bee Gees To Love Somebody and hear earthy, loose-limbed soul. And you’d be right.
So why is this record such a disappointment? Because it never shifts gears, not once. It’s relentlessly mid-tempo, oppressively pleasant. Actually I lie, it does shift dynamics — to slow down even further; her version of Bridge of Troubled Water is so slow, portentous and — I hate to say it, given Flack never does this elsewhere, so far as I can see — self-regarding that it makes the original sound like The Ramones.
So give it a listen through, grab the one or two tracks that grab you most, and stick them on a Sunday afternoon playlist with Compared to What.
I can’t quite say why, but (with a handful of exceptions*) there are almost no live albums or live versions of songs (if I can get them elsewhere) among my favorites.
I love performance footage, but something about listening to a show that I can’t see, let alone attend, feels like a great party happening next door.
But Earth, Wind and Fire‘s disco-inflected studio proficiency often smoothed-over edges I’d prefer left rough, so the mostly live format of their double album Gratitude serves me well in several ways.
First, the drums hit way harder, and everything’s a notch or two quicker than the studio versions.
Second, shows of virtuosity — always a bit of an Achilles heel for EW&F — are rendered less empty when they’re followed by cheers (“oh, this is *for* someone … “)
It’s not flawless — I find myself tuning out New World Symphony for the first four of it’s 9 minutes, and only tune back in once it starts to irritate me. Plus the studio numbers, which start lively, soon just remind me how much I’m missing the rest of the party.
Quick note on the joys of record buying: I love wondering what took my copy from Corso Italia in Catania to a Queenscliff second hand store.
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*To name a couple that spring to mind: Augie March’s orchestral take on One Crowded Hour from Kings Park in Perth (only because I was there, it was exultant, and I never thought I’d hear it again), Elvis Costello’s piano solo on Accidents Will Happen at Hollywood High in 1978 and some of Bill Withers at Carnegie Hall.
Though they’re obvious, the magnificently filthy Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! and the genuinely haunting MTV Unplugged (and probably From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, while we’re on the subject) earn their place as truly great stand alone albums in the catalogues of their respective artists and are always rewarding when I re-listen.
A brief farewell to Emitt Rhodes, who died today at the age of 70.
His four 1970s album — mostly self-produced and entirely self-played on a four track in his house and released to minor commercial success — are the platonic ideal of a certain branch of pop music; one in which Rhythm and Blues played no part.
It’s lily-white, sprightly, detailed, formal, maddeningly catchy and decidedly pretty. It’s there to make you sing along, not to make you dance.
Rhodes belongs to a tradition of melodicists who followed most closely in Paul McCartney’s footsteps (indeed, squint and Rhodes is sometimes indistinguishable from Sir Paul) which also includes Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, Andy Shauf, Tobias Jessos Jnr, Jeff Lynne, Harry Nilsson, Jon Brion, Elliott Smith (yep, they’re all boys as well as being extremely white — the sound just goes somewhere else in anyone else’s hands).
If all that sounds just *awful* to you, fair enough. But if, like me, you get as much out of Mother Nature’s Son as Yer Blues, I recommend you Spotify the 2009 collection The Emitt Rhodes Recordings and just bask in it; you’ll find a LOT to like.
We had gotten as far as Creswick when my mother told me Grandma had taken a “turn” and by the time we were in Castlemaine, she had died.
She was 89, and for months it was coming, and then it wasn’t, and then it had come.
My Grandma, a selfless and giving woman, had a life that was remarkable, if only in its length and how emblematic it was of a certain experience of the last century — a childhood and early adolescence stolen by the second world war and the privations that followed, before achieving a lower middle class comfort with her husband as England was rebuilt that had been unthinkable to her parents. Her children were the first in her family to go to university and they in turn achieved a greater prosperity than she. Greater ease of travel took her grandkids over to Australia.
This may seem a frivolous association, but I think her death had something to do with my voracious consumption of old music videos while we were holiday.
My girlfriend and I had — fresh “negative” Covid tests in hand — gone on a long-planned road trip, a diamond of towns between Ballarat, Clunes, Castlemaine, Echuca and Beechworth, mere hours before Melbourne’s postcode-specific lockdowns extended city wide. So every day we gulped down the freedom of movement, the bustle of bars, the lighting of restaurants like it was life itself.
