Month: January 2017

Fabrizio De André – La buona novella

La buona novella

Fabrizio De André – La buona novella Produttori Associati PA/LPS 34 (1970)

La buona novella (translation: “The Good News” or “The Good Book”) is a concept album about Jesus.  It draws from both the canonical New Testament and the Biblical Apocrypha.  On “Laudate hominem,” the closing song, De André sings, “I don’t want to think of you as son of God, but son of man, even brother of mine.”  He had this to say about the album in 1998:

“When I wrote La buona novella it was 1969. At the time we were in the very middle of the students’ protests, and less attentive people, which are always the majority among us — comrades, friends, people of the same age as me — regarded that record as anachronistic. They told me: ‘What’s this? We go fighting inside universities and outside universities against abuses, and you instead tell us the story, which moreover we already know, of Jesus Christ’s preachings?’ And they did not realize that the Good News was meant to be an allegory, it was an allegory that consisted in a comparison between the better and more sensible instances of the revolt of ’68, and some instances, certainly higher from a spiritual point of view, but similar from an ethical-social point of view, raised by a gentleman, 1969 years before, against the abuses of power, against the abuses of authority, in the name of egalitarianism and universal brotherhood. That man was called Jesus of Nazareth. And I think he was, and remains, the greatest revolutionary of all time. When I wrote the album I didn’t want to venture into roads or paths that would be difficult for me to travel on, such as metaphysics or even theology, first of all because I don’t understand anything about those, secondly because I always thought that if God did not exist we should invent Him, which is exactly what Man has done ever since he set foot on Earth.”

When put this way, it is clear that he was looking at christianity in a similar way as film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who wrote the screenplay St. Paul around this time but was unable to find funding to film it.  (Pasolini also made the trite Gospel According to Matthew).  They both were interested in the radical underpinnings of christianity, viewed from an atheistic point of view.  It is a perspective that has gained some traction in academic philosophy in more recent years (Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism; The Fragile Absolute — or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?).  Actually, musicians and others have for some time argued that Jesus was a communist.  For that matter, Ernst Bloch‘s Atheism in Christianity touched on this approach back in 1968, as did Thomas J. J. Altizer‘s earlier “death of god” theory.  At bottom all these are attempts to link the foundations of (purely atheistic, materialist) egalitarianism to the revolutionary content of early christianity, separate from the way the christian church has evolved (especially since the Roman Empire).  La buona novella can also be seen as something of the polar opposite of the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, which debuted on Broadway the following year and dwelt on the melodrama of being a messiah — in the superficial trappings of hippie garb.

The melodies here are memorable.  De André applies his wonderfully smooth, resonant voice to treatments that might be called folk-rock mixed with christian chorale music.  These recordings can be appreciated even by listeners who do not speak Italian.  Yet De André is renowned as a lyricist.  Reading translations of his lyrics by themselves is worthwhile.  (There are translations available online.)

One of the best songs here, “Il testamento di Tito” (“Tito’s Will”), includes the lyrics:

“honor the father, honor the mother
and honor also their rod
kiss the hand that broke your nose
because you asked for a morsel

“when my father’s heart stopped
I felt no sorrow
when my father’s heart stopped
I felt no sorrow”

This is more than a bit reminiscent of Luke 14:26:

“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”

The story draws from the Syriac Infancy Gospel and is narrated by Tito/Titus, the so-called “good thief” or “penitent thief” (also called Dismas).  Tito describes himself violating nine of the ten commandments, unrepentant, with “though shalt not kill” violated by those crucifying him.  The last lines of the song are Tito saying,

“I, in seeing this man who is dying
Mother, I feel sorrow
in the piety that doesn’t yield to resentment
Mother, I learned love.”

This is the essence of christian universalism, by taking the criminal (of a low social strata) and making his acceptance of the duty of christian love — agape, love as charity or “political love” by choosing to act like the Holy Spirit — an example of gaining direct, personal access to the universal, depicted in a positive light (rather than as a usurpation or transgression).  There is still no transcendence.  The thief dies, and so does Jesus.

De André is known for his sardonic criticisms of the catholic church, a major institution in his native Italy.  His popularity there arguably maintained or increased after his death.  A bit like Camarón de la Isla in Spain, he is a people’s musician, an iconic champion for the marginalized (even as De André came from a well-off family).

