Music – Page 45 – Rock Salted

Public Enemy – Fear of a Black Planet

Public Enemy – Fear of a Black Planet Def Jam CK 45413 (1990)

Fear of a Black Planet is still considered a watershed hip-hop album. It was meticulously sequenced. At a time when cassette tapes were a common format for releasing commercial musical recordings, this album was put together so that each side was essentially the same length (down to a matter of mere seconds), so that there was minimal silent runout at the end of one side of the tape (a byproduct of having sides of unequal length). The use of non-musical recordings also took a big leap here. Public Enemy had already done some of this on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, but now the skits were more elaborate and the excepts from mainstream media commenting on Public Enemy (“Incident at 66.6 FM”) were extended and clearly positioned to coincide with the provocative messages of the new songs. These weren’t just isolated songs thrown together haphazardly, like in the early days of LP records when 45 RPM singles still held commercial dominance. This was a cohesive album-length statement.

The band’s popularity was at an all-time high when Fear of a Black Planet dropped, thanks in large part to a hit song, “Fight the Power,” used in the Spike Lee movie Do the Right Thing and released as a single and soundtrack cut during the prior year. Lee also directed a music video for the song — this also still being the height of popularity for MTV and music videos as promotional (and artistic) devices. It is one of the most blunt statements of what the band’s music is about. The thundering, irregular bass line, like a modern Bo Dilddley beat, is set against a metallic wash of noise, and an array of disjointed drum beats. There is scratching and little snippets of vocals and keyboards too. The lyrics go a little overboard, but they make a point that is not to far off from what the #blacklivesmatter movement would be about decades later.

Just to give a sense of what Public Enemy’s music meant around this time, here’s a story from Boots Riley of The Coup in Tell Homeland Security — We Are the Bomb (2015):

“A woman named Rossy Hawkins and her two twin sons who were eight years old got beat down, bloodied by the police in the Double Rock projects [of San Francisco]. The neighborhood immediately came out, hundreds of people, and surrounded the police. What had happened a week or two before was a guy had gotten beaten up by the police and been taken in the police car and driven around until he died — because they didn’t take him to the hospital. So people wanted to get Rossy and her kids away from the police and take her to the hospital because they feared for her life. So they surrounded the police, and the police got scared and started shooting up in the air. *** And everybody ran away. But at a certain point everybody turned around. They turned around and came back, got Rossy and her kids away from the police, and sent those police out without their car. The car was turned over.

“So two things. One, none of this was put in any mainstream newspapers or anything like that the next day. *** And the other thing that happened is that what made everyone turn around was this: It was the summer of 1989, and the number-one song on the radio was ‘Fight the Power’ by Public Enemy. And somebody started chanting ‘Fight the power, fight the power, fight the power.’ And everyone said that then is when they knew that they all had a job to do.

“When that story was being told to me that day is when I realized the power that music could have, that hip-hop could be a rallying cry that consolidates our ideas into action.”

As inspiring as this was to Boots Riley, Public Enemy were (rightly) perceived as a threat to an established system of oppression. Touring in late 1990 in support of the album, PE appeared at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom in late December with rock band Sonic Youth opening. Following the show a police riot erupted.

Public Enemy was, for the most part, still a large collective at the time that Fear of a Black Planet was recorded and released. Hank Shocklee had helped work up a lot of the songs on the album, some of which had percolated for years before being recorded, but he wasn’t directly involved in the production for the album. It is still an album made in his style, with some constraints and omissions with regard to his predilections for unconstrained raw noise and atonality. But given his lack of involvement, the name “The Bomb Squad” was coined as the production credit for PE recordings. Calling the production team by that name obscured — quite intentionally — who was really involved. Although a conscious strategy by Chuck D, this became kind of a contradiction in Public Enemy’s message. They seemed like hypocrites by deceiving fans this way. Yet, they still delivered some amazing songs. Hank’s brother Keith stepped up. He wrote “Brothers Gonna Work It Out,” one of the band’s best songs anywhere. Professor Griff had also been booted from the band after a media dust-up about anti-semitic comments (despite his lack of involvement, his photo appears in the liner notes). He would return in the late 1990s though. This was another semi-hypocritical move by the band. Rather than stand together, and assert that Griff was not anti-semitic but rather made a mistake when caught off-guard as the result of typical anti-black “gotcha” journalism — during the black power movement journalists would often quote only the one extremist statement made in passing during hour-long speeches, to try to discredit black leaders with much to say.

