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140 to the Twitterverse
From the home page
Ann Powers and Jacob Ganz | NPR.com
This week, alternative rock's bible, SPIN magazine, announced that it would eliminate the standard short album review from the magazine (and web site) in order to "reinvent the album review." 21 staffers and freelancers will assess 1,500 albums over the course of the year via single 140-character posts on Twitter. In an essay, the magazine's staff said the project would aim "to be an exhaustively definitive listener's guide and argument-starter for virtually every album or EP or mixtape that matters in 2012."
If SPIN's project sounds familiar, it might be because the writer heading the effort has pretty much already done it: In 2009, Christopher Weingarten reviewed 1,000 albums on his Twitter account, @1000TimesYes, managing to squeeze the artist's name, the album title, a number score and the sequential number of the review, plus a few words about the album itself, into those 140 characters. (On David Bazan's Curse Your Branches: "Losing your religion makes you prickly, punky, droll;" on the Avett Brothers' I And Love And You: "Things like 'love songs' and 'Southern rock' just how textbooks describe them.")
Now SPIN's senior editor, Weingarten has imported his format, and some philosophy, to the magazine. ...
Read more at NPR
New Orleans: Hall of fame, and time
From the home page
Tom Sancton | Vanity Fair
Just a single room with worn floorboards, some rough wooden benches, and threadbare cushions. Dust and time and the steamy air of New Orleans have given the place a golden patina, and the peeling walls are covered with smoky paintings of musicians now long gone. Over the two centuries since it was built, this 31-by-20-foot chamber has been a private drawing room, a tavern, a tinsmith’s shop, and an art gallery. For the past 50 years, however, it has been known by the name written in brass letters on two battered instrument cases that hang over the wrought-iron entrance gate: Preservation Hall.
Since its opening day, June 10, 1961, more than two million people have walked through that gate, including presidents, prime ministers, movie stars, and rock idols. Paul Newman and Steve McQueen filmed scenes at the hall. Singer Tom Waits, who recorded there last year, called it “sacred, hallowed ground,” and bluesman Charlie Musselwhite says it is “the holy grail of clubs.” Louis Armstrong, at his 70th-birthday tribute, in Newport in July 1970, said of Preservation Hall, “That’s where you’ll find all the greats.” …
Read more from Tom Sancton at Vanity Fair
Paul Motian dies at 80
From the home page
Ben Ratliff | The New York Times
Paul Motian, a drummer, bandleader, composer and one of the most influential jazz musicians of the last 50 years, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 80 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications of myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood and bone-marrow disorder, said his niece, Cindy McGuirl.
Mr. Motian was a link to groups of the past that informed what jazz sounds like today. He had been in the pianist Bill Evans’s great trio of the late 1950s and early 1960s and in Keith Jarrett’s so-called American quartet during the 1970s. But it was in the second half of his life that Mr. Motian found himself as a composer and bandleader, with work that could be counterintuitive or straightforward, runic or crowd-pleasing.
Stylish and alert — he wore sunglasses in the dark and laughed often and loudly — he worked steadily for decades, and for the last six years or so almost entirely in Manhattan. ...
Read more at The New York Times
Some Stones
From the home page
Geoff Boucher | Los Angeles Times
These are days of unfinished business for the Rolling Stones as they continue to mine their vault for "lost" material — a fascinating cache of unreleased tracks from the 1977-1978 "Some Girls" sessions arrives in stores next week — and gather their dark powers for their 50th anniversary next year and perhaps another tour.
Lead singer Mick Jagger chuckled when asked about the advice he would give himself as the band sizes up the golden anniversary and its possibilities.
"You can't be too impressed, I think," Jagger said. "You could wallow in nostalgia if you wanted, couldn't you? I don't think that'd be the right attitude. There are a lot of ideas and things to do, some of them sound interesting, some of them sound possible and some of them sound difficult and some sound outright schmaltzy, to be honest. I don't really know what's going to exactly happen — but I'm working on it." ...
Read more at the Los Angeles Times
L.A.: Heavy D dies at 44
From the home page
Alvin Blanco | The Root
Lou Reed + Metallica = WTF?
From the home page
Nick Ashford dies at 69
From the home page
Taxing nightlife in Seattle
From the home page
Cienna Madrid | The Stranger
Several nightclub owners in Ballard, Fremont, and Capitol Hill had every reason to believe their businesses were current on taxes. But within the last seven months, state auditors told at least three Seattle club owners that, in fact, they owed thousands of dollars in back taxes—up to $210,000 in one instance—due to a vaguely worded state code originally written to tax aerobics and jazzercise studios.
"This is the first time, in my experience, that they've applied this tax to music venues," says Seattle Office of Film + Music director James Keblas. "I'm worried about all our live music venues—even nonprofits—suddenly being audited and being told to pay or they'll be shut down."
The owner of one such bar, who asked to remain anonymous, concurs that unless the state waives the huge, unexpected bill, "I'll be shut down." And at this rate, the bar owner continues, the state is "going to shut down more businesses." ...
Read more at The Stranger
Wanted: Adventurous jazz in L.A.
From the home page
Chris Barton | Los Angeles Times
Living in Los Angeles, one of the early joys of summer is running down the schedule at the Hollywood Bowl. Probably the most famed venue on the West Coast, the Bowl's sprawling, woodsy confines and nearly 18,000-person capacity can transform mere concerts into events and bleacher-mates into neighbors during performances that can feel like a summer block party in a city that has its share of challenges in fostering a consistent feeling of community.
And while this year's popular music lineup predominantly booked by the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Johanna Rees is marked by its usual genre-hopping blend of crowd-pleasers (Sarah McLachlan, a "Totally '80s" pop smorgasbord) and compelling, fringe-adjacent bills such as an all-star salute to Serge Gainsbourg and an evening with anthemically glum indie rockers the National, the jazz segment of the Bowl's programming fails to carry the same kind of balance. ...
More in The Los Angeles Times
Bonnaroo: Late night with Lil Wayne
From the home page
James Montgomery | MTV News
MANCHESTER, Tennessee — Over its 10-year history, the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival has played host to all sorts of acts, but few of them — if any — ever took the stage to a prerecorded message from the New York State Department of Corrections (not even Phish).
Lil Wayne did just that on Friday night (or, more correctly, early Saturday morning), bounding onstage while the last strains of a DOC phone message — recorded after he was released from prison last November — faded from the rather formidable stacks of speakers that flanked him. And it was just one of the history-making moments during his headlining set. Bonnaroo has had hip-hop acts headline previously (Kanye West took a rather disastrous turn in 2008, and Jay-Z mainstaged without much incident last year), but they weren't Wayne. He's not a household name on par with 'Ye or Jigga, and there existed the very real question of whether his set would translate to the Bonnaroo crowd.
But when Wayne wrapped his set just before 3 a.m., that question had been answered. Not only did he go over like gangbusters, but he did it in gritty, sweat-drenched glory. ...