Gladys Knight & The Pips – Neither One of Us

Neither One of Us

Gladys Knight & The Pips – Neither One of Us Soul S 737L (1973)

The early 1970s were an interesting time for soul music.  The genre underwent seismic shifts.  Those musical shifts went along with shifting social circumstances.  As the liberal “freedom movement” (AKA “civil rights movement”) stepped back following its “victories” (which proved small and mostly temporary), and as severe backlash (including torture and assassinations) against anti-capitalist black militancy set in, there was a kind of metaphorical fork in the road.  The best and brightest black Americans could accede to the dictates of the establishment, forsake the “movement” in exchange for narrow personal benefit, or, instead, commit to solidarity with a large class-based coalition in spite of the scorn and repression of the vested interests and all their concomitant tactics of racial bigotry.  So take the title track, “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye).”   There is a long tradition in black music of “masking,” with two meanings embedded in songs (usually one light and often romantic, the other socio-political and often dealing with racism).  The title song could be seen as being about the decision point as the freedom movement and black militancy were receding and facing real defeats — in the face of state violence in the form of COINTELPRO and the like.  Stick with it or turn one’s back on it and say goodbye?  The song is brilliant, and one of Knight & The Pips’ best recorded performances, up there with their later hit “Midnight Train to Georgia.”

A lot of soul music in the early-/mid-70s drew on a sense of urban elitism.  Adolph Reed is one of the best commentators on that phenomenon, asserting that “race politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. *** As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.”  Or as Pete Dolack put it, “liberal ideology tends to fight for the ability of minorities and women to be able to obtain elite jobs as ends to themselves rather than orient toward a larger struggle against systemic inequality and oppression.  *** A movement serious about change fights structural discrimination; it doesn’t fight for a few individuals to have a career.”  The upshot of the now-prevailing neoliberal mindset is that so long as a representative proportion of racial minorities are given privileged positions in a system of stark and brutal inequality then the all forms of social activism aimed at the larger, systemic and institutional inequalities are deemed inappropriate, even invalid.  This sort of undercurrent flows through a lot of “Philly Soul”, which could seem a bit opportunistic and self-congratulatory.  But Neither One of Us conveys a deeper sense of conflict.  It was poised right at the historical juncture when different paths forward were possible, and people, in essence, had to collectively and individually choose their path.  It may not be explicit about it, but the album is chock full of a sense of apprehension about the future.  Gladys Knight & The Pips were deftly conveying that sense of the times, as were a few others like Sly Stone (Fresh).

The arrangements and production on Neither One of Us are by an army of supporting personnel — six producers and eight arrangers!  But it works damn well.  Just check the phenomenal “This Child Needs Its Father,” opening with a seductively lethargic melodic line played on strings and a growing element of psychedelic guitar.  Contrast the limp and boilerplate strings on O’Jays‘ Back Stabbers from the same year, which seem to simply magnify a single idea across many string players rather than using the orchestration to build something premised on the interactions of a multitude of players.  This difference is precisely that between the urban liberal “there is no alternative” attitude exemplified by the formulaic, immutable and homophonic orchestrations of the O’Jays, on the one hand, and the more diffuse egalitarianism represented by the sort of interactive, layered orchestration on “This Child Needs Its Father” (or, say, early 1970s recordings of Curtis Mayfield), on the other.

This is a great one, up there with the very best Motown-affiliated LPs, like David Ruffin‘s My Whole World Ended, Marvin Gaye‘s What’s Going On, and Stevie Wonder‘s best few albums.

Ryley Walker – Primrose Green

Primrose Green

Ryley Walker – Primrose Green Dead Oceans DOC 101CD (2015)

The influences are apparent: John Martyn, The Pentagle (Jansch and Renbourn especially), Tim Buckley, Van Morrison, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, even The Grateful Dead and The Incredible String Band.  This is definitely music made “in the tradition” (to adopt Anthony Braxton‘s restrucuralists/stylists/traditionalists taxonomy).  But this is quite impressive in that it takes so many different elements from the late 1960s/early 1970s folk-rock milieu and deploys them all so convincingly.  Really likable and surprisingly durable.

Leo Tolstoy – The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Quote from Chapter XII “Conclusion – Repent Ye, For the Kingdom of Heaven Is at Hand” from The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), by Leo Tolstoy:

“the organization of our society rests, not as people interested in maintaining the present order of things like to imagine, on certain principles of jurisprudence, but on simple brute force, on the murder and torture of men.

“People who own great estates or fortunes, or who receive great revenues drawn from the class who are in want even of necessities, the working class, as well as all those who like merchants, doctors, artists, clerks, learned professors, coachmen, cooks, writers, valets, and barristers, make their living about these rich people, like to believe that the privileges they enjoy are not the result of force, but of absolutely free and just interchange of services, and that their advantages, far from being gained by such punishments and murders as took place in Orel and several parts of Russia this year, and are always taking place all over Europe and America, have no kind of connection with these acts of violence. They like to believe that their privileges exist apart and are the result of free contract among people; and that the violent cruelties perpetrated on the people also exist apart and are the result of some general judicial, political, or economical laws. They try not to see that they all enjoy their privileges as a result of the same fact which forces the peasants who have tended the forest, and who are in the direct need of it for fuel, to give it up to a rich landowner who has taken no part in caring for its growth and has no need of it whatever—the fact, that is, that if they don’t give it up they will be flogged or killed.

