Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Mature Themes

Mature Themes

Ariel Pink’s Haunted GraffitiMature Themes 4AD CAD3230CD (2012)


You could say that Ariel Pink’s music is based on some form of corollary to historian Marcus Lee Hansen‘s so-called “Hansen’s Law” about immigrant assimilation (it’s really just a theory): “What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.”  That’s because he dredges up material from the 1960s through the 1980s to re-purpose for his own music.  But there is more to his music than just that.  He constantly juxtaposes high and low culture.  This guy has studied pop culture.  On the opener, “Kinski Assassin,” he intones, “who sunk my battleship / I sunk my battleship.”  This recalls a TV commercial from the 1980s for the game “Battleship” in which a kid cries out, “You sunk my battleship!”  But elsewhere in the song Pink is singing, “We’ll always have Paris,” like a line from Casablanca (1942).  Fitting these together, with lines like “Blonde seizure bombshells and the blowjobs of death / Bring on the bog and she-males hopped up on meth” refuse to let this come to any sort of equilibrium.  At times it almost does.  “Only in My Dreams” seems almost like The Byrds.  Then “Farewell American Primitive” references the music collector obsession with “American Primitive” guitarist John Fahey.  But Pink sings, “fuck it, I’m high…”  He also drops in lines like “Native American Immigrant” and “If that isn’t me, North Korea is me.”  In all this, Pink refuses to let his music settle into any sort of comfort zone.  The juxtapositions of the incompatible just keep coming.  This is basically the same approach that the radical elements of the French nouvelle vague movement in cinema pursued half a century earlier.  After all, isn’t the aesthetic that Ariel Pink deploys here almost the same as what Godard did on Filme socialisme (2010), with its oversaturated digital video clips, sudden jumps to different characters, and offhand comments on philosophy, art, and work?

And let’s clear something up.  The term “hypnagogic pop” has been thrown around a lot to describe music like Ariel Pink’s.  But the term is a bit misleading when applied here.  The philosopher Hegel wrote about a concept that became known as “beautiful soul syndrome”, in reference to Goethe’s chapter “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahr [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship].  Hegel took up Goethe’s story to expand upon it and explain the vacuity in the forgiveness of evil by the “beautiful soul”.  As a J.N. Findlay wrote about Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomeology of Spirit]:

“It [the “beautiful soul”] then tries to cultivate goodness in solitary isolation from the actual social whole. *** The very rejection of objectivity is the only achievement of the ‘beautiful soul’, and is held to be the greatest triumph of its self-conscious freedom. It flees from concrete moral action, and luxuriates in a state of self-hypnotized inactivity.”

In this context, the jarring discontinuities of Pink’s music become the key to its success–the reason it avoids “beautiful soul syndrome”.  There is always the threat of a lulled hypnosis, but that is always and consistently disrupted by the strange juxtapositions he invokes, which almost everywhere in the real world are held part.  Mature Themes is maybe less jarring than much of Pink’s prior work.  The violent discontinuities are still there, though, more subtly.  Because they force the listener to confront and reevaluate the elements, they are what keep the album from becoming mere inactive nostalgia for subjective experience.

Jungle Brothers – Done By the Forces of Nature

Done By the Forces of Nature

Jungle BrothersDone By the Forces of Nature Warner Bros. 9 26072-1 (1989)


By the late 1980s, hip-hop was evolving.  It wasn’t just about sneakers, nursery rhymes, eating boogers and dancing anymore.  But while plenty of artists of the newer generation went for documenting the grimmest aspects of life on the streets or being part of the underclass, a group of artists calling themselves the Native Tongues tried something different.  The Native Tongues groups focused more on the positive aspects of what they would want things to be like.  Part of that was about respect for the historical contributions of Africans to world civilization.

Unlike most multi-MC groups, the Jungle Brothers didn’t have one MC who overshadowed the others.  Everybody shares duties on the mic, and there is never a letdown when another MC takes over from the last.  In fact, that is one of the group’s real charms.  Part of the reason Done By the Forces of Nature works is that the MCs tend to all use the same vocal rhythm, rather than their own idiosyncratic ones.  It is a very staccato, percussive delivery, free of any of the more melodic kind of rapping that emerged a decade or so later. This rhythmic emphasis is a shared approach.  So when one MC passes the mic to the next, there is a kind of stylistic commonality that tells the audience that these guys are trying to get at some big, heavy stuff, not trying to cut each other, or anybody else.  This is a style that perfectly fits the thematic sentiments of the songs.

