http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOrMg3pY7hw
Music is a genre that endlessly steals from itself. Music is up-front about it, though. It's easy to identify references and homages in music, because our ears pick them out whether we're looking for them or not. Books and movies can steal plots and characters; sometimes we won't even notice that O Brother Where Art Thou is an homage to the Odyssey.
But musical homages insist upon being recognized. We have the 1956 Chuck Berry original, above; we have The Beatles' cover in 1963, who give the song a little je ne sais qoui; we have Electric Light Orchestra's cover in 1973, which begins with Beethoven's fifth itself. Then something was sparked; Beethoven's fifth became part of popular consciousness again, maybe. Disco artist Walter Murphy went gold with Fifth of Beethoven in 1976. Recently, a Flight Facilities remix of the disco edit.
Whenever one reads about celebrated thinkers and figures of antiquity, there's always this direct, easily traced line of descent; we have Socrates and his student Plato and his student Aristotle. We have Haydn and especially Mozart before Beethoven, and Bach before them.
It's easy to pick a figure and claim them as unparalleled genius; Bach appears to have had no predecessors; nor Socrates, nor Chuck Berry. Einstein had the same figure of genius around him; he was self-taught and self-emergent.
I would wager these chains of popular figures exist in all fields. Is this a product of human progress or simply human memory?
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Musawe — The Seatbelts/Yoko Kanno
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co-itvSCNiI
I discover things backwards a lot, it turns out. I fell in love with the Cowboy Bebop OST before I ever actually saw the show. Much of the soundtrack is jazz and bebop, but it does range as far as funk, blues, opera, singer-songwriter ballads, classical, etc. For me, it was wonderful starter kit into the world of everything-but-modern-pop.
Musawe is an original piece, but done in the style of gnawa; set to images of space travel, off-planet bazaars, and syndicate violence, it is surreal and transcendental. It's gorgeous and subtle and entirely out of place, which puts it exactly in place. Gnawa (a distinctly modern Morrocan musical genre) is a form of liturgy: "recreat[ing] the first sacrifice and the genesis of the universe by the evocation of the seven main manifestations of the divine demiurgic activity".
Reappropriated and used as the backing music to an anime about space bounty hunters, is this disrespectful? Does anyone care?
I discover things backwards a lot, it turns out. I fell in love with the Cowboy Bebop OST before I ever actually saw the show. Much of the soundtrack is jazz and bebop, but it does range as far as funk, blues, opera, singer-songwriter ballads, classical, etc. For me, it was wonderful starter kit into the world of everything-but-modern-pop.
Musawe is an original piece, but done in the style of gnawa; set to images of space travel, off-planet bazaars, and syndicate violence, it is surreal and transcendental. It's gorgeous and subtle and entirely out of place, which puts it exactly in place. Gnawa (a distinctly modern Morrocan musical genre) is a form of liturgy: "recreat[ing] the first sacrifice and the genesis of the universe by the evocation of the seven main manifestations of the divine demiurgic activity".
Reappropriated and used as the backing music to an anime about space bounty hunters, is this disrespectful? Does anyone care?
Monday, March 4, 2013
Sleepwalkin' — Modest Mouse
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT_PwXjCqqs
There's a lot to say about covers, usually because the songs themselves, by virtue of being important enough to have been recorded not once but twice, are generally... well, important somehow.
The original, Sleep Walk, was a guitar-based instrumental from the 50s, recorded by two Italian guys from Brooklyn that, somehow, made it into the popular consciousness: used in movies, covered upwards of thirty times, and generally recognizable, like a folk song — even if no one knows who recorded it. (Santo and Johnny Farina.)
But it made it big. Some part of the song resonates with the aesthetic mind. Maybe its chord structure, maybe its tempo, maybe its specific vintage timbre and tone. It doesn't matter.
But for a band like Modest Mouse — whose typical work is fed through (as Pitchfork puts it) "the umbilical of strip malls, religion, blues, prairies, automobiles, and dysfunction" — the song emerges unscathed. It's a little twangier, a little slower and sadder, and a little more electric. It has drums.
It also has lyrics. Written by Modest Mouse, fit to the music, and layered over. Not as a remix, or a theft. A tasteful reappropriation. Typically, I discovered this backwards. I heard the Modest Mouse version first, and then discovered (maybe by instinct) that it was a cover of an instrumental.
But by that time, the Modest Mouse version was canonized. The lyrics fit, made sense, cemented the song for me. Sleepwalkin' exists as a song about country life and white trash.
But it also exists as Sleep Walk, a song firmly set in 1959 Brooklyn, with Coney Island and Trinity Records, when a record (not a CD) would make gold and give the Farina brothers enough to live on for a lifetime.