The departures of Hank Shocklee and Professor Griff would have a big impact on the band in the coming years. But for a time, inertia (and the efforts of the remaining crew) kept the band going full speed.

This may not be It Takes a National of Millions to Hold Us Back, but nothing is, and this comes as close as anything. Well, truthfully, albums like this didn’t come along much in later years for one glaring reason. A legal crackdown on sampling arrived just after Fear of a Black Planet, which effectively ended hip-hop of this sort — for instance, by some calculations, the cost of royalties (a contested topic by itself) for the samples on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back would have meant the band (and its label) would lose over $4 (US) on every copy sold. There was nothing inevitable about the sampling crackdown, which could have been ruled a “transformative” fair use, and therefore not copyright infringement. In the end, the legal battle was political. The courts sided with the “vested interests” (to use economist Thorstein Veblen‘s term), meaning that what was effectively a new and unprecedented art form would be subordinated to the interests of self-important has-beens, greedy absentee owners of intellectual property rights who own large back catalogs of recordings, and lazy heirs and estate trustees.

“911 Is a Joke” was the song Flavor Flav delivered for the album. It might be his very best. His rhythm is impeccable. He delivers his lines with his usual prankster humor, though the subject matter is actually incisive social commentary (about public emergency services being withheld from or limited in black neighborhoods for racist reasons). Flav delivers “Can’t Do Nuttin’ for Ya Man,” which is a good song that occasionally shows up on compilations but lacks the benefits of the social commentary of “911 Is a Joke.”

“Welcome to the Terrordome” (probably a reference to the 1985 film Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome) is one of the harder-hitting tunes. A looping, siren-like wail drones on through much of the song, setting a kind of baseline level of aggression. Chuck D sounds absolutely fierce on the mic.

Fear of a Black Planet comes across as a very premeditated sort of album. There is nothing that happens on this record that isn’t planned and then executed precisely. It can be a bit exhausting, but it is just as exhilarating.

John Lennon & Yoko Ono – Double Fantasy

John Lennon & Yoko Ono – Double Fantasy Geffen GHS 2001 (1980)

To me, this is the late 70s/early 80s equivalent of Nilsson‘s Nilsson Schmilsson, a well-executed grab bag of mainstream rock/pop songs.

Dixie Hummingbirds – Journey to the Sky: The Legendary Recordings 1946-1950

Dixie Hummingbirds – Journey to the Sky: The Legendary Recordings 1946-1950 P-Vine PCD-5818 (2001)

Legendary vocal quartet music, featuring dynamic lead singer Ira Tucker and bass vocalist William Bobo. This may be the very best vocal group music of the late 1940s, at a point when the “jubilee” style of gospel singing was being left behind in favor of the new, more daring “hard gospel” style. Too many classic cuts here to go through them all individually, but hearing just “Move On Up a Little Higher” (either version), “In the Storm Too Long”, or “Search Me Lord” alone would be enough to make the whole set worthwhile even though there isn’t a bad cut to be found. You don’t need to have any interest in the religious content of this music to enjoy it. This particular set lacks recording and release information (at least in english), but the sound is great for recordings this old. There are a few other Dixie Hummingbird collections out there on CD as well, like Complete Recorded Works 1939-1947 in Chronological Order covering a generally earlier period, and Thank You for One More Day: The 70th Anniversary of The Dixie Hummingbirds and The Best of both focusing a bit more on later periods. But this is probably the place to start.