Read more of Montgomery’s report at MTV News
Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)
From the home page
Ben Sisario | The New York Times
Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in pieces like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him a notable voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early influence on hip-hop, died on Friday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 62 and had been a longtime resident of Harlem.
His death was announced in a Twitter message on Friday night by his British publisher, Jamie Byng, and confirmed early Saturday by an American representative of his record label, XL. The cause was not immediately known, although The Associated Press reported that he was admitted to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center after becoming ill upon his return from a trip to Europe.
Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had prefigured rap. “I don’t know if I can take the blame for it,” he said in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm. He preferred to call himself a “bluesologist,” drawing on the traditions of blues, jazz and Harlem Renaissance poetics. ...
Read more at The New York Times
Revisiting Robert Johnson
From the home page
Michael E. Ross | MSN.com
We know his name and his reputation more than we know him; he's more recognized by his songs as performed by the greats of the rock genre than he's known in his own right. In the generations since August 1938, when he died at age 27--after being poisoned by a romantic rival at a juke joint--his presence and talents as a guitarist, singer and songwriter have become mythic in the culture.
He's almost wraithlike, more and longer spirit than he was ever substance. He occupies a contradictory space in music history, both as a flesh-and-blood icon and an almost vaporous enigma. His name has a certain space around it, there's a reverence built into its usage. Yet that name is utterly, prosaically American. Look in your phone book. Wherever you live, there's almost certainly a Robert Johnson near you--just not the one Eric Clapton called "the most important blues musician who ever lived." …
Read more at msn.com
Lollapaloozanniversary!
From the home page
Chris Talbott | The Associated Press
Perry Farrell will celebrate the 20th anniversary of Lollapalooza with an eclectic lineup this summer in Chicago that knows no boundaries, from rock and rap and even pop, to dance music and experimental sounds that can't be described in a few words.
Tens of thousands of fans will feel the grass between their toes as they leisure under the trees in Grant Park, snacking on festival haute cuisine imagined by one of the Windy City's top chefs. There will be a place for kids to play, the chance to learn about socially conscious initiatives and the opportunity to live in harmony for three days.
This is definitely not the Lollapalooza Farrell founded in 1991, but he loves what it has become.
Read more at Salon.com
Rethinking music in Boston
From the home page
Luke O’Neil | Boston.com (The Boston Globe)
Making it in the world of music has always been an uncertain proposition for even the most talented of performers. Today it’s more confusing than ever before, particularly as the beleaguered industry continues to unfold in directions unforeseen even a few years ago. Prestigious institutions like the Berklee College of Music continue to graduate students well-versed in composition, theory, and performance, but who knows what sort of music industry they’ll enter into? (Or if there will even be one left to speak of?)
That’s one of the issues they hope to address at Rethink Music, says conference executive director and Berklee professor of music business and management Allen Bargfrede.
“At Berklee, part of our goal is to have a thriving industry so graduates have a place to survive and have real careers,’’ he says. ...
Read more at Boston.com
Libya: Times they are a-changin’, again
From the home page
Sebastian Abbot | The Associated Press (via The Huffington Post)
AJDABIYA, Libya -- The Libyan revolution has been tough on rebel fighter and guitarist Massoud Abu Assir's rock band. His bass player was captured by Moammar Gadhafi's forces, and his drummer is off fighting on the front line.
But those setbacks haven't stopped the 38-year-old amateur musician from composing songs in support of the revolution and performing them for rebels on the battlefield. He made an appearance Saturday on the outskirts of the front line city of Ajdabiya as fierce fighting raged about 25 miles (40 kilometers) away.
"My homeland will be strong. My homeland will be free. We will take our homeland up high," he sang in folksy Arabic verse, reminiscent of Bob Dylan. ...
Read more of Abbot’s report in The Huffington Post
Aretha, before the breakthrough
From the home page
David Maine, PopMatters
Conventional wisdom has it that Aretha Franklin never really hit her stride—her chart-topping, vocal-bursting, paradigm-shifting stride—until she left Columbia Records in the mid-1960s and signed on with Atlantic, where studio guru Ahmet Ertegun was responsible for recognizing a host of stars, including Aretha’s unlikely labelmates Led Zeppelin. This particular point of view is probably right. Aretha’s tenure at Atlantic produced a flurry of brilliant albums and songs, including such standards as “You Make me Feel Like a Natural Woman”, “Respect”, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”, “Chain of Fools”, “Son of a Preacher Man”, “A Rose in Spanish Harlem”, and dozens more.
However.
Aretha’s Columbia output isn’t going down without a fight. Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia gathers every cut from Aretha’s ten original Columbia albums, plus compilation album The Queen in Waiting, alternate takes and mono mixes (nearly 50 altogether) and a brief DVD of TV appearances. Ever wanted a comprehensive package of Aretha’s early years? Here it is. ...
Read the rest of David Maine’s review at PopMatters
The Northwest musicscene community
From the home page
Jonathan Zwickel, CityArts, March 2011
Community is a buzzword. It’s also a reality. As in: Northwest music is surpassing traditional notions of scene is in its new-age embrace of community.
Go ahead and laugh, but the distinction is more than semantic. To spell it out, scene connotes scenery, spectacle and spectator, producer and consumer, with a well-defined line of separation in between. Community connotes inclusion, participation and intention. In a community, everyone’s in it together.
And so people – post-collegiate, white, well groomed, sensitive, eager – come together around a Northwest brand of inclusive folk-pop music. They sing along to “Rivers and Roads” with the Head and the Heart as the band leaves behind its mics in a grand finale at Berbati’s Pan in Portland. They turn silent when Goldfinch sings an a cappella version of “Parting Glass,” an old Irish folk song, sharing a single mic onstage at Columbia City Theater. They sit entranced at Damien Jurado’s feet as he strums an acoustic guitar at a house show in Tacoma. Musicians draw in listeners with vocal harmonies that beg to be shared and heartbeat rhythms that distill naturally into hand claps and foot stomps. The music’s emotional force is equally palpable in a living room or at the Paramount Theatre. It hinges equally on craft and passion. It comes off the stage, literally, and into the audience, the performers part of the crowd, the crowd part of the performance. …
Hollywood and Nashville manufacture music for mass consumption in culture labs far from the Northwest; here, homegrown intimacy prevails. Savvy music lovers seek out tangible artists and art. They want their own presence to be acknowledged. But being present isn’t enough – community demands contribution, be it of time, money or talent. Once you pay the cover, everybody’s in the band. ...
Read more at CityArts
Radiohead: Two views
From the home page
Ann Powers, Los Angeles Times
Thom Yorke jerks around in the video for "Lotus Flower," the first single from Radiohead's just-released eighth studio album, "The King of Limbs," like someone only just discovering that the body's job is to move. ...