The lyrics hint at a new view of masculinity, at least within hip-hop.  There is caution and skepticism.  This isn’t all bravura (though there is plenty of that).  In way, their sexist posturing kind of gives way to brief admissions that all that is just desperate attempts at something they can’t really grasp, leaving open the possibility to maybe taking a new and different look at the world.  It would be too much to call these guys feminists, but the ways their songs veer off course from the usual testaments to alpha male status open the door to other things.  Most often those other things are testaments to afro-consciousness.  But the crazy thing is that if the album had nothing but testaments to afro-consciousness, the people who probably need to hear those the most might not listen, and even those that do maybe would  have only focused on everything else.

A clear influence on the Jungle Brothers was James Brown.  A really funky beat is absolutely constant.  It is a big part of what makes Done By the Forces of Nature so damn infectious from start to finish.  Their debut record used a “house music” producer from Chicago, and that gave it a tight, tense, nimble sound.  That goes out the window here.  A little bit of that is retained, perhaps, keeping this music dance friendly.  But the beats meld with the lyrics a lot more here.  Take the opener, “Beyond This World,” there is a lot more wordless shouts of “yeah” or “uh” for rhythmic effect.  These guys seem much more comfortable, less beholden to the structure of the beats.  They make this music their own.  These seem like raps over music these guys had lived with.  That suits their artistic outlook, giving the album a friendly, down-home brightness that rewards the optimism of the lyrics.  It helps that this album was recorded in the “golden age” of hip-hop, before the crackdown on sampling that began in 1991 with a lawsuit against Biz Markie that made choice samples unaffordable to many acts.

Hip-hop was still a semi-unproven commercial prospect back in the late 1980s.  It was a kind of specialty genre, with its adherents who probably were insiders to hip-hop culture.  Done By the Forces of Nature comes at a key transition, when the forms of early hip-hop were fully refined, but when the scope and direction for the next generation was only being sketched out.  The positive, open-minded approach that The Jungle Brothers and other Native Tongues acts put forward didn’t quite catch on like the ghetto tourism aspects of “gangsta” rap.  Still, this album hasn’t aged much in two and a half decades.  It still has good beats, true to the funkiness of James Brown, though the beats are part and parcel of the overarching sense that these guys were making the kind of music that they like.  By extension, they suggest that maybe they could also do what they like when it came to the subjects they rapped about.  This is the really subversive edge.  The journalistic chronicles of gangsta rap held everything in stasis.  They told things as they were.  The Jungle Brothers suggested what things might become.  Their visions might be a little inept an inarticulate in places.  Stumbling in an interesting direction proved a bigger achievement than just being the black news (journalism) network.  This was black philosophy: asking better questions.

The Rolling Stones – Goats Head Soup

Goats Head Soup

The Rolling StonesGoats Head Soup Rolling Stones Records COC 59101 (1973)


After the artistic triumph, and commercial failure, of Exile on Main St., The Rolling Stones brought forth the thoroughly mediocre Goats Head Soup.  It is essentially an entire album filler (though “Dancing With Mr. D.” is at least good quality filler; it would have fit on Let It Bleed).  “Angie” shows up on some best-of compilations though it is a very weak song.  On many of the songs the guitar solos seem downright lazy.  This was their worst studio effort so far by quite a large margin.  It rocks about as hard as gym class, and the songwriting flirts with inspiration only on a momentary basis.  Mostly this feels as contrived and inauthentic as a political photo op.  Sorry sports fans, but this set the stage for a lot of what came later.

Sunn O))) – Monoliths & Dimensions

Monoliths & Dimensions

Sunn O)))Monoliths & Dimensions Southern Lord sunn100 (2009)


Uneven, yet also showing the promise that doom metal might be able to expand to entirely new territory.  First the bad, then the good.  The album’s weaknesses are that “Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia)” is a rather poor song and that the cheeseball vocals on “Aghartha” tarnish an otherwise decent song.  As for the good, “Big Church [megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért]” shows the band trying new things, in this case adding vocals that wouldn’t sound out of place on Steve Reich‘s The Desert Music.  The real highlight, though, is the closer “Alice”.  Rich in its sonics and surprisingly light on guitar rumble, it is something totally new.  Jazz legend Julian Priester makes a guest appearance, and perhaps the most astounding thing about Monoliths and Dimensions is that the last track makes comparisons to fusion, like Priester’s Love, Love, seem, if not directly relevant, like something plausible enough for consideration.  In the end, the good outweighs the bad, and at the very least this album opens a door for things yet to come, should the band be willing.