Bruce Springsteen – Born to Run

Bruce Springsteen – Born to Run Columbia JC 33795 (1975)

It is possible to look at Bruce Springsteen as the ultimate salesman/apologist for capitalism in the 1970s music scene. Looking at Springsteen’s excellent, and overlooked, debut album Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., one finds (much like in Van Morrison albums) a dreamy desire for a kind of utopian world outside the confirms of present reality, and much pondering of the obstacles to such dreams. But with Born to Run the ambitions have been narrowed (“focused,” if you must say so) to concentrate all energies on reaching escape velocity, that is to say, all attention is on the act of breaking free. The context of what is being broken away from, or what destination might await anyone who does break free, and other such concerns, are all relegated to a decidedly secondary place.

Historian Jefferson Cowie wrote a book called Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010), which theorized that one of the dominant narratives in American media in the 1970s was that of the individual breaking free of restrictive social bonds. Is there any more acute statement of that sentiment than the title track of Born to Run? Ernest “Boom” Carter‘s drums mechanically urge everything onward: thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud! Elsewhere the rhythm on the drums is steady but played in a circular figure. (The monotonous rhythm of the drums set against the more supple, syncopated rhythms of the other instruments and vocals is one of the most significant features of the recording). Bruce sings:

“Tramps like us /

Baby, we were born to run”

A rebuttal of sorts might be the Carpenters‘ “I Need to Be in Love” from A Kind of Hush (1976), with the line, “But freedom only helps you say goodbye.” In that Carpenters song, there is a resigned acceptance of stifling social bonds, without completely internalizing and normalizing the strains those social bonds produce.

Why does all this matter? Well, there is a theory that politicians in the United States basically offer up constituencies to the highest bidder — they form constituencies in the name of certain interests but then almost always betray those people and interests by accepting money (bribes) in the form of campaign contributions to further the opposing goals of the donors. This is more or less the “investment theory of politics” by political economist Thomas Ferguson (similar theories have been offered by the likes of G. William Domhoff, etc.). Recent, well-publicized research by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page empirically supported these theories, showing that the opinions of ordinary people have close to zero influence on public policy in the United States while those of elites (and their organizations) have substantial influence.

If we look at the Carpenters song as being built on a christian notion of love (as in, “love thy neighbor”), a kind of community-building myth that brings people together despite differences, Springsteen is pushing for an anti-christian attitude of atomistic individuals. His constant references to automobiles is simultaneously praise for generic materialistic consumption, weird sexualized commodity fetishism, and advocacy for enjoyment of the primary mechanism for an individual to contribute to fossil fuel pollution and waste. Now, it is possible to say that all this is sheer coincidence. Or not. Matthew Modine‘s character Pvt. Joker in the film Full Metal Jacket (1987) is the cynic who actually manages to sustain the Vietnam war effort by maintaining a protective personal distance from the insane logic of the war effort, whereas Vincent D’Onofrio‘s character Pvt. Pyle, who takes the war effort serious, shoots himself, thereby not advancing the effort. Springsteen always had a sense of irony and cynicism, but it was the sort that worked in favor of the groundswell of neoliberal politics in the mid-1970s.

Neoliberalism, in terms of specific and recognizable policies, is about favoring financial interests over labor, privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending to expand the role of the private sector in the economy; but those policies are sustained by a manner of thinking that favors certain groups over others. Henry A. Giroux: “As an ideology, it construes profit making as the essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market cannot only solve all problems but serve as a model for structuring all social relations. It is steeped in the language of self-help, individual responsibility and is purposely blind to inequalities in power, wealth and income and how they bear down on the fate of individuals and groups.” Erik Olin Wright: “Neoliberal ideology says that the social-democratic solutions are permanently off the table. That’s just self-justification of elite privilege.” Michael Hudson: neo-liberalism is neo-rentier and perhaps neo-feudal, and attempts a counter-enlightenment.