What is it about that damn song?
There's a lot to say about covers, usually because the songs themselves, by virtue of being important enough to have been recorded not once but twice, are generally... well, important somehow.
The original, Sleep Walk, was a guitar-based instrumental from the 50s, recorded by two Italian guys from Brooklyn that, somehow, made it into the popular consciousness: used in movies, covered upwards of thirty times, and generally recognizable, like a folk song — even if no one knows who recorded it. (Santo and Johnny Farina.)
But it made it big. Some part of the song resonates with the aesthetic mind. Maybe its chord structure, maybe its tempo, maybe its specific vintage timbre and tone. It doesn't matter.
But for a band like Modest Mouse — whose typical work is fed through (as Pitchfork puts it) "the umbilical of strip malls, religion, blues, prairies, automobiles, and dysfunction" — the song emerges unscathed. It's a little twangier, a little slower and sadder, and a little more electric. It has drums.
It also has lyrics. Written by Modest Mouse, fit to the music, and layered over. Not as a remix, or a theft. A tasteful reappropriation. Typically, I discovered this backwards. I heard the Modest Mouse version first, and then discovered (maybe by instinct) that it was a cover of an instrumental.
But by that time, the Modest Mouse version was canonized. The lyrics fit, made sense, cemented the song for me. Sleepwalkin' exists as a song about country life and white trash.
But it also exists as Sleep Walk, a song firmly set in 1959 Brooklyn, with Coney Island and Trinity Records, when a record (not a CD) would make gold and give the Farina brothers enough to live on for a lifetime.
What is it about that damn song?
Counting Crows — St. Robinson In His Cadillac Dream
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6SEVMhwShQ
Whenever I talk about music with anyone over the age of about thirty, the idea of tonal shift always comes up: most music today has a great divide between the tone of its music and the tone of its lyrics. Modern music can be poppy and upbeat, and discuss sadness and loss. Often it's slow and sad but has hopeful and uplifting lyrics. The theory is that this is a new development, and I'm inclined to agree — it's hard to picture Ella Fitzgerald pulling this trick, (although not as hard to picture Sinatra); but Opera, Soul, Blues, R+B, modern Musicals, Rock 'n' Roll, not even Rap ever has real cognitive dissonance Yet modern Rock, and especially Alternative (call it Indie, whatever) does this a lot.
St. Robinson in His Cadillac Dream is the button song on the Counting Crows' 1999 album This Desert Life; a wonderful, flawed, expert rendition of Americana pop mixed with shoegaze. Yet it's a prime example: a sad, melancholy song put to poppy, heightened banjo, organ, and guitar. It leaves echoes of... uncertainty?
A wonderful example is The Cure, although I'm not sure that they began the trend — Plainsong is Robert Smith going off to write a secret love letter to his wife, shrouded in the timbre of the previously dark stuff The Cure had done earlier in the 80s. It became massively popular, an all-consuming emotional statement, as Pitchfork so puts it.
It sounds sad, but it's deeply happy. St. Robinson pulls the same trick. Most modern indie music pulls the same trick.
But why?
Whenever I talk about music with anyone over the age of about thirty, the idea of tonal shift always comes up: most music today has a great divide between the tone of its music and the tone of its lyrics. Modern music can be poppy and upbeat, and discuss sadness and loss. Often it's slow and sad but has hopeful and uplifting lyrics. The theory is that this is a new development, and I'm inclined to agree — it's hard to picture Ella Fitzgerald pulling this trick, (although not as hard to picture Sinatra); but Opera, Soul, Blues, R+B, modern Musicals, Rock 'n' Roll, not even Rap ever has real cognitive dissonance Yet modern Rock, and especially Alternative (call it Indie, whatever) does this a lot.
St. Robinson in His Cadillac Dream is the button song on the Counting Crows' 1999 album This Desert Life; a wonderful, flawed, expert rendition of Americana pop mixed with shoegaze. Yet it's a prime example: a sad, melancholy song put to poppy, heightened banjo, organ, and guitar. It leaves echoes of... uncertainty?
A wonderful example is The Cure, although I'm not sure that they began the trend — Plainsong is Robert Smith going off to write a secret love letter to his wife, shrouded in the timbre of the previously dark stuff The Cure had done earlier in the 80s. It became massively popular, an all-consuming emotional statement, as Pitchfork so puts it.
It sounds sad, but it's deeply happy. St. Robinson pulls the same trick. Most modern indie music pulls the same trick.
But why?
