Kishi Bashi – Lighght

Lighght

Kishi Bashi – Lighght Joyful Noise (2014)

Pop music can still succeed.  Kaoru Ishibashi has made an album here that melds the frenetic energy of Japanese J-Pop with an assortment of Western pop music formats from the last half a century, especially prog rock (Mike Oldfield, Kansas), symphonic psychedelic rock (early Harry Nilsson, The Moody Blues), indie rock (Animal Collective, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, fun., Mercury Rev), etc.  There are a lot of synthesizers here.  They create a symphonic palette on a humbler scale, and without much to be humble about.  It’s something of a surprise that the songs aren’t about elves and fairies, because upbeat, hyperactive music like this is usually drawn to the realm of magical fantasy.  But it isn’t.  That push into another direction is what makes Lighght so nice.  Its strength is its eclecticism, used in a way that is not an end unto itself.  The lyrics have some missteps (“Mr. Steak, you’re Grade A”, *sigh*).  Still, the lyrics are an afterthought to the soundscapes.  The sensation given by many of the songs is that of an idea so intensely developed that it overflows a bit, unable to be contained by the usual structures of the styles it employs.  So, that leads to the limitations.  These songs are sometimes little more than little shots of pop pleasures, synthesizer extravaganzas with slowly building, anthemic vocals rounded out with baroque flourishes on violin and sped-up segments (often from the violin again) once upon a time reserved once upon a time for attempts to sound like chipmunks performing holiday songs.  So enough about the limitations.  A song like “Q&A” has an adept sense of shifting rhythm, built around a fairly steady 4/4 beat, the layers of synthesizer-generated horns, and slippery strings and soft punches of a moog keyboard capture attention away from the beat, so that what is steady has the appearance of something shifting and moving.  This is what Ishibashi does so very well–the insistent drive of “Carry on Phenomenon” has that quality too.  Whatever about the music seems superficial, it more than makes up for in its happy reconstruction of the geekiest sorts of grandiose pop music of the past.  This sources of inspiration often came across as pretentious.  But strung together this densely, Ishibashi puts a sizeable crack in the ponderous self-importance of those influences.  All those influences have a place.  There isn’t any sort of reductionist emphasis on any one of them though.  The techniques of pop music that felt the need to be taken seriously are cleverly subverted this way, by taking away their primacy and centrality.

Talk Talk – Laughing Stock

Laughing Stock

Talk Talk – Laughing Stock Verve 847 717-2 (1991)

Though commercially ignored on release (and beginning descriptions of recordings this way usually means good things are in store), Laughing Stock is now recognized as being among the definitive albums of the 1990s. There are definitely different stages in Talk Talk’s oeuvre. Early on, they were an above-average pop group. By the time Spirit of Eden came about, they were making art music removed from the usual progressions.

Searching testaments in Mark Hollis’ vocals find new expressions of timeworn themes. Hollis anchors this disc, as studio musicians lend much to Laughing Stock. Multi-instrumentalist Tim Friese-Greene stirs the pot enough to have the album invigorating throughout.

Sounds are layered to the point that horns and pianos appear only for seconds at a time, and even then becoming only barely audible. The orchestral backing accentuates the ambient qualities while also resonating with the natural textures.  In all these songs, Talk Talk derive a new way of recording pop music, one that takes painstaking effort to build layered, evolving tonal canvases that practically “waste” the sounds of the instruments by putting so much detail into music that ends up being comparatively spare.  There is very little structure. You cannot point to some essential core of the album and say, “this is Laughing Stock.” It suggests more than just itself. It remains like an untranslated, intensely introspective piece of one great, total mystery. To forgive, to accept, to die, to love; these are the preoccupations Talk Talk take up. They go where the stakes are high indeed.

“Ascension Day” has rhythmic guitar washes enveloped in a near-hypnotic wall of sound. The foreboding flow of the lyrics (“Bet I’ll be damned/ Get’s harder to sense to sail/ Farewell fare well”) assumes a humble wonder that probes even the darkest possibilities. These painful first steps lead to richer realizations. “After the Flood” has the obscured vocals building a new, calmer state. It creates a fresh palette. Guiding are the gentle organ harmonies and sweetened drum licks punctuated with a long, distorted run from the harmonica. Talk Talk build rhythmic pulses into a living canvas. Wading through a vision of some kind of a den of sin, Hollis constantly seeks some general apocalypse from which he could be reborn. “Taphead” drives deep into the themes of rebirth and enlightenment. “New Grass” then continues the uplifting feeling with its softly slurred guitar lines.

Laughing Stock is so unique and developed that it reaffirms the human power to survive the wear of day-to-day life. Disconnects can be healed. Listen to Laughing Stock when everything is dark. Listen to it again in bright sunshine after waking. Laughing Stock is attuned to both the wandering emptiness of night and the building glory of the morning.