So, yes, perhaps Springsteen was a useful idiot, unknowingly advancing interests he didn’t consciously wish to advance. All this does matter, because his public image is that of the “ordinary Joe,” or, perhaps, hero of the “ordinary Joe.” But is he really helping ordinary people, or selling them out to their class enemies? It seems like the latter more than the former. Further proof might be how so many people “misunderstand” Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. Some intellectual types state that listeners who use the song for its patriotic content are missing its ironic, cynical critique of patriotism. But perhaps the intellectuals are overstating the effect of irony/cynicism, and perhaps it really is just a necessary distance. In this way, maybe Springsteen is akin to Dmitri Shostakovitch, whose very distance from Stalinism was paradoxically really part of the functioning of the Stalinist regime. Like Pvt. Joker and Shostakovitch, Springsteen actually aided the Carter/Thatcher/Reagan neoliberal counter-revolution to roll back the social welfare programs of the mid-20th Century. Oh, and also maybe a nickname like “The Boss” aligns Springsteen a bit too close for comfort with the exploiters of labor?

So both at the level of individual psychology, and at the level of the political economy, Springsteen’s music can be seen as supporting the very thing it purports to oppose. Let’s return again to the Carpenters. “I Need to Be in Love” and albums like A Song for You (1972) are about building something, rather than breaking away from something. Even a cursory view of the Carpenters’ music reveals a kind of frustration with the world it inhabits. But, the thrust of the music is about saying working those problems is preferable to trying to cast aside everything and start anew like Springsteen proposes in song. Rather than simply cast aside institutions that have their problems, the Carpenters made music about recognizing and addressing those problems. Springsteen, on the other hand, just abandons the difficult tasks. These seem like cop-outs framed around mitigating symptoms rather than redressing root causes. This might be summed up by articulating the missing burden: “The difficult lesson . . . is thus that it is not enough to simply give voice to the underdogs the way they are: in order to enact actual emancipation, they have to be educated (by others and by themselves) into their freedom.”

There are, indeed, some really good songs here: the title track and the opener “Thunder Road.” There is some decent material too: the hearty R&B of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” etc. Most of the songs maintain the sense of movement, action, and almost inevitability and achievement. Piano is used in places to make the music grandiose. The jazzy ballad “Meeting Across the River” doesn’t do that, and it changes the pace of the album just before the closer “Jungleland.” Whether it’s the “wall of sound” style of producer Phil Spector, soulful R&B horn breaks, obvious nodes to Bob Dylan, or something else, most of these songs look backwards to old styles, with commonplaces that might be called pastiche — though frequently leaning more heavily on guitar riffs that the sources of inspiration. This looking backward is significant, because it tends to underscore the lack of new demands in the music. If stereotypical 1960s radicalism was about pressing established institutions with demands intended to undermine those very institutions, then Born to Run kind of relents and says that no new demands will be made.

If contrasted with Springsteen’s excellent debut album, the turn with The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle and then Born to Run can be seen as selling out. According to the standard narrative (pushed in promotional materials for reissues of the album), faced with a commercial crises for lack of album sales, he capitulated to the forces that his debut leaned against. The transformative idealism of the debut was gone, which suggested asking new questions and creating new attitudes to fit those questions, and it its place a kind of empty idealism that was all about action stripped of context, kind of like running on a treadmill — there is the illusion of movement (breaking free) that really keeps the runner in one place. This was somewhat similar to what French “new philosophers” of the 1970s (Michel Foucault, Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, etc.) did, when they asserted that the only revolutionary project is that of self-realization. And yet, this album is quite an effective sellout effort! This is the sort of album that can be appreciated much like Leni Riefenstahl‘s Nazi propaganda film Triumph des Willens [Triumph of the Will]. If this sort of comparison seems like a stretch (see also “Godwin’s Law”), then consider that alienation and isolation were preconditions for totalitarianism according to Hannah Arendt.

So maybe it is time to rethink Springsteen’s “blue collar” bona fides. There are few, if any, albums from the 1970s that so succinctly capture and redirect the populist underpinnings of neoliberalism as dynamically and persuasively as Born to Run.

Bowie – Diamond Dogs

Bowie – Diamond Dogs RCA APL1-0576 (1974)

After the glam hard rock of Aladdin Sane and the nostalgic (and poorly-received) Pin Ups, David Bowie returned, somewhat, to the theatrics of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. Mick Ronson and The Spiders From Mars are gone, but Bowie’s own guitar playing is sturdy and effective, if more economical and scrappy.