And predictably, it all knitted together in my mind — the oncoming return to lockdown, with its ringing reminder we weren’t living through a discrete and conquerable episode, but most likely entering a new understanding of what life is. The trips through old Gold Rush towns, either “preserved” and pristine or cracking up around the edges and seemingly half-abandoned, all monuments to rhythms and understandings of life that lasted the majority of a generation, and suddenly finished.
Clunes, for example, the site of the very first gold discovery in Victoria, possibly the state’s savior. It was wealthy and prosperous from 1840ish to the turn of the century, before spending the next 60 years dying, the population falling to 200 by the time George Farwell visited it for Ghost Towns of Australia in 1965. It’s back up to 1,700 as of the last census, and has re-branded as a “book town” surrounded, as it always was, by farmland — green and gently undulating under charcoal skies, every achingly competent landscape painting you’ve seen in an antique store.
The town retains an eerie grandeur (partly COVID related of course): everything was closed, closed until the weekend, closed until the pandemic is done, or just closed, profoundly closed. The old free library, the old butcher, the old post office, all relics of the 1800s, all dimly preserved and utterly abandoned looking, lined with cracks and surrounded by wild, unruly grass.
And then my grandma was gone, and the best part of a century was gone with her.
And then music videos. Our last hotel had Foxtel and the remaining MTV channels and I watched them for every minute I wasn’t specifically called to do something else.
Like everything in pop music, naming the first music video is a fool’s errand. But let’s say it’s Go Now by The Moody Blues — nicking the light and dark palette of the With The Beatles cover and using a lighting scheme Queen might have been thinking of with Bohemian Rhapsody.
This is where it starts to count — the idea of a promotional film almost as familiar as the song it promotes (which is why The Beatles innovations in this area don’t count). You know what the Bohemian Rhapsody video looks like, and so does everyone you know.
Eight years on from that — which takes in Stayin’ Alive and The Message and the first clip to be played on MTV, Video Killed the Radio Star — we get Thriller, which kicks everything into the next gear. MTV gives us the idea of music videos as a key, perhaps primary way of interacting with popular music.
By the time I was 13, music videos were mini-movies — P Diddy, Mariah Carey, late-era Michael Jackson. They calmed down a bit after the millennium, but they still remained at the very least half of my interaction with popular music, and often by extension the wider popular culture, with all its pretensions and anxieties and profundities.
So watching MTV Classic, unable to simply search for what I thought I wanted, I was just delivered songs, and it brought those songs back more vividly than simply encountering them at a bar or on a car radio: re-delivered in the form they were first encountered, and engaging the senses in the same way, recalling the fashions, and trendy film tropes of their era.
It delivered hit after hit (not all good songs or videos, but quality is miles from the point), many of which I was dimly surprised to find I recognised within the first few frames (Don’t speak, Total eclipse of the Heart, What have you done for me lately?).
And that, like all forms of cultural consumption that predates the internet, is dying, if it’s not already dead. They still make music videos, obviously — indeed, watching the most viewed videos this year on YouTube reveals two things: they’re just as much a mix of cynicism, trends, empty bombast and genuine artistry as they ever were, and they are getting to as many eyeballs as ever.
Further, it’s internationalising pop superstardom, with artists from Korea, India and various Spanish language countries muscling in on the US turf in a way that couldn’t — or at least didn’t — happen under the old system.
But the point is, I had to search for it. My parents could probably recognise the Wonderwall clip, and I could tell you what happened in most Mariah Carey videos, an artist I’d never once listened to on purpose during her peak.
The mass culture that one passively imbided and shared with pretty much everyone they knew is what’s going. And I don’t think that’s just me –because I’m in my mid 30s and pop music isn’t for me anymore. When was the last time you talked to a friend about a new song and the conversation involved the video?
When was the last time the culture at large gave a shit about a music video? And remember, we are in the golden age of an exhausting litany of takes. If, say the Weeknd couldn’t really get us talking with a “PROVOCATIVE” and “THEMATIC” series like the one that accompanied After Hours, what hope does an absolute nothing like 6IX9INE stand?