The singer's moves and his bowler hat recall the physical comedians of the silent film era, when onscreen human motion still seemed artificial, almost surreal. It's a typical Radiohead moment in some ways, a visceral expression of the struggle to stay fully human in a world that's been both enhanced and corrupted by technology. Yet it's new, too, mostly because of the music behind Yorke, and specifically the sound coming out of him: his falsetto has never sounded this relaxed before as he sings about the release of dancing, the joy of releasing energy, "just to see what gives." In some dark imagined disco, this song is getting people on the floor. Radiohead, it seems, has become a dance band.
Well, not entirely. ...
Read Ann Powers’ full review at the Los Angeles Times
From the home page
Ann Powers and Jacob Ganz | NPR.com
This week, alternative rock's bible, SPIN magazine, announced that it would eliminate the standard short album review from the magazine (and web site) in order to "reinvent the album review." 21 staffers and freelancers will assess 1,500 albums over the course of the year via single 140-character posts on Twitter. In an essay, the magazine's staff said the project would aim "to be an exhaustively definitive listener's guide and argument-starter for virtually every album or EP or mixtape that matters in 2012."
If SPIN's project sounds familiar, it might be because the writer heading the effort has pretty much already done it: In 2009, Christopher Weingarten reviewed 1,000 albums on his Twitter account, @1000TimesYes, managing to squeeze the artist's name, the album title, a number score and the sequential number of the review, plus a few words about the album itself, into those 140 characters. (On David Bazan's Curse Your Branches: "Losing your religion makes you prickly, punky, droll;" on the Avett Brothers' I And Love And You: "Things like 'love songs' and 'Southern rock' just how textbooks describe them.")
Now SPIN's senior editor, Weingarten has imported his format, and some philosophy, to the magazine. ...
Read more at NPR
New Orleans: Hall of fame, and time
From the home page
Tom Sancton | Vanity Fair
Just a single room with worn floorboards, some rough wooden benches, and threadbare cushions. Dust and time and the steamy air of New Orleans have given the place a golden patina, and the peeling walls are covered with smoky paintings of musicians now long gone. Over the two centuries since it was built, this 31-by-20-foot chamber has been a private drawing room, a tavern, a tinsmith’s shop, and an art gallery. For the past 50 years, however, it has been known by the name written in brass letters on two battered instrument cases that hang over the wrought-iron entrance gate: Preservation Hall.
Since its opening day, June 10, 1961, more than two million people have walked through that gate, including presidents, prime ministers, movie stars, and rock idols. Paul Newman and Steve McQueen filmed scenes at the hall. Singer Tom Waits, who recorded there last year, called it “sacred, hallowed ground,” and bluesman Charlie Musselwhite says it is “the holy grail of clubs.” Louis Armstrong, at his 70th-birthday tribute, in Newport in July 1970, said of Preservation Hall, “That’s where you’ll find all the greats.” …
Read more from Tom Sancton at Vanity Fair
Paul Motian dies at 80
From the home page
Ben Ratliff | The New York Times
Paul Motian, a drummer, bandleader, composer and one of the most influential jazz musicians of the last 50 years, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 80 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications of myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood and bone-marrow disorder, said his niece, Cindy McGuirl.
Mr. Motian was a link to groups of the past that informed what jazz sounds like today. He had been in the pianist Bill Evans’s great trio of the late 1950s and early 1960s and in Keith Jarrett’s so-called American quartet during the 1970s. But it was in the second half of his life that Mr. Motian found himself as a composer and bandleader, with work that could be counterintuitive or straightforward, runic or crowd-pleasing.
Stylish and alert — he wore sunglasses in the dark and laughed often and loudly — he worked steadily for decades, and for the last six years or so almost entirely in Manhattan. ...
Read more at The New York Times
Some Stones
From the home page
Geoff Boucher | Los Angeles Times
These are days of unfinished business for the Rolling Stones as they continue to mine their vault for "lost" material — a fascinating cache of unreleased tracks from the 1977-1978 "Some Girls" sessions arrives in stores next week — and gather their dark powers for their 50th anniversary next year and perhaps another tour.
Lead singer Mick Jagger chuckled when asked about the advice he would give himself as the band sizes up the golden anniversary and its possibilities.
"You can't be too impressed, I think," Jagger said. "You could wallow in nostalgia if you wanted, couldn't you? I don't think that'd be the right attitude. There are a lot of ideas and things to do, some of them sound interesting, some of them sound possible and some of them sound difficult and some sound outright schmaltzy, to be honest. I don't really know what's going to exactly happen — but I'm working on it." ...
Read more at the Los Angeles Times
L.A.: Heavy D dies at 44
From the home page
Alvin Blanco | The Root
Hip-hop music legend Heavy D passed away today, and his fans are surely mourning the beloved artist's untimely death. According to TMZ, the rapper collapsed in his Beverly Hills, Calif., home this morning after returning from a shopping trip. He was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and pronounced dead at 1 p.m.
Born Dwight Errington Myers, the Mount Vernon, N.Y., native came to rap prominence in the late 1980s and flourished in the early '90s thanks to a cadre of dance-floor-motivating and radio-friendly hits from his group, Heavy D & the Boyz. Known for being an agile dancer despite his size, he also became a hip-hop sex symbol and was affectionately dubbed the Overweight Lover. …
Lou Reed + Metallica = WTF?
From the home page
Sean Nelson | The Stranger
As anyone who's heard even the 30-second sample Warner Bros. had the gall to leak a few weeks ago can tell you, Lulu is a trial to endure. The bewildering, bewilderingly long (two discs, 87:04 minutes) collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica doesn't make sense on any level—aesthetic, commercial, historical, even satirical. It's one of those records people feel no need to listen to before declaring that it sucks more balls than a Lotto jackpot machine.
But simply to call the record poor is both too easy and weirdly beside the point. Its utter unlikeliness puts it well beyond the reach of critical judgment and into the realm of fascination, simply because it exists. The main thing about Lulu is that it is fucking baffling, root and branch. Which, at the risk of being obvious, almost never happens in pop culture anymore. You think of the bolder moves executed by big-name musical artists in the last couple-few decades—Kid A? Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? Chinese Democracy? Achtung Baby? Lil Wayne's Rebirth? Can any even touch the hem of Lulu's garment for sheer blunt audacity? ...
Read more at The Stranger
As anyone who's heard even the 30-second sample Warner Bros. had the gall to leak a few weeks ago can tell you, Lulu is a trial to endure. The bewildering, bewilderingly long (two discs, 87:04 minutes) collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica doesn't make sense on any level—aesthetic, commercial, historical, even satirical. It's one of those records people feel no need to listen to before declaring that it sucks more balls than a Lotto jackpot machine.
But simply to call the record poor is both too easy and weirdly beside the point. Its utter unlikeliness puts it well beyond the reach of critical judgment and into the realm of fascination, simply because it exists. The main thing about Lulu is that it is fucking baffling, root and branch. Which, at the risk of being obvious, almost never happens in pop culture anymore. You think of the bolder moves executed by big-name musical artists in the last couple-few decades—Kid A? Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? Chinese Democracy? Achtung Baby? Lil Wayne's Rebirth? Can any even touch the hem of Lulu's garment for sheer blunt audacity? ...