“Rebel Rebel” is one of Bowie’s catchiest guitar riffs. “Diamond Dogs” is another great one here, with its solid glam beat and gracefully dingy horns. Of the tracks that aren’t on the radio or best-of collections, “Rock ‘n’ Roll with Me” is perhaps the best, and most instructive. It (and the soulful “We Are the Dead”) points towards Bowie’s focus on his singing that would lead to the R&B rave-up title track to Young Americans and the excellent cabaret ballad “Wild Is the Wind” on Station to Station.

There is a concept of sorts behind this album, something about a dystopian future like in George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four (Bowie was denied rights by the author’s estate to make a direct adaptation of the novel). The concept helps the album, not in the direct structure of a cohesive overall story line, but in providing a kernel of inspiration that gets individual songs going. There is more social commentary here than on perhaps any other Bowie album.

Really, Diamond Dogs is one of Bowie’s best.

Tom Zé – Estudando o Pagode

Tom Zé – Estudando o Pagode (Na Opereta Segregamulher e Amor) Trama 748-2 (2005)

Often described as a feminist operetta, Zé insists that Estudando o Pagode is not one. But he is merely explaining things so he can confuse you. If feminism is defined as the radical theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, then this is absolutely a feminist work. The album was dedicated to philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)), Isabella Faro de Oliveira, scientist Charles Darwin, ethologist/zoologist Konrad Lorenz and science journalist (and evolutionary psychology advocate) Robert Wright. The psychoanalyst Maria Rita Kehl is cited repeatedly in the libretto. A central concern is how the relationship between men and women is crafted in societies premised on domination and how hierarchies evolve and reproduce themselves, often in disguised and hidden ways. In an interview, Zé said,

“I would like to clarify a bit the general attitude of this album, an operetta about the woman situation.

“It is not a feminist work. Though it is not a machoist CD, it is, at least, ‘masculinist’: It calls man’s attention to the huge disadvantage he has created in his present relationship with women.

“A woman, nowadays, is slightly suspicious and cannot permit herself the easy-going kind of well-being of companionship that allows going from affection to a caress.

“Women have incorporated a feeling of mistrust towards men. She is always tense, worried, confronted with a potential enemy, an attitude created due to the psychological context of his situation in the society.”

This is a work meant for men, to convince them they have mistreated women throughout history to hold greater power. It is to convince men to see the world from a point of inclusive difference, not from a perspective of chauvinism. (Regarding the elimination of racism, Judith H. Katz wrote White Awareness from a similar premise: racism is a problem caused by white people and white people are responsible for ending it, not the victims of racism).

What Zé is really driving at is that this is not music premised on so-called “identity politics“. What does “identity politics” mean? In short, it is about building political power by looking at the world through identity, namely, by building groups having a common identity such as the same gender and then exerting the collective power of the group identity to achieve political ends, particularly from the perspective of so-called “minority influence” but also through coalitions. This is something promoted by the likes of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and it has become one of the dominant aspects of neoliberalism — manifested through “inclusive” policies like multiculturalism.

French philosopher Alain Badiou is one of the most renowned opponents of “identity politics”. Badiou has said, “What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? This is what I believe love to be.” If there is a way to relay the premise of Estudando o Pagode short of actually hearing it, this would be it. As acknowledged in the liner notes, following a lengthy quote/summary of Riane Eisler‘s book The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987), Zé wants to push for utopian (gender) egalitarianism (using the past to break with the Gordian knot of the present with a form of argument that Walter Benjamin advanced: using the past to argue for a different future).

This music is also, thankfully, not really “opera” in terms of the manner of singing — it isn’t even bel canto popular music influenced by operatic forms of singing. American writer Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) attended a performance of Richard Wagner‘s opera Parsifal and wrote a piece “Mark Twain at Bayreuth” in Chicago’s Daily Tribune newspaper, published December 6, 1891. He summed up a common reaction to experiencing a Wagner opera:

“The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a Wagner opera done in pantomime once. *** Singing! It does seem the wrong name to apply to it. Strictly described, it is a practicing of difficult and unpleasant intervals, mainly. An ignorant person gets tired of listening to gymnastic intervals in the long run, no matter how pleasant they may be.”