Incidentally, the counter-example you’re thinking of was two years ago:
That fracturing of experience isn’t good or bad, really, but it makes me sad to see it go. Because the whole artform is aimed perfectly at people my age and slightly older — sufficiently established as we were growing up to be ubiquitous, sturdy enough to outlive du jour status into our early adulthood — hell, we even got a generation of mini-auters like Gondry and Williams — and then visibly decaying as a centre of culture as we approach middle age.
Whatever meaning or beauty it provided, it was ephemera, just my generation’s equivalent of radio serials or spiritualist meetings. Like any ephemera, it won’t be mourned much.
And so the mine is depleted, the body withers and the venue has to close. It’s only sad if, in one way or another, it was part of you.
My city returned to lockdown, so it seems a good time to take stock of what we have. So I’m gonna start posting one of these a day or so — a teensy review/excerpt of one of the records in my collection, selected at random, and for no other reason than it’s a nice thing to do, and I need nice right now (I’m sure you do too).
Day one: Stardust, Willie Nelson
A 1978 collection of old American songbook standards (one of the first after Harry Nilsson’s A Touch of Schmilsson in the Night) shot through with Nelson’s customary intelligence, warmth, clarity and decency.
By now there’s enough of these “revive the standards” records by Michael Buble alone to qualify as its own sub genre. Stardust is by quite some distance the best.
The key difference is Nelson treats the material with love and affection, but not reverence. Which means Stardust retains not only the grace of the original material, but the personality of the interpreter.
And as the absence of such — across the million other jukebox cash-ins that followed — makes abundantly clear, grace and personality is what made this music great in the first place.
Jay Electronica’s long awaited debut, A Written Testimony, has one of those pleasing contrasts — only available to people talented enough to have stayed relevant for a decade without releasing an album and thus rare outside hip hop — of the veteran with a lot left to prove. In this way, and others, it resembles Percee P’s Perseverance.
The beats throughout are grand and cinematic, returning to the sonic palette popularised by J Dilla/Madlib, and showing how much life and richness — melodically, sonically, rhythmically — is left in that aesthetic.
So the blast of Ghost of Soulja Slim contains Fellini-score guitars and shimmering strings and bellowing drums and cheering children, Jesus Christ is that a sqeezebox?
The Blinding assimilates the trappy, bleary-eyed croon of Travis Scott with Nyamwezi chants from Tanzania. Neverending Story takes its beat not from drums, but texture — from the chord changes, the authority of the voice.
The cutlery draw clatter of Ezekiel’s Dream. The soul stormcloud double punch of Shiny Suit Theory and Universal Soldier. It hits and hits and hits.
On Politics:
The album –and it’s not the first — presents the Nation of Islam as a locus for resistance, which would be fine, were it not for where that ends up.
Tracks one and two feature a stirring section of oratory from the vile anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan. The Rothschild reference could be explained away by his romantic involvement with one, and I could hope (without really believing) Jay was being uncharacteristically imprecise with his language, using the word “Satan” when expressing solidarity with Palestine.
Of course, it also forces you to reckon with the crimes of the occupation of Palestine and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan. But neither is raised cogently enough as a contrast to justify toying with such grotesque ideas.
Of course, I understand that rappers are inveterate conspiracy theorists — The “Illuminati” is only the biggest. But the deaths of Biggie and Tupac, or smaller theories about the CIA murdering Bob Marley, or the government releasing weaponised ticks are all part of it.
And I understand why. Look, say, at the theory that gangsta rap is itself a conspiracy, cooked up by private prison owners to pull black kids into a life of crime. As Complex points out, precisely the opposite is true. It was the material conditions — racist policies and enforcement, mass incarceration — which produced the culture, not the other way round.
So there is conspiracy. Well there are many. Our reality is one that contains, as established facts, the following: the Tuskegee experiments, at least a decade of collaboration between the CIA and drug-runners, 100s of black men still incarcerated for an act — selling weed — that white owned businesses now make millions from.
Just yesterday a white woman in a New York park called the cops on a guy that had told her to leash her dog: “I’m going to call the police and tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life,” she told him, and everyone knows exactly what she was alluding to with the inclusion of his race, lead-heavy with allusion, after allusion, after allusion.