Read more at The Stranger
Nick Ashford dies at 69
From the home page
Steve Jones | USA Today
Nick Ashford, who along with wife Valerie Simpson helped set the gold standard for R&B duets, both as songwriters and performers, died of throat cancer Monday in a New York hospital. He was 69.
Ashford & Simpson — you can't think of one without the other — penned and produced almost all of the '60s hits for Motown's Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, including "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "You're All I Need to Get By," "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" and "Your Precious Love." They also wrote hits for Chuck Jackson, The Shirelles, Maxine Brown and the Fifth Dimension.
Ray Charles' 1966 No. 1 R&B hit "Let's Go Get Stoned" was their breakthrough record. They would later write and produce Diana Ross' biggest solo hits, including her signature "Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)." They also wrote Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman," which was later recorded by Whitney Houston. ...
Read more at USA Today
Nick Ashford, who along with wife Valerie Simpson helped set the gold standard for R&B duets, both as songwriters and performers, died of throat cancer Monday in a New York hospital. He was 69.
Ashford & Simpson — you can't think of one without the other — penned and produced almost all of the '60s hits for Motown's Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, including "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "You're All I Need to Get By," "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" and "Your Precious Love." They also wrote hits for Chuck Jackson, The Shirelles, Maxine Brown and the Fifth Dimension.
Ray Charles' 1966 No. 1 R&B hit "Let's Go Get Stoned" was their breakthrough record. They would later write and produce Diana Ross' biggest solo hits, including her signature "Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)." They also wrote Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman," which was later recorded by Whitney Houston. ...
Read more at USA Today
Taxing nightlife in Seattle
From the home page
Cienna Madrid | The Stranger
Several nightclub owners in Ballard, Fremont, and Capitol Hill had every reason to believe their businesses were current on taxes. But within the last seven months, state auditors told at least three Seattle club owners that, in fact, they owed thousands of dollars in back taxes—up to $210,000 in one instance—due to a vaguely worded state code originally written to tax aerobics and jazzercise studios.
"This is the first time, in my experience, that they've applied this tax to music venues," says Seattle Office of Film + Music director James Keblas. "I'm worried about all our live music venues—even nonprofits—suddenly being audited and being told to pay or they'll be shut down."
The owner of one such bar, who asked to remain anonymous, concurs that unless the state waives the huge, unexpected bill, "I'll be shut down." And at this rate, the bar owner continues, the state is "going to shut down more businesses." ...
Read more at The Stranger
Wanted: Adventurous jazz in L.A.
From the home page
Chris Barton | Los Angeles Times
Living in Los Angeles, one of the early joys of summer is running down the schedule at the Hollywood Bowl. Probably the most famed venue on the West Coast, the Bowl's sprawling, woodsy confines and nearly 18,000-person capacity can transform mere concerts into events and bleacher-mates into neighbors during performances that can feel like a summer block party in a city that has its share of challenges in fostering a consistent feeling of community.
And while this year's popular music lineup predominantly booked by the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Johanna Rees is marked by its usual genre-hopping blend of crowd-pleasers (Sarah McLachlan, a "Totally '80s" pop smorgasbord) and compelling, fringe-adjacent bills such as an all-star salute to Serge Gainsbourg and an evening with anthemically glum indie rockers the National, the jazz segment of the Bowl's programming fails to carry the same kind of balance. ...
More in The Los Angeles Times
Bonnaroo: Late night with Lil Wayne
From the home page
James Montgomery | MTV News
MANCHESTER, Tennessee — Over its 10-year history, the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival has played host to all sorts of acts, but few of them — if any — ever took the stage to a prerecorded message from the New York State Department of Corrections (not even Phish).
Lil Wayne did just that on Friday night (or, more correctly, early Saturday morning), bounding onstage while the last strains of a DOC phone message — recorded after he was released from prison last November — faded from the rather formidable stacks of speakers that flanked him. And it was just one of the history-making moments during his headlining set. Bonnaroo has had hip-hop acts headline previously (Kanye West took a rather disastrous turn in 2008, and Jay-Z mainstaged without much incident last year), but they weren't Wayne. He's not a household name on par with 'Ye or Jigga, and there existed the very real question of whether his set would translate to the Bonnaroo crowd.
But when Wayne wrapped his set just before 3 a.m., that question had been answered. Not only did he go over like gangbusters, but he did it in gritty, sweat-drenched glory. ...
Read more of Montgomery’s report at MTV News
Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)
From the home page
Ben Sisario | The New York Times
Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in pieces like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him a notable voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early influence on hip-hop, died on Friday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 62 and had been a longtime resident of Harlem.
His death was announced in a Twitter message on Friday night by his British publisher, Jamie Byng, and confirmed early Saturday by an American representative of his record label, XL. The cause was not immediately known, although The Associated Press reported that he was admitted to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center after becoming ill upon his return from a trip to Europe.
Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had prefigured rap. “I don’t know if I can take the blame for it,” he said in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm. He preferred to call himself a “bluesologist,” drawing on the traditions of blues, jazz and Harlem Renaissance poetics. ...
Read more at The New York Times
Revisiting Robert Johnson
From the home page
Michael E. Ross | MSN.com
We know his name and his reputation more than we know him; he's more recognized by his songs as performed by the greats of the rock genre than he's known in his own right. In the generations since August 1938, when he died at age 27--after being poisoned by a romantic rival at a juke joint--his presence and talents as a guitarist, singer and songwriter have become mythic in the culture.
He's almost wraithlike, more and longer spirit than he was ever substance. He occupies a contradictory space in music history, both as a flesh-and-blood icon and an almost vaporous enigma. His name has a certain space around it, there's a reverence built into its usage. Yet that name is utterly, prosaically American. Look in your phone book. Wherever you live, there's almost certainly a Robert Johnson near you--just not the one Eric Clapton called "the most important blues musician who ever lived." …
Read more at msn.com
Lollapaloozanniversary!
From the home page
Chris Talbott | The Associated Press
Perry Farrell will celebrate the 20th anniversary of Lollapalooza with an eclectic lineup this summer in Chicago that knows no boundaries, from rock and rap and even pop, to dance music and experimental sounds that can't be described in a few words.
Tens of thousands of fans will feel the grass between their toes as they leisure under the trees in Grant Park, snacking on festival haute cuisine imagined by one of the Windy City's top chefs. There will be a place for kids to play, the chance to learn about socially conscious initiatives and the opportunity to live in harmony for three days.
This is definitely not the Lollapalooza Farrell founded in 1991, but he loves what it has become.
Read more at Salon.com
Rethinking music in Boston
From the home page
Luke O’Neil | Boston.com (The Boston Globe)
Making it in the world of music has always been an uncertain proposition for even the most talented of performers. Today it’s more confusing than ever before, particularly as the beleaguered industry continues to unfold in directions unforeseen even a few years ago. Prestigious institutions like the Berklee College of Music continue to graduate students well-versed in composition, theory, and performance, but who knows what sort of music industry they’ll enter into? (Or if there will even be one left to speak of?)