Mac DeMarco – Salad Days

Salad Days

Mac DeMarco – Salad Days Captured Tracks CT-193 (2014)

Call it hypnagogic pop, cultural anthropology, or the musical corollary of “Hansen’s law of third-generation return,” there are plenty of musicians operating in the early new century trying to reconfigure the music of the past that was never associated with people their social status before.  Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti spring immediately to mind, but in their own ways, acts like Thundercat and Kishi Bashi have the same sorts of attitudes, even if they utilize arrestingly different styles and techniques.  Mac DeMarco represents sort of the singer-songwriter contingent.  Salad Days has wit and character.  But it also overuses a few gimmicks, like an effect that makes the guitar sound like it is wobbling or maybe even like the strings are rhythmically bending, and many of the songs fail to make their mark.  If you hear one of these songs you’ve practically heard them all–but if you have to choose, pick the title track.  DeMarco has talent and promise.  He’ll just need to work at broadening his range a bit.

OutKast – Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik

Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik

OutKast – Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik LaFace 73008-26010-2 (1994)

The TV channel VH1 aired a documentary “ATL: The Untold Story of Atlanta’s Rise in the Rap Game.”  At one point there is a clip of OutKast’s André 3000 responding to an unruly, angry crowd at a 1995 hip-hop magazine’s award show booing OutKast, after “East Coast” and “West Coast” rappers had been feuding throughout the entire event, by saying, “The South got something to say!”  (Here, remember that at that very award show OutKast also asked for open-mindedness, listening to what any original MC had to say…).  The tone of the documentary was that Atlanta hip-hop musicians felt neglected as media focus was exclusively on New York City and Los Angeles.  But the problem with putting André 3000’s declaration in this context is that it makes it hardly more than an arbitrary statement of chauvinism.  Did the Midwest, the Southwest or the Northwest not have something to say too?  This reveals an important insight into the dead-end aspirations embedded in a lot of hip hop in the 1990s.  The goal wasn’t some kind of fundamental equality.  It wasn’t like this was a noble fight so that everybody, no matter their origins, could have a chance. Instead it was just a narrow battle to put Atlanta, alone, at, or maybe even above, the level of New York City or Los Angeles.  It was about a distinct “Atlanta” identity having some kind of precedence over other identities.  This represents the narrowest possible expansion.  It is sort of a defense of the status quo, with just one specific fiefdom added to the inner circle of nobility in the largely patriarchal estates of the hip-hop realm

Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik starts strong, but runs out its welcome a bit as it goes on.  The rapping is, really, nothing too special.  The lyrics are all about players/playas, which is to say they are about the bravura of young men angling to achieve “alpha male” status.  They render that mindset well.  By adopting a slightly ironic distance from some of it (“Ain’t No Thang”), though, OutKast allow themselves to perpetuate the sorts of misogynistic, materialistic claptrap that they occasionally poke fun of, yet always seem to be preoccupied with (“Player’s Ball (Original)”).  It could just be a youthful mistake.  As much as this album is suppose to announce the arrival of a unique southern style of hip-hop, it mostly recalls New York boom-bap and early 1990s East Coast gangsta rap.  Yes, the tempos are a little slower, the bass is a little heavier and more insistent, and the overall vibe is a little more laid-back.  Also, the music has more melodicism in the raps than most hip-hop at the time.  It remains just a slight variation on the basic template of hip-hop from elsewhere.  While Outkast tried to rise above the confines of mainstream hip-hop, their earliest music couldn’t.  It tripped up by being just the same old gangsta hip-hop with a less aggressive posture.  They didn’t really have a new objective.  All they had was another horse in the same old race.  Maybe they wanted this music to be more than that, but they don’t always get there.  They bring it on a few tunes, but there is plenty of ho-hum filler too.  After a while the album gives way to what sounds more like third-tier R&B than hip-hop as such.  At that point it becomes quite tiresome.

The big stars here are the producers, Organized Noize.  The rappers, Big Boi and André 3000, seem like they are along for the ride.  They are up for it, but they don’t really seem like they are driving the procession.  That would come a few years later.  They were still kids.  Much of what they started here was more compellingly delivered on Aquemini (1998), and then they went in really new directions with Stankonia (2000).  But, really, it seems like OutKast wouldn’t have become what they did without first setting off in the direction they took here, then exhausting the need to push a “player” identity and instead making music that spoke to everyone on a new level.