The overriding reason that opera is sung in such an unnatural way is to emphasize distinction among its listeners and partisans. In other words, the very unnatural way about it, in relation to normal speaking voices, makes it esoteric and not readily appreciated. It takes time and effort (and resources) to cultivate an understanding of its objectives, and therefore involves a degree of “conspicuous waste” (to use Thorstein Veblen‘s term) that distinguishes the wealthy — who have time and money to cultivate obscure tastes — from the “rabble” — who don’t. Also, the “great person” aspect of operatic singing emphasizes that the feats of vocalization achieved by trained singers are not possible for everyone. This promotes inequality, and reinforces a sense that inequality is natural and just.

If the concept of a feminist (or masculinist) operetta still seems unappealing, know that this music is wonderfully quirky and idiosyncratic. Tom Zé is one of those endearing weirdos who can put a smile on the face of even the most bitter cynics.

This is the second of the (perhaps still-counting) trilogy of Zé’s “studies” (estudandos) of musical forms. The way he approaches these studies is reminiscent of Conlon Narcarrow, a major musical influence. Nancarrow composed (and recorded) “Studies for Player Piano,” punching holes in player piano rolls in way that produced music impossible for a single human performer to play. Sometimes he prepared the player pianos by rigging the piano hammers with leather or metal to produce different timbres, and synchronized multiple player pianos for performances in unison. Nancarrow’s works are intellectually curious and profound, while also being playful and having an affinity for popular musical forms like boogie-woogie (see his Study No. 3a for example, which, in the best possible way, sounds a bit like four pianists improvising on a James P. Johnson tune, simultaneously, as fast as they can play).

Zé uses a lot of different musical techniques here, drawn from many different quarters. The opening “Ave Dor Maria” features a processed, computer-like voice, reminiscent of Prince & The Revolution‘s “1999” (“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you…”). The song draws on hip-hop and has a sturdy electric guitar-led rhythm. Many of the songs utilize electronically programmed sounds, for beats or just for noisy effects. “Teatro (Dom Quixote)” throws in anachronistic horns.

There is melody too. The Second Act in particular draws on pleasant lyrical statements, on “Eleau,” “Prazer Carnal” and songs around them.

Speaking about his talents — or lack of talent — he said,

“I am a very bad composer, a very bad singer, a very bad instrumentalist, but the text is the most important thing of everything. Because I am so bad, that is the reason I am here. I am always going to the edges where nobody wants to go and try to work it out.”

The studies albums are the most explicit in describing a process of working through problems at the edges of possibility. Syncretism has always been a part of Zé’s music. Yet here there are as many — or more — different types of music in one place as anywhere in his back catalog, and the mashups are both as dramatically incongruous and creatively provocative as they can be. This is also incredibly playful music. The themes may be intellectual, but the performances are approached almost like stand-up comedy. Tom Zé has always embraced compositions with disparate elements moving not in unison, but together, independently. There is much of that here: staccato guitar riffs and whistles, slowly moving washes of noise, tuneless glissandi caused by blowing on ficus leaves. There is a pervasive tension between lead and backing voices. They jostle. Zé calls these approaches “induced harmony” and likens them to “incipient practices” like he used as a child performing in the Brazilian folk genre of música sertaneja, and like the intuitive sociopolitical life strategies of ordinary people.

The story of the operetta is summarized on the back of the album. It vaguely resembles another strange psychoanalytic epic, El Topo. But don’t approach this thinking that following the libretto is crucial. It isn’t. The music is worthwhile on its own, even if you do not speak Portuguese.

Miles Davis – Birdland 1951

Miles Davis – Birdland 1951 Blue Note 7243 5 41779 2 7 (2004)

Very good performances from Miles’ bop days, but these were recorded in “primitive” fashion from radio broadcasts. Casual listeners should avoid this in favor of something with better than bootleg quality sound. Committed Davis fans will really dig the performances though, and can probably look past the fidelity issues.