***

“Simply because torture and murder are not employed in every instance of oppression by force, those who enjoy the exclusive privileges of the ruling classes persuade themselves and others that their privileges are not based on torture and murder, but on some mysterious general causes, abstract laws, and so on. Yet one would think it was perfectly clear that if men, who consider it unjust (and all the working classes do consider it so nowadays), still pay the principal part of the produce of their labor away to the capitalist and the landowner, and pay taxes, though they know to what a bad use these taxes are put, they do so not from recognition of abstract laws of which they have never heard, but only because they know they will be beaten and killed if they don’t do so.

“And if there is no need to imprison, beat, and kill men every time the landlord collects his rents, every time those who are in want of bread have to pay a swindling merchant three times its value, every time the factory hand has to be content with a wage less than half of the profit made by the employer, and every time a poor man pays his last ruble in taxes, it is because so many men have been beaten and killed for trying to resist these demands, that the lesson has now been learnt very thoroughly.

“Just as a trained tiger, who does not eat meat put under his nose, and jumps over a stick at the word of command, does not act thus because he likes it, but because he remembers the red-hot irons or the fast with which he was punished every time he did not obey; so men submitting to what is disadvantageous or even ruinous to them, and considered by them as unjust, act thus because they remember what they suffered for resisting it.

“As for those who profit by the privileges gained by previous acts of violence, they often forget and like to forget how these privileges were obtained. But one need only recall the facts of history, not the history of the exploits of different dynasties of rulers, but real history, the history of the oppression of the majority by a small number of men, to see that all the advantages the rich have over the poor are based on nothing but flogging, imprisonment, and murder.

“One need but reflect on the unceasing, persistent struggle of all to better their material position, which is the guiding motive of men of the present day, to be convinced that the advantages of the rich over the poor could never and can never be maintained by anything but force.

“There may be cases of oppression, of violence, and of punishments, though they are rare, the aim of which is not to secure the privileges of the propertied classes. But one may confidently assert that in any society where, for every man living in ease, there are ten exhausted by labor, envious, covetous, and often suffering with their families from direct privation, all the privileges of the rich, all their luxuries and superfluities, are obtained and maintained only by tortures, imprisonment, and murder.”

Holger Czukay – On the Way to the Peak of Normal

On the Way to the Peak of Normal

Holger Czukay – On the Way to the Peak of Normal Welt-Rekord 1C 064-46 400 (1981)

Before the advent of samplers and digital audio — with all the concomitant abilities to dice up and recombine sounds — Holger Czukay made On the Way to the Peak of Normal, a highly personal and fully analog set of sound musings.  Drawing on techniques from avant-garde modern classical (think Stockhausen‘s Hymnen, Steve Reich‘s “Come Out” and those sorts of things), plus the spliced-together rock music of his former “krautrock” band CAN, Czukay combines found sounds, bedroom/basement guitar/bass jams, comically unexpected instrumentation, and extended suite-like structures, to form an original and remarkably, infectiously durable album.

“To break up an idea into its ultimate elements means returning upon its moments, which at least do not have the form of the given idea when found, but are the immediate property of the self.  Doubtless this analysis only arrives at thoughts which are themselves familiar elements, fixed inert determinations.  But what is thus separated, and in a sense is unreal, is itself an essential moment; for just because the concrete fact is self-divided, and turns into unreality, it is something self-moving, self-active.  The action of separating the elements is the exercise of the force of Understanding, the most astonishing and greatest of all powers, or rather the absolute power.”  G.W.F. Hegel, Preface (para. 32) to The Phenomenology of Mind.

By sheer coincidence, I first encountered this album at the same time I discovered cLOUDDEAD‘s self-titled collection of 12″ records, and the two albums have a lot of similarities.  Czukay is less precious.  And that is fine.  When I first heard On the Way to the Peak of Normal I was particularly impressed with the way some of the sounds on it were “field recordings” made with a dictaphone — a technology now all but obsolete, but still pointedly in use when I heard this album!  I also really liked (and still do) the way a horn (french horn?) kind of bubbles up unexpectedly in “Ode to Perfume,” a song to that point made mostly with conventional rock instrumentation.  The pace is sometimes slow enough that you can almost hear the wheels turning to inch the magnetic tape along holding these sounds, but that only adds to the overall charm of the album.  This is a heart-warming winner.