Slavoj Žižek – Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept

Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept

Slavoj Žižek – Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept (Melville House 2014)

With Žižek, you sort of have to take the good with the bad.  Event falls into the category of the “bad”.  He explains the philosophical concept of the “event” as developed primarily by Alain Badiou — though Badiou is only mentioned briefly toward the end as the person who largely developed this view of “events” 25 years ago.  Anyway, an “event” is “[a]t first approach, . . . the effect that seems to exceed its causes” (p. 5) but it is further “the surprising emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme” and jumps from one point to another through pervading deadlocks, (p. 7), in which “reality includes fiction (or fantasy),” and “the right choice only emerges after the wrong one.”  (p. 95).  Such an “event” is not inherently good or evil, it has no specific content.

Žižek typically alternates between “big” and “little” books, with some newspaper pieces and other miscellany interspersed.  His last “big” one was a reinterpretation of Hegel, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012).  His last “little” one, aside from mere collections of interviews, was The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (2012).  As usual, he borrows quite a lot from his prior works, I spotted bits lifted from In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), Less Than Nothing and The Year of Dreaming Dangerously without really looking that carefully.

Although his “little” books are often more readable, due to less space for aimless digressions and uninteresting turf wars with other academics, this one lacks that readable quality.  He addresses points he has made elsewhere, often verbatim, but shortens them to the point that they will hardly be comprehensible unless you have read his other works, possibly even multiple prior works.

So, like Badiou, Žižek works out the position of continental philosophy that “ideology” has supremacy over “facts”.

“In an event, things not only change, what changes is the very parameter by which we measure the facts of change, i.e., a turning point changes the entire field within which facts appear.”  (p. 159).

His arguments here seem flimsy most of the time.  This is strange because he’s made these arguments before, more convincingly.  There just does not seem to be a good reason for these arguments to be so curt and thin, conclusory even.  He moves on to the next before it seems like he’s finished his prior thought.

A book like this just encourages the man’s critics who label him a charlatan.  It is for the most part uninteresting and superfluous.  To the extent that there are a few small new ideas, better to wait until the next time, when Žižek recycles and expands them to the point where they are interesting and defensible.  The man still has interesting things to say (take, for instance a recent newspaper op-ed, “ISIS Is a Disgrace to True Fundamentalism”).  Some of that wit makes brief appearances here, like comments on how weird and lewd acts in public are not part of some sort of “regression” to an animalistic state but a continuation of the privatization of public space (akin to the “enclosure of the commons”) — it is public space that is disappearing, not private space.  Event as a whole, however, seems like a throwaway.

Children of Men

Children of Men

Children of Men (2006)

Universal Pictures

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Main Cast: Clive Owen, Clare-Hope Ashitey, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Julianne Moore, Pam Ferris

An adaptation of the P.D. James novel The Children of Men (1992), deals with a dystopian near future period in which humans as a species have become infertile.  The film makes heavy use of symbolism, metaphor, and incorporates references to broadly contemporary political situations.  Theo (Clive Owen), an unassuming nobody, is pulled into a conflict by a “terrorist” group “The Fishes”, who are fighting against a fascistic government in England.  The youngest person in the world has just died.  But Theo’s former wife/girlfriend Julian (Julianne Moore), who is a leader of sorts in The Fishes, has come to the know Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), the first woman to become pregnant in 18 years.  The goal is to get Kee (like “Key”, get it?) and her child to “The Human Project,” a mysterious group supposedly starting a remote colony away from fascistic England.  Theo is a broke hack, grudgingly helping the “terrorists” in exchange for payment. But as he interacts with these terrorists, he is revealed as an apostate activist, tormented by the death of his child years ago, who can’t help but to do the right thing no matter what danger that puts him in.

In an sort of thematic archtype, The Fishes betray their revolutionary intent to internal power struggles of the individuals involved.  Theo and Kee, plus a midwife (Pam Ferris), narrowly escape The Fishes with the assistance of Theo’s elderly hippie friend Jasper (Michael Caine).  The plan is to rendezvous with The Human Project on their hospital boat via a refugee camp — what looks like a concentration camp for all intents and purposes.  Entering the refugee camp, full of “fugees”, the film depicts immanently contemporary horrors, with hooded prisoners subjected to torture, humiliation and execution. The scenes recall Abu Ghraib.  On the way there, scenery of belching pollution coming out of drain pipes and foul gasses emanating from smokestacks implies total environmental collapse as a possible cause for the infertility problem.  Inside the camp, Kee has her baby — will she name it Frolle or Bazooka? — and an insurrection breaks out between The Fishes and government troops.  Brutally realistic scenes of urban combat follow.  Theo and Kee try to reach a rowboat hidden in the camp.  They have the assistance of a surprisingly benevolent ersatz hotel operator who doesn’t speak their language.