That’s one of the issues they hope to address at Rethink Music, says conference executive director and Berklee professor of music business and management Allen Bargfrede.
“At Berklee, part of our goal is to have a thriving industry so graduates have a place to survive and have real careers,’’ he says. ...
Read more at Boston.com
Libya: Times they are a-changin’, again
From the home page
Sebastian Abbot | The Associated Press (via The Huffington Post)
AJDABIYA, Libya -- The Libyan revolution has been tough on rebel fighter and guitarist Massoud Abu Assir's rock band. His bass player was captured by Moammar Gadhafi's forces, and his drummer is off fighting on the front line.
But those setbacks haven't stopped the 38-year-old amateur musician from composing songs in support of the revolution and performing them for rebels on the battlefield. He made an appearance Saturday on the outskirts of the front line city of Ajdabiya as fierce fighting raged about 25 miles (40 kilometers) away.
"My homeland will be strong. My homeland will be free. We will take our homeland up high," he sang in folksy Arabic verse, reminiscent of Bob Dylan. ...
Read more of Abbot’s report in The Huffington Post
Aretha, before the breakthrough
From the home page
David Maine, PopMatters
Conventional wisdom has it that Aretha Franklin never really hit her stride—her chart-topping, vocal-bursting, paradigm-shifting stride—until she left Columbia Records in the mid-1960s and signed on with Atlantic, where studio guru Ahmet Ertegun was responsible for recognizing a host of stars, including Aretha’s unlikely labelmates Led Zeppelin. This particular point of view is probably right. Aretha’s tenure at Atlantic produced a flurry of brilliant albums and songs, including such standards as “You Make me Feel Like a Natural Woman”, “Respect”, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”, “Chain of Fools”, “Son of a Preacher Man”, “A Rose in Spanish Harlem”, and dozens more.
However.
Aretha’s Columbia output isn’t going down without a fight. Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia gathers every cut from Aretha’s ten original Columbia albums, plus compilation album The Queen in Waiting, alternate takes and mono mixes (nearly 50 altogether) and a brief DVD of TV appearances. Ever wanted a comprehensive package of Aretha’s early years? Here it is. ...
Read the rest of David Maine’s review at PopMatters
The Northwest music
From the home page
Jonathan Zwickel, CityArts, March 2011
Community is a buzzword. It’s also a reality. As in: Northwest music is surpassing traditional notions of scene is in its new-age embrace of community.
Go ahead and laugh, but the distinction is more than semantic. To spell it out, scene connotes scenery, spectacle and spectator, producer and consumer, with a well-defined line of separation in between. Community connotes inclusion, participation and intention. In a community, everyone’s in it together.
And so people – post-collegiate, white, well groomed, sensitive, eager – come together around a Northwest brand of inclusive folk-pop music. They sing along to “Rivers and Roads” with the Head and the Heart as the band leaves behind its mics in a grand finale at Berbati’s Pan in Portland. They turn silent when Goldfinch sings an a cappella version of “Parting Glass,” an old Irish folk song, sharing a single mic onstage at Columbia City Theater. They sit entranced at Damien Jurado’s feet as he strums an acoustic guitar at a house show in Tacoma. Musicians draw in listeners with vocal harmonies that beg to be shared and heartbeat rhythms that distill naturally into hand claps and foot stomps. The music’s emotional force is equally palpable in a living room or at the Paramount Theatre. It hinges equally on craft and passion. It comes off the stage, literally, and into the audience, the performers part of the crowd, the crowd part of the performance. …
Hollywood and Nashville manufacture music for mass consumption in culture labs far from the Northwest; here, homegrown intimacy prevails. Savvy music lovers seek out tangible artists and art. They want their own presence to be acknowledged. But being present isn’t enough – community demands contribution, be it of time, money or talent. Once you pay the cover, everybody’s in the band. ...
Read more at CityArts
From the home page
Ann Powers, Los Angeles Times
Thom Yorke jerks around in the video for "Lotus Flower," the first single from Radiohead's just-released eighth studio album, "The King of Limbs," like someone only just discovering that the body's job is to move. ...
The singer's moves and his bowler hat recall the physical comedians of the silent film era, when onscreen human motion still seemed artificial, almost surreal. It's a typical Radiohead moment in some ways, a visceral expression of the struggle to stay fully human in a world that's been both enhanced and corrupted by technology. Yet it's new, too, mostly because of the music behind Yorke, and specifically the sound coming out of him: his falsetto has never sounded this relaxed before as he sings about the release of dancing, the joy of releasing energy, "just to see what gives." In some dark imagined disco, this song is getting people on the floor. Radiohead, it seems, has become a dance band.
Well, not entirely. ...
Read Ann Powers’ full review at the Los Angeles Times
Arnold Pan, PopMatters
... there’s nothing particularly easy or user-friendly about The King of Limbs: The new release continues to play out the millennial drama between human imagination and artificial intelligence that has driven Radiohead since at least OK Computer, though perhaps more on a compositional level than as a conceptual thematic on this occasion. Yet despite the dark, vacuum-sealed soundscapes that producer Nigel Godrich creates for Radiohead’s alternate universe, The King of Limbs, on balance, finds this band as optimistic as it can be about the prospects of forging and strengthening human connections ...
Read Arnold Pan’s full review at PopMatters
Arcade Fire tops Grammys
From the home page
Arcade Fire, the seven-member Canadian group that wowed listeners and critics last year with its emotionally riveting album The Suburbs, took the top Grammy for 2011, with that collection winning honors for Album of the Year.
Rolling Stone has a full list of the winners, and everything else. Of course.
Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times
Pop provocateurs Lady Gaga and Eminem may have brought more compelling career stories to the 53rd annual Grammy Awards, but on a shocking night the big trophies went home Sunday with Southern trio Lady Antebellum and Montreal indie-rock band Arcade Fire.
Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now," a harmony hit of closing-time yearning, was named record and song of the year (the former is for best overall track; the latter is specifically for song writing), while the best album honors went to Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, the third studio album from the seven-member band led by the married couple Win Butler and Régine Chassagne.
A dizzying string of envelope surprises at Staples Center began with perhaps the biggest shock of all: Esperanza Spalding, the 26-year-old jazz bassist and vocalist from Portland, Ore., was named best new artist, beating out far more famous nominees, among them kid-pop sensation Justin Bieber and rapper-singer Drake.
Michael E. Ross, Culcha
By the time the 53rd annual Grammy Awards was over last night, the Staples Center in Los Angeles had become a multipurpose room like its builders never intended. It was a mosh pit for Janelle Monae, the site of a sexy indoor bonfire for Rihanna and Drake, a suburban bicycle park for Arcade Fire, a street battleground for Muse and a room Mick Jagger worked like an intimate club.