Tom Zé – Tropicália lixo lógico

Tom Zé – Tropicália lixo lógico Passarinho PASSCD0001 (2012)

The late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said, “I believe that if the sociology I propose differs in any significant way from the other sociologies of the past and of the present, it is above all in that it continually turns back onto itself the weapons it produces.” A similarly reflexive position is taken in certain psychoanalytic/philosophical discourses (dealing with “permanent self-questioning”). Tom Zé’s self-released album Tropicália lixo lógico (crude English translation: “Tropicália Logical Waste”) kind of follows a similar approach to music.

Zé is a kind of musical analyst (most likely a logical-intuitive introvert, just like cinema’s Jean-Luc Godard). This album draws on Zé’s past in the late 1960s Tropicália movement, without being beholden to it. This is a fairly mellow collection of music, much like his prior studio album Estudando a Bossa: Nordeste Plaza. He is ironically using bits of popular music, some old, some newer. What is different here is that unlike recent efforts his appropriations are in a way more crude, less nuanced. This is kind of the point! What made Zé’s misadventures in Tropicália decades ago so unique is that they dissolved many of the contradictions of straight-up cynicism. When he appropriated bits of mass culture he didn’t do so just to cheaply trade on a kind of guilty-pleasure enjoyment in kitsch but to elevate the appropriation in relation to the content, honoring the sources without becoming beholden to them. That last part was always the key. When rudimentary cynics like Frank Zappa do things like this, they tend to prove in the end that they are really beholden to the past and can at most recall it to reinforce its underpinnings (and try to show off in the process). Zé, on the other hand, robs the past of its coercive force, opening up the future to other possibilities. He’s doing that again here. But this man is in his late 70s!

Tropicália lixo lógico is an excellently produced album. Much like Jogos de armar (Faça Você Mesmo), this is as conventional and approachable a production style as you will find anywhere from Zé, while also retaining the man’s essential weirdness and edginess. There are hints toward indie rock, bossa nova, and so forth, with fewer and softer angular rhythms than on his most experimental recordings. But he still has tricks up his sleeve. One of his best devices is to cut off many of the songs. Rather than fade out, or reach some kind of clear resolution, many of the songs are cut off mid-verse and the next song abruptly begins. Consider this a litmus test. If something like that sounds absurd to you, perhaps it is time to move along. If the idea of cutting off the ends of the songs to refuse any sort of resolution sounds kind of interesting, then buckle in for a lifelong fascination with one of Brazil’s most fascinating musical figures — this probably won’t be your last Zé recording.

The Mothers of Invention – Freak Out!

The Mothers of Invention – Freak Out! Verve V6-5005-2 (1966)

There is something really curious about Mothers of Invention records. They rely on a kind of double irony. That is to say that there are songs like “Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder” and “Any Way the Wind Blows” that look back to 1950s doo-wop and pop/rock with a dose of sarcasm, or “Wowie Zowie” with a melody near the end cribbed from The 4 Seasons‘ 1962 sunshine pop hit “Sherry,” but the sarcasm is itself ironic and sarcastic. It’s like this: given the wave of counterculture that was underway in the late 1960s (a year after the release of Freak Out! was the “summer of love”), the only way for the Mothers to hold fast to the pre-countercultural norms was to do those things ironically. So when someone hears a song like “Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder” the listener hears sarcastic, mocking vocals, she is really supposed to like the song and not sarcastically dismiss it. In the liner notes there is a comment about “Any Way the Wind Blows” that says, “It is included in this collection because, in a nutshell, kids, it is…how shall I say it?…it is intellectually and emotionally accessible for you. Hah! Maybe it is even right down your alley!” But why put a song like this on the album at all — or write it in the first place — if it is only for squares? And why go on to do Cruising With Reuben & The Jets, an entire album of doo-wop? Again, this is why the real intent is to like the song for its retro qualities. Really, what is wrong with that though? Probably the best career move bandleader Frank Zappa ever made was to sign the Philadelphia doo-wop group The Persuasions to his record label! In some ways, the doo-wop tracks are some of the very best cuts on the entire double album.