Protesters in Minneapolis are tear gassed as they condemn a black man’s murder at the hand of police, while heavily armed white protesters can storm Michigan’s state capital in response to a public health order and remain untouched. There is a conspriacy. The conspiracy is out in the open.
Which makes it all the more dispiriting to hear a writer as smart and experienced as Jay Electronica falling back on references to the “Synagogue of Satan”, probably the oldest and most dangerous conspiracy theory of all.
It poisons in an album that is otherwise so thrilling and beautiful, I almost can’t believe it came from the same source.
It’s all in there. All of it. Little Richard wasn’t an architect, or a pioneer or a tastemaker — he was Rock n Roll, because before Rock n Roll, there wasn’t any place for Little Richard to exist.
Richard wasn’t the first to record what we now know as Rock n Roll — I’m not getting into the argument about whether that wasRock Me or Roll ’em Pete, or whatever, not today — some form of which had been bubbling away beneath the notice of mass culture for decades, at raucous parties and clubs across the South spreading to Chicago and Kansas, where blues and jazz artists — many of them queer black women, who are only beginning to get their credit — got quicker and looser and improvised bawdy, funny songs.
But more than any other artist of his era, he was the embodiment of the joys and conflict at the heart of the genre, and perhaps the first to capture that on record. His truly essential work probably clocks in at less than an hour collectively and he barely scraped the charts after 1958, and yet in his work, aesthetic and story there is the blueprint for more or less every significant development of the genre — and it’s countless offshoots — for the next 40 years.
Born Richard Penniman in 1932 in Macon, Georgia, a feminine kid, bullied at school for only playing with girls, beaten at home for wearing his mother’s makeup and clothes, he was eventually kicked out of home at 15.
By this time, he’d already opened a show for the colossal Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The idea of her discovering him, singing her gospel songs, and offering him a gig — surely not knowing that she was kicking a genre she had helped pioneer a step further toward being the defining culture of the post-war world — is so vertiginous as to defy belief.
From there he found his way to Rock n Roll via drag, burlesque and vaudeville.
Later, he used this femininity — wearing make up and teasing his hair into a monumental pompadour — as a way to lessen his threat to the white audiences whose children were being driven insane by his music. He would later say: “I wore the make-up so that white men wouldn’t think I was after the white girls. It made things easier for me, plus it was colorful too.”
He was a teetotal in 1960 and hooked on PCP by 1975. He went back and forth to the Church in various official and born again capacities for decades. He veered between gay, bisexual, omnisexual, prurient and puritan — though I can’t find one instance of him identifiying as straight — right up to 2017.
I suspect his desires — not to mention his endless array of self-conceptions — and the tensions between them is why the music is still so wild. Bill Haley, Fats Domino, Chubby Checker, even Rocket 88 all tend drift politely into the background if you’re not looking directly at them. Little Richard’s wide eyed, hoarse wail, that playing style of beating the instrument into submission, that booming, driving beat, that barely concealed transgressive sexuality — just look up the original lyrics to Tutti Frutti — offers no such respite.
He’s outlived by Jerry Lee Lewis, but in his contradictions his influence will resonate a lot longer.
The conflict between excess and the yearning for salvation of one kind or another resonates most obviously in Prince, and peak era Rolling Stones but also The Weeknd, Childish Gambino and a million other lesser beings.
That desperate howl you hear echoed in every era, through Lennon and McCartney, through Lydon, Smith, Cobain, and Harvey, The Stooges, The New York Dolls, a hundred proto-Metal bands.
Voice as rhythmic component more than melodic gives you James Brown and funk, and gets you a long way towards hip hop. Just listen to that gospel tinged, loose-limbed take on Good Night Irene from 1964.
The flamboyance, and in particular gender as performance and plaything,gets you to Bowie, Bolan, Lady Gaga, Reed, Madonna, Prince again, Andre 3000, certain baseline ideas of what pop music is.
And from the sheer orgiastic thrill, the emancipatory fun of it all, you get more or less everything else worthwhile that rock had to offer.
In the mainstream understanding of reality — sexual, racial and economic — of the American south of the 1940s and 50s, there was no place for Little Richard to exist. And through music, he punched a hole in the air and created it.
Dancing to Architecture 