No doubt, the film has leftist leanings.  The struggle for power in “civil society” creates conflict, while in the primitive setting of the refugee camp, there are benevolent humans.  This could almost come from something Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote during the Enlightenment.  But the quest to reach The Human Project seems like a step towards something else, something not quite of the Enlightenment.  Going to a colony somewhere out in the sea seems like a rootless new beginning.  The centrality of “fugees” — Kee is one — seems like a rejection of “identity politics” and an assertion that the future–the Human Project’s boat is called “Tomorrow” — must reject a retrenchment of uniformity, exemplified by the fascist English government’s use of concentration camps, and float about on something much looser, something that permits radically disparate elements to coexist.  The common denominators are care for others, generosity, self-sacrifice.  The film is a curiously uplifting message in a world that seems hopelessly and intractably locked into a downward spiral.  What superficially seems like a dumb sci-fi thriller is actually quite an excellent movie, made all the better by uniformly superb acting and the highest technical proficiency.  Hollywood is capable of something good now and again.

Nina Simone – Silk & Soul

Silk & Soul

Nina Simone – Silk & Soul RCA Victor LSP 3837 (1967)

Nina Simone was an icon.  She was dubbed the “high priestess of soul” by her fans, but they did so long before she actually started performing “soul” music.  It was only in the late 1960s, a full decade into her professional career, that she made a foray into the genre.  Frankly, this was one of her least convincing styles.  She often came across as a huge stiff.  She used formalistic vibrato (“Consummation”) in place of guttural drive, and pre-soul R&B shouting (“It Be’s That Way Sometime”) when a more supple delivery seemed advisable.  In some ways, it is the mark of arrogance.  She’s a philistine when it comes to soul music, but her hubris pushes her onward into territory that is slightly outside her natural stylistic range.

“Soul” was an afro-american musical form that often used “masking”, a technique that concealed social or political messages behind music that seemed on the surface to be (only) about romance, or whatever.  The psychological issues of inferiority looming behind the technique are the sort of things Frantz Fanon wrote about in Black Skin, White Masks [Peau noire, masques blanc] (1952).  When Nina Simone started making “soul” music, she frequently did it without masking.  She sang soul songs that were directly about social and political issues–like her 1969 hit single “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.”  The problem this presented is that it really isn’t possible to directly address any subject that really matters.  There is a need to engender meaning from oblique angles.  At least, this is what everyone in the structuralist or post-structuralist camp from Roland Barthes to Slavoj Žižek would say, in one form or another.  So while the militant social activist Simone did address the problem Fanon identified, she kind of missed another issue.  Even without the “white mask” problem, there is still no way to directly express something real without inscribing it on something else, another mask.  Her mid-1960s recordings that had a more traditional pop or Broadway sound gave her a mask on which she inscribed something else.  It is that something else that is often missing here.  We get Nina Simone singing soul, but not Nina Simone singing soul as a unique way to tell us something else. She stops short.

On “Love O’ Love” we have just her on piano, a setting closer to her earlier work, which works, and it is the best thing here.  In other places, “It Be’s That Way Sometime,” “Cherish,” “Some Say,” she’s out of sync with the backing band or the horns simply sound like dinner theater pop more than “authentic” soul or her vocals seem too flat and lacking texture that the greasy rock backing calls for.

Silk & Soul sounds more like a clinical, scientific experiment than the real deal.  Simone was clearly trying to stay relevant by catering to what she (or handlers) thought audiences wanted, rather than making the sort of music that compelled her and trying to bring audiences to that, whatever it was.  While not terrible, this is among Simone’s most forgettable albums of the 60s.

Paul Robeson – On My Journey

On My Journey: Paul Robeson's Independent Recordings

Paul Robeson – On My Journey: Paul Robeson’s Independent Recordings Smithsonian Folkways SFW CD 40178 (2007)

These were recordings made in the 1950s when Robeson was blacklisted during the cold war McCarthy witch hunt era.  He started his own label Othello Records and offered recordings on a subscription basis by way of the newspaper Freedom that he contributed to during that time.  His longtime arranger, accompanist and collaborator Lawrence Brown had largely stopped working with Robeson following a 1949 concert in Peekskill, NY in which an angry mob of idiots attacked the stage (to which Robeson responded in later concerts by surrounding himself on stage with unionists as bodyguards/bouncers, like his own Red Guards).  Instead, pianist Alan Booth is present on most of these recordings.  Booth was a competent pianist, but he didn’t have the deep connection that Brown had with Robeson. To complicate matters, any musicians that worked with Robeson during this time risked having their union card revoked (so much for unions supporting the working man), and even studios that gave Robeson recording time faced FBI harassment.  Under those circumstances, the mere existence of these recordings is impressive.  Yet, overall, they aren’t quite as good as Robeson’s earlier Columbia recordings.  There are still very fine performances here, like the stunning and resolute “Bear the Burden in the Heat of the Day” and “On Mah Journey Now, Mount Zion.”  There are fairly extensive and interesting liner notes with this release though, and a few tracks were previously unreleased.