Sunday, March 3, 2013
This Bitter Earth — Dinah Washington / Max Richter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXHGoaEtmFM
A professional mashup by Robbie Robertson (of The Band) of Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight and Clyde Otis' This Bitter Earth as performed by Dinah Washington, produced as part of the soundtrack for Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, and played over the closing credits. A complex, melancholy, and very beautiful song, I think. Dinah Washington was a '50s and '60s American blues singer, best known for What a Difference a Day Makes. Max Richter is a modern British classical musician, nearly ambient in his style.
Rarely have I heard a more devastating piece of music — let alone a mash-up. Washington's original, done as a blues single with schmaltzy backing strings, evokes sadness, certainly, but in a cinematic way, a temporary cliffhanger, designed for suspense and drama. But somehow Richter's replacement strings add a finality to the song, I think — studied in the context of the film, Shutter Island, (especially as a commentary on its ending), it delivers not a temptation for melancholy, but a definitive statement — this is the way life is. It's engrossing and repulsive in its sadness, but it's such a completely immersive sound.
A professional mashup by Robbie Robertson (of The Band) of Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight and Clyde Otis' This Bitter Earth as performed by Dinah Washington, produced as part of the soundtrack for Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, and played over the closing credits. A complex, melancholy, and very beautiful song, I think. Dinah Washington was a '50s and '60s American blues singer, best known for What a Difference a Day Makes. Max Richter is a modern British classical musician, nearly ambient in his style.
Rarely have I heard a more devastating piece of music — let alone a mash-up. Washington's original, done as a blues single with schmaltzy backing strings, evokes sadness, certainly, but in a cinematic way, a temporary cliffhanger, designed for suspense and drama. But somehow Richter's replacement strings add a finality to the song, I think — studied in the context of the film, Shutter Island, (especially as a commentary on its ending), it delivers not a temptation for melancholy, but a definitive statement — this is the way life is. It's engrossing and repulsive in its sadness, but it's such a completely immersive sound.
Unwind Yourself — Marva Whitney
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym7IOodKeWI
I like rap. No, no apologies. I love rap. But normally I love rap for the poetry of its lyrics; I'm a fan of De La Soul and The Pharcyde and Das Racist and Aesop, for their lyricality. It's the largest modern source of poetry there is, and it's relevant and clever and unique.
I was listening to History of Rap, and they played the song Let Me Clear My Throat — DJ Kool. What caught me here weren't the lyrics, it was the sample. ?uestlove and The Roots were imitating (live) a sample used in the 1996 song (which was recorded live) which used a sample from The 900 Number — The 45 King, a mid-80s sampling artist, who took a sample from the instrumental behind Marva Whitney's Unwind Yourself, a 60s funk track.
And yet the original shone through, translated three times. It hadn't lost its rhythm, it hadn't lost its tonality, it hadn't been desecrated in any way. I wonder for how many other oft-sampled riffs the same is true.
I like rap. No, no apologies. I love rap. But normally I love rap for the poetry of its lyrics; I'm a fan of De La Soul and The Pharcyde and Das Racist and Aesop, for their lyricality. It's the largest modern source of poetry there is, and it's relevant and clever and unique.
I was listening to History of Rap, and they played the song Let Me Clear My Throat — DJ Kool. What caught me here weren't the lyrics, it was the sample. ?uestlove and The Roots were imitating (live) a sample used in the 1996 song (which was recorded live) which used a sample from The 900 Number — The 45 King, a mid-80s sampling artist, who took a sample from the instrumental behind Marva Whitney's Unwind Yourself, a 60s funk track.
And yet the original shone through, translated three times. It hadn't lost its rhythm, it hadn't lost its tonality, it hadn't been desecrated in any way. I wonder for how many other oft-sampled riffs the same is true.
Friday, March 1, 2013
Ashes to Ashes — David Bowie
I most strongly associate David Bowie with the parodic figure surrounding him. Like most figures who piqued (forgive me) before my birth, I don't so much know their fame as I know the effects of their fame. I never saw the Beatles' rise and fall; I was born into a world where they were canonized. And David Bowie had been canonized as this ridiculous cross-dressing Ziggy Stardust figure, wild and distinctive and flashy, the way I thought of most of the '80s.
But I was on shuffle and Ashes to Ashes came up. My first impression was, (distressingly), the song Better Than This by Keane. Wikipedia confirms it was a tribute, so. Yeah.
I want to understand Bowie as he was in his own era, and I'm not sure if it's possible. The Seinfeld Effect shows us that sometimes it isn't. I still very much like Ashes to Ashes; I like the synth-pop precursors, and I like the nursery-rhyme atmosphere. But it's not a clear song. It's not an anthem or a ballad. I'm not sure what it's saying.
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