But from the over-the-top spectacle of fashion gone nuts to the spontaneous onstage happenings to the real source of surprise — the winners nobody saw coming — the location of the 2011 Grammys was where some faith was restored in the power of the unexpected. For the sheer joy in some of its performances, and the way the evening’s big winners reflected the ability of the star-maker machinery to break from script, this year’s Grammys was one of the better ones in recent years.
You want spectacle? Lady Gaga did her part, but there was no deli-ready wardrobe this year. So 2010, you know. Gaga appeared from a giant translucent egg carried Cleopatra-style by courtiers onstage. Emerging adorned in a yellow latex number, she sang “Born This Way,” the title track from her new album, due to drop soon.
Channeling George Clinton and 1970’s-era Elton John, Cee-Lo Green played his Grammy-nominated “F*** You” dressed in red fur and feather boas and sporting a sequined flapper headdress — in all, looking like the bastard child of Liberace and Big Bird on steroids. And surrounded by puppets, no less. His partner in song: Gwyneth Paltrow, doing her best to, well, do her best.
And in his tribute to the late Solomon Burke, Mick Jagger showed why he still commands the spotlight. Pushing 68, Jagger sprinted around the stage, his signature voice still versatile in its range. He remains ever the showman. So Mick … about that tour …
◊ ◊ ◊
But the winners of the prizes that are maybe the most important — Best New Artist and Album of the Year — were the big surprises last night. Justin Bieber (who worked it on the broadcast with Usher and Jayden Smith) was supposed to be coronated Best New Artist. It was all but done. (Buzzer sound here.) Not to be. Esperanza Spalding, the phenomenal Portland singer and jazz bass player, took it instead.
When it was said and done, the Album of the Year honors looked to be a two-way battle between Lady Gaga (whose The Fame Monster, a catchy exploration of the downside of fame, is the latest from the electropop-cultural juggernaut) and Eminem, whose emotionally raw, autobiographical Recovery album garnered him 10 nominations.
When the Arcade Fire won, the seven-piece unit from Montreal was huddled backstage, completely unaware. Like most of the rest of us. The group, a long-time indie favorite, gains major crossover exposure with a Grammy for The Suburbs. The days of Arcade Who are definitely over.
And maybe, for now, the days of more such surprises will be back at the Grammys on a regular basis. Last night was a validation of how heart can prevail over marketing campaigns … how sometimes the underdog can chase the smart money out of the building.
Commenters on HuffPost’s live stream agreed, and said as much about Arcade Fire’s win:
Shawn Hugus: “A rare moment where the Grammy Awards don't pick the ancient relic or the disposable product and pick an actual band in their peak.”
Toomuchpr: “I woke up on New Year's Day 2011 and played the Suburbs at very high volume. I played it back to back about 10 times when I got it... I'm still really surprised Arcade Fire won the Grammys because they have picked really boring albums of the year …”
And the band itself, reacting to the win on Twitter, was suitably restrained: “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD. Thank you EVERYONE.”
You want passion? There it is, after the fact no less than before. “When it came right down to it Sunday night,” the Calgary Herald reported, “passion trumped spectacle every time.”
Read more at The Washington Post
The White Stripes pack it in
From the home page
Nekesa Mumbi Moody, Associated Press
NEW YORK — The White Stripes are done.
The groundbreaking rock duo, which helped revive and reshape a stale rock scene with their scorching, guitar-fueled, blues-tinged songs, announced Wednesday they are splitting up after more than a decade and six albums together.
Read more at The Huffington Post
Teena Marie, godmother of hip-hop
From the home page
Paul Devlin, The Root
I don't know what you do, but like Nas in "Book of Rhymes" (at 2:30 in), I pump some Rick James with that Teena Marie. The R&B legend passed away on Sunday at age 54, leaving one of the great vocal legacies in music, in a career that spanned nearly 40 years. From her world-famous and somehow incredibly awesome 1981 rap (at 3:47 in -- complete with pre-Nicki Minaj inflections!) to her catchy 2004 single (with Cash Money Records, complete with contextualizing intro by Birdman/Baby), Teena's career was inextricably intertwined with hip-hop. She was a hip lady who embraced the music that embraced her. Important and fascinating, her rap celebrates a white person's unabashed and unambiguous affection for black culture -- and black audiences returned the love for nearly 30 years.
Read more at The Root
Billy Taylor dies at 89
From the home page
Peter Keepnews, The New York Times
Billy Taylor, a pianist and composer who was also an eloquent spokesman and advocate for jazz as well as a familiar presence for many years on television and radio, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 89 and lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, Kim Taylor-Thompson.
Dr. Taylor, as he preferred to be called (he earned a doctorate in music education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975), was a living refutation of the stereotype of jazz musicians as unschooled, unsophisticated and inarticulate, an image that was prevalent when he began his career in the 1940s, and that he did as much as any other musician to erase.
Read more at The New York Times
McCartney plays the Apollo!?
From the home page
Jim Fusilli, The Wall Street Journal
There aren’t many veritable concert halls that Paul McCartney hasn’t played in his 53-year career, but last night in New York he made his first appearance at the Harlem landmark, the Apollo Theater. McCartney, now 68 years old, and his backing quartet delivered a nearly two-hour show that reinforced the idea that though he’s among the most familiar rock performers, he’s still capable of surprise. …
Though he is a supremely accomplished musician whose body of work is unsurpassed by any of his peers or musical descendants, he remained the charming, thoroughly approachable pop star, his ready smile and unwavering confidence guiding him and his audience through triumph and a mistake or two.
Read more at The Journal
Reports: Aretha has pancreatic cancer
From the home page
Various reports
New York Daily News: Following news of Aretha Franklin's cancer diagnosis, the legendary singer's cousin said she is "doing better than doctors expected" and will be released from the hospital this weekend.
Brenda Corbett said Franklin "has a long life in front of her and will be back in concert, on stage, late spring or early summer," according to the Detroit Free Press.
Reverend Jesse Jackson has visited the Detroit native in the hospital several times since her surgery, and told the Detroit News that she is "recovering, and her spirits are high. She's doing very well. She's very prayerful."
Detroit Free Press: Amid grim reports and with details hard to come by, at least one thing about Aretha Franklin was clear: The world is worried about her.
Read more at the Free Press
Billboard gets social on ya
From the home page
Billboard.biz
Billboard announced today (Dec. 2) that it is expanding its suite of chart offerings to include a new chart, the Social 50, presented by ZYNC from American Express, which ranks the most active artists on the world's leading social networking sites.
Rihanna becomes the 'only girl in the world' to top the Social 50 chart in its debut week, followed by Justin Bieber, Eminem, Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj, respectively, to round out the top five. …
Serving as a complement to Billboard's existing weekly rankings, the Social 50 chart will tally artists' popularity using a formula blending weekly additions of friends/fans/followers along with weekly artist page views and weekly song plays on MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and iLike. Data from these sites is gathered and provided to Billboard by social music tracking service Next Big Sound. …
"The Social 50 provides a weekly snapshot of the artists that music fans engage with the most in the social arena, which in today's world is a significant validation of their investment in an act," says Billboard chart director, Silvio Pietroluongo.