One of the most successful rockers is “Trouble Every Day.” This song, commenting on the Watts Riots and race relations generally, turns out to have less of an Abbie Hoffman “militant activist” vibe than a Hubert H. Humphrey “compassionate liberal” vibe!

All this positions The Mothers not as a faithful part of the counter-culture, but as part of the counter-counterculture. The band’s labelmates (sometimes appearing together on tour) The Velvet Underground represented a real musical revolution. But Zappa would mock them on stage. Zappa, and by extension The Mothers, were basically crypto-conservatives (of the liberal-libertarian-conservative strain). If that seems like an odd characterization, it is in the sense of adapting to and blunting revolutionary impulses to avoid a real revolution — think Igor Stravinsky instead of Arnold Schönberg or The New Deal instead of the Bolsheviks.

Challenging that view, however, are songs like “I Ain’t Got No Heart,” “How Could I Be Such a Fool,” “You Didn’t Try to Call Me,” and “I’m Not Satisfied” that appropriate easy listening, marching band and plaid suit old boys club horn section atmospherics, and place them alongside rock guitar riffs. According to one source (not verifiable by any other online source), Zappa attended musical training by Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the use of wildly disparate musical styles was an approach that showed up in the work of many such students — Zappa’s fellow student Rogério Duprat from Brazil employed that effect with more startling originality and subversive power on records for Gilberto Gil and others in the tropicália movement. Zappa’s use of this technique is the most rudimentary. It seeks to provide a contrast, but never really succeeds in mocking the underlying premises of the horn section music. It just shows up like a fart joke (and those kinds of jokes were mainstays of The Mothers’ repertoire). The lengthy closer “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet” was an unfinished track that Zappa and the band did not want included. The the abstractions of “Help, I’m a Rock (Suite in Three Movements),” “It’s Can’t Happen Here,” and “Who Are the Brain Police?” add other layers and music elements to the mix — only the first part of “Help I’m a Rock” really succeeds though.

This album is decent. It is worth giving a listen every once and while, but doesn’t quite come together enough to likely be a perennial favorite. As my friend Brian put it, “Freak Out! is a more important release than it is necessarily a great album.” The Mothers did better with We’re Only In It for the Money. And other artists later improved on many of the ideas here: The Grateful Dead on Anthem of the Sun and CAN on Tago Mago with a hybrid of rock and modern classical; Brazilian tropicalismo with juxtaposition of seemingly opposing elements; and The Red Krayola with absurdist humor on the likes of God Bless The Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It. But Freak Out! still deserves credit for attempting a unique blend of countercultural rock, retro pop, and avant garde modern classical musics. It clearly tries to normalize the weirder elements — to prove that the weird stuff isn’t really weird at all. Yet it was making these attempts and making its experiments sooner than most. The floodgates of truly revolutionary music would only really open in 1967 and 68. Legendary producer Tom Wilson deserves special credit for the album’s best elements. He summoned a lot of resources to help make an album of base humor with the finest studio recording techniques and equipment of the day.

Frank Sinatra – Sings His Greatest Hits

Frank Sinatra – Sings His Greatest Hits Legacy CK-65240 (1997)

This album makes an excellent introduction to Frank Sinatra’s music. It’s not a perfect collection, but it features some great songs from the 1940s and early 1950s. There are a few alternate versions and previously unreleased tracks included. I would recommend this album over the more popular Sinatra Reprise: The Very Good Years if you only want a single disc Sinatra collection, and also over the bloated box set The Best of the Columbia Years 1943-1952. However, The Capitol Collectors Series and Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits are also good collections for later time periods (picking up both of those along with Sings His Greatest Hits would provide a fairly complete overview of his entire career — they cover basically non-overlapping periods).

Interesting aside: did you know that “The House I Live In” was the title song to short film Sinatra starred in that was organized by the communist party? Or that as a consequence of those sorts of activities he was barred from performing for troops during the Korean War?