The Rolling Stones – Out of Our Heads

Out of Our Heads

The Rolling StonesOut of Our Heads London LL 3429 (1965)


There was something in early Stones records that wasn’t in early Beatles records. The Beatles seemed to pick up Afro-American songs and meander through white bread renditions that tended to conform to a white bread middle class lifestyle, tending to unwittingly bleach the black out of them. The Stones had more enthusiasm in what they did. Playing a Marvin Gaye or Solomon Burke song gave the Stones opportunity to share in a “break-free” attitude that was becoming a centerpiece of rock ‘n’ roll. The Stones added their own personality to their records, sometimes by accident, but they always found what was eternal in the soul of American rock ‘n’ roll songs. Just because Mick Jagger and Keith Richards became such noted songwriters doesn’t mean the beauty of their performance of others’ songs should diminish.

“The Last Time” is side one’s hit. Side two opens with “Satisfaction.” The songs of less popular distinction are still amazing. “The Spider and the Fly” is a fantastic delta blues number probing the immobility of the moving rhythms. It was the B-side to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” It also is the kind of song the Stones needed more of in the years after Brian Jones. “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotions Man” is a smooth number at a medium tempo. That song wouldn’t work as a single but it does so much for side two of the album. There is positive energy always coming through.

This is a record with no pretensions. Later Stones albums get more hype but they generally don’t have the offhand, hurried and unguarded charm of Out of Our Heads. The high and low cool of Keith Richards’ guitar is like no other joy. Set against the unidentifiable genius of Brian Jones the Stones ramble on with Mick Jagger strutting past his agony as if he would never consider whether it could overtake him. On Sam Cooke’s “Good Times,” Jagger sings with credulity. His voice feels right–graceful enough. In a way you don’t ever consider proving since every instinct says you can trust it, it comes from a good place.

[Note that the UK version of Out of Our Heads, which came out after the US version, did not have the hit singles on it and added tracks from December’s Children (And Everybody’s), which was not released in the UK. The UK version of Out of Our Heads may be the better album.]

Willie Nelson – To All the Girls…

To All the Girls...

Willie NelsonTo All the Girls… Legacy 88765425862 (2013)


Willie Nelson has kept touring and recording a hell of a lot longer than anyone ever would have guessed.  Many of those later-career recordings are decent but not of much consequence.  They feel tossed off and somewhat lazy.  But returning to a major label he has recorded a few albums in recent years that sound much more elaborate and polished than what he was doing in the early 2000s.  Another problematic feature of his recent work has been the gimmicks, from stupid genre exercises like the reggae album Countryman to faddish, star-studded guest performer albums like The Great Divide.  He’s made some dubious choices when it comes to quality control.  But he’s still a guy with a great voice, and when he pulls himself together and puts forth some effort he’s still capable of good things.  Against the odds, To All the Girls… is an unlikely late-career success.  The title reflects that each song features a different female guest performer.  There is a certain stylistic diversity, allowing individaul songs to lean on the strengths of the guests — from a Bill Withers cover with Mavis Staples to western swing with Shelby Lynne.  But much of this has an easy listening feel — appropriate given that Willie is now eighty years young — and he comes across as more engaged with that sort of a sound than just about any time in memory.  Nothing here jumps out as particularly notable.  But Willie has hardly made an album this consistently listenable from top to bottom in more than a decade.  There is a gentle touch in the recordings that suit that approach quite well, with unobtrusive strings and other little embellishments that enrich the performances without taking away from the singing and guitar solos that rightly remain the focus.  The guest performers for the most part all turn in nice performances (the biggest dud being the outing with his daughter Paula Nelson), and the song selections are appropriate ones for both Willie and the guests, which is perhaps the most difficult aspect in pulling off a project like this.  If you can handle Willie’s more polished and lighter tendencies then you might well rank this as his best since 1998’s Teatro.