The full chart’s available at Billboard.com
Los Angeles: Eminem paces Grammy field
From the home page
Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times
The beleaguered record industry couldn’t have been happier about the return to the spotlight in 2010 of rapper Eminem, the biggest-selling artist of the new millennium, and heaped upon him a field-leading 10 Grammy Award nominations for his “Recovery” album, including nods in all three top categories of album, record and song of the year.
Although it was widely expected that Eminem would do well in this year’s Grammy competition, Hawaiian-born producer-singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Bruno Mars caught many by surprise as runner-up to Eminem with seven nominations, announced Wednesday in conjunction with a televised Grammy nomination concert from the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles. …
The other three nominees for record of the year, which honors performance, production and engineering, are “Love the Way You Lie” from Eminem and Rihanna; Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ love letter to the Big Apple, “Empire State of Mind”; and country trio Lady Antebellum’s romantically desperate closing-time phone call, “Need You Now,” which also earned the country trio an album of the year nomination.
Eminem and Lady A are vying in the album category with Lady Gaga’s “The Fame Monster,” Katy Perry’s frothy “Teenage Dream” and the latest critically acclaimed effort from Canadian indie rock group Arcade Fire, “The Suburbs.” …
Read the full story in The Envelope
Chappo:
The interview
From the home page
Culcha: I'm admittedly a little late to the party, since the EP and "Come Home" have been out for a while. But I get a sense that, maybe because of the iPod deal, or because "Come Home" is so thoroughly infectious, things are just starting to lift up for you in the public eye. I'm not the only one that can't get that song out of his head right now. What's your sense of where Chappo is on its creative glide path?
Chappo: You're not late to the party at all! It's just getting started! We feel like the path has been steadily picking up steam, and we're at a cool place on it right now. This year has been kind of a blur. We finished the Plastique Universe EP, recording it all on shitty equipment in our kitchen, we started touring, and also (self) released the EP back in New York. The tours went great, and we've been adding new music to our live shows. We have a bunch of new music, which will be kind of a continuation of the sci-fi bandit story, that we're getting ready to record soon so it's all kind of great timing.
What's the thumbnail history of the group, and how does Brooklyn figure in its genesis?
Chappo: Weirdly enough, we were a craigslist success story. If they start doing big advertising, we'd love to be spokesmen for them. Chris responded to Alex's ad: seeking a roommate with an interest in an interdimensional but close-quartered lifestyle, with rambunctious tendencies. We lived in an East Village apartment building where Allen Ginsberg used to live. We both were playing with different bands at that time, but it didn't take long for us to start working on music together. Then we became roommates again when Alex moved out to Chris' new house in Brooklyn. Chris' roommate [Zac Colwell, the EP’s producer] became our drummer and produced the album with us. We just did that all summer and into the fall. It was great. We also went out to all of Brooklyn's 'hottest' beaches for "Beach Sundays."
What makes "Come Home" work so well as a song? I've read some tweets at your Web site and elsewhere, from office workers who said it was indispensable to them this past summer, like a soundtrack for the workplace. Other people say it's "hooky." But it still works.
That's a good question. To us, it feels like a fast, fun engine that accelerates and just doesn't stop, while also maintaining some sort of innocence to it. It's nice that it made an impression on other people too. At the time, we got a lot of comments that it was really "summery," which is cool. Hopefully people will still like it in the winter, too, and play it at tons of holiday office parties.
You've seen the write-ups, of course, with some calling Chappo psychedelic garage rock. Somebody said it's a cross between the Rolling Stones and the Flaming Lips. I've seen that comparison more than once. It's a given those writers take it seriously. Do you?
We love those bands; it's pretty flattering considering how early we are in our output. Hopefully we can be at it for a long time, and different sides of our music will come out as well, as they have for those bands. Maybe on the next album we'll want to combine Talking Heads and Kenny Rogers or something. We have some work to do if we're going to make it that long and be in as good shape as Mick Jagger when we're pushing 70.
Who inspired your sound, what are your touchstones musically?
Since we're from Baton Rouge (Alex) & Seattle (Chris), there was plenty of different stuff that we grew up around (Dr. John and Galactic vs. Nirvana & Quincy Jones). We definitely connected over a lot of different kinds of music. Albums that resonated for Alex when he was a kid: Stereo Pathetic Soul Manure by Beck; Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers by the Stones; Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star by Sonic Youth; tons of Bowie and Dylan records. Also Violent Femmes, Pixies, Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Fleetwood Mac. Also a bunch of hip hop: Jurassic 5, Aesop Rock, Biggie, 2pac. For Chris: a lot of his parents' folk albums, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Harry Nilsson. Also a lot of classical music and jazz that he got into as a kid. When we first became roommates, it was evident that we both listened to a lot of different things from each other, but were both interested in new things too. When we started recording the EP, we definitely were into a lot of the newer dancey rock music.
Without arousing the ire of the lawyers at Apple, what was the process like when they picked your song for the iPod Touch G4 campaign?
They got in touch with us right after we had gotten back from our West Coast tour. We got an email, and initially figured it was a joke or spam. But immediately after responding, they called us. Chris was in the shower at the time. Things actually moved pretty quickly. Steve Jobs gets stuff done, ya know?
Apparently so. How have things changed A.A. (After Apple)? What's next for Chappo? Is another tour in the offing?
The fact that it's now playing all over the world is really cool, in that people that would never have a chance to stumble onto our music normally, potentially could now. Without a label at this point, that's a huge thing for us. As it's still a pretty small operation, we're overwhelmed with all the new people finding out about the band and taking interest. We're looking at recording really soon. Touring, for sure!! We're looking forward to getting out again, probably early in the new year after recording. Hopefully we can get to some far reaching places of the globe with warm beaches. A longer- term goal is also to be the first band in space. Literally. Pass it on if you know anyone at NASA.
Seattle: Change afoot at Bumbershoot?
From the home page
Chris Kornelis, Seattle Weekly
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Last week, One Reel--the umbrella non-profit that runs Bumbershoot--laid off eight of their 14 festival staffers, folks who run the Family Fourth and Bumbershoot. Executive director Jon Stone says the primary factors included low sponsorship and attendance at Bumbershoot, the latter of which he blames primarily on the economy and weather.
Stone says attendance was in the neighborhood of 103,000 over three days, down from about 150,000 the festival averaged a decade ago when artist fees and ticket prices were lower and the festival was a four-day event. ...
"Now we really have that mandate in front of us to find something that works," he says. "What we did this year doesn't really work."
Read more at Seattle Weekly
Jimi's new return
From the home page
Michael E. Ross, theGrio
So much of the musical legacy of Jimi Hendrix rests on memory of the legendary guitarist as the fluid, inventive musical maverick who burst on the scene in 1967 — almost single-handedly defining the creative extravagance of the Summer of Love —or the legend who exited that scene three years later, dying in London on Sept. 18, 1970, at the age of 27.
This even-numbered anniversary year of his passing has already seen a flurry of previously unreleased music and images, and there’s more to come before year’s end, other opportunities to discover the Hendrix that existed before the world discovered him, the lean Seattle kid struggling to survive the critical formative years that helped make him what he would become, before his talents seemed to explode on the world fully formed.
“People think that he just ... appeared one day,” Janie Hendrix — Jimi’s stepsister, and president/CEO of Experience Hendrix LLC, the Hendrix family company — said in 2003. “But he also had a history and a life, from birth to childhood to adolescence to adulthood.” That year the Experience Music Project, a Seattle museum, joined forces with Experience Hendrix on an exhibition of Hendrix’s early life and childhood.
Forty years after Hendrix’s death, fans and scholars alike are again re-examining his music, his persistent impact on popular culture, and his status as a trailblazer whose impact on rock culture sought to transcend the confines of racial identity. ...
Read the rest at theGrio
Rockin’ for Pakistan
From the home page
BBC News
Pakistani-born rock star Salman Ahmad is penning a new song to raise funds for the country's flood disaster.
Khwab - the Urdu word for dream - is due to be ready in a couple of weeks' time and Ahmad hopes to record it with Pakistani and Western artists.
He told the BBC it was important to let young Pakistanis know the world cared for them in their hour of need. ...
Speaking from New York, he told BBC World Service that he realised that people in the West were hesitant about helping, asking why they should care for a country associated with extremism.
"[But] there are 100 million-plus young people under the age of 25 who can go two possible ways into the future," he said.
"They can follow their dreams or they can give in to the extremists and the Taliban who want them to go blow themselves up.
"If they feel that the world cares for them, you may change the destiny of Pakistan. Not only is it humane but it is urgent self-interest - this is a moment to win hearts and minds."
Read more at BBC News
Exile on el Centro
From the home page
Daniel Hernandez, Los Angeles Times
It's like the Beatles being banned from returning to Liverpool, the Red Hot Chili Peppers being yanked from stages in Los Angeles, or Jay-Z's music stopped in a source of his inspiration, New York. Since last November, Los Tucanes de Tijuana, one of the most recognizable bands in the Mexican norteño regional genre, are banned from playing in their hometown and namesake, the border city of Tijuana.
The ban is a result of a 2008 concert in which the band's lead singer sent his regards from the stage to the city's most notorious and wanted men, "El Teo and his compadre, El Muletas." The city's get-tough police chief, Julian Leyzaola, was outraged.
Leyzaola pulled the plug on shows by Los Tucanes as they prepared to perform at the city's storied Agua Caliente racetrack in November. Leyzaola said the band's polka-driven narcocorrido songs glorify drug lords and their exploits and are therefore inappropriate to play in a city that has suffered soaring drug-related violence in recent years. The band, with millions of record sales and a fan base as broad as the international border, hasn't been allowed to play in Tijuana since. ...
Read more in the Los Angeles Times
Abbey Lincoln: Music as political act
From the home page
Nate Chinen, The New York Times
Abbey Lincoln, a singer whose dramatic vocal command and tersely poetic songs made her a singular figure in jazz, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side.
Her death was announced by her brother David Wooldridge.
Ms. Lincoln’s career encompassed outspoken civil rights advocacy in the 1960s and fearless introspection in more recent years, and for a time in the 1960s she acted in films, including one with Sidney Poitier.
Long recognized as one of jazz’s most arresting and uncompromising singers, Ms. Lincoln gained similar stature as a songwriter only over the last two decades. Her songs, rich in metaphor and philosophical reflection, provide the substance of “Abbey Sings Abbey,” an album released on Verve in 2007. As a body of work, the songs formed the basis of a three-concert retrospective presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2002.
Her singing style was unique, a combined result of bold projection and expressive restraint. Because of her ability to inhabit the emotional dimensions of a song, she was often likened to Billie Holiday, her chief influence. But Ms. Lincoln had a deeper register and a darker tone, and her way with phrasing was more declarative. ...
Read more at The New York Times
Fighting the powers, 20 years on
From the home page
Sean McCarthy, PopMatters
... Politically-leaning albums routinely age poorly. And in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, Blue Sky Mining sounded a bit dated. But 2010 has proven that just because an album sounds dated five years ago, doesn’t mean it won’t resonate today. .... Of course, before the BP oil leak of this year, one of the top stories was the mining disaster in West Virginia that claimed 29 miners. ...
Issue-wise, few bands can top Midnight Oil in terms of environmental credibility. Long before it was the adopted cause for many musicians, the Oils were deeply involved in environmental and Aborigine rights. The environmental-themed songs on Blue Sky Mining—namely “River Runs Red” and “Antarctica”—pack just as much of a wallop now as they did 20 years ago. ...
Fear of a Black Planet was Public Enemy’s amazing follow-up to its 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Upon its release, talk quickly went from “this is the best album of the year” to “this is the best album of the decade”. And like all great albums, it scared the shit out of the mainstream. ...
So much was addressed, from the racism in Bensonhurst to one’s own struggle with racial identity. And while so much was being said about the lyrical content, the musical impact was just as shattering. …
Blue Sky Mining and Fear of a Black Planet came out when I was a sophomore in high school. These two albums (along with Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love) were practically melted into my Walkman and made sense of a world that often seemed chaotic on its best days and apocalyptic at its worst. Little did I know that 20 years down the road, both albums would do a better job summing up a summer of media-engineered race baiting and environmental catastrophe than any album released today.
Read the full analysis at PopMatters
They can’t work it out
From the home page
Dean Goodman, Reuters
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 5 - Don't hold your breath waiting for Beatles songs to go on sale at iTunes or other online retailers, Yoko Ono said on Thursday.
The Fab Four have long resisted the allure of digital downloads, instead selling millions of old-fashioned compact discs last year after remastering the catalog.
Apple Corps, the group's holding company has been unable to agree on terms with EMI Group, which licenses the Beatles' recordings. And then there's the unrelated Apple Inc (AAPL.O), owner of iTunes, the world's largest music retailer. ...
"(Apple CEO) Steve Jobs has his own idea and he's a brilliant guy," Ono, the 77-year-old widow of John Lennon, told Reuters. "There's just an element that we're not very happy about, as people. We are holding out.
"Don't hold your breath ... for anything," she said with a laugh.
Read more at Reuters
Rio de Janeiro: Samba 365!
From the home page
Sibel Tinar, The Rio Times:
RIO DE JANEIRO – Performed to one of the liveliest, most captivating rhythms of the world, the fast and sensual samba is the driving force of the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro; what may not be as obvious to an outsider is how it is integral to the Carioca way of life, 365 days a year.
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Quite possibly the most famous product of Brazilian culture outside of their yellow soccer jersey, samba originated and evolved in Rio from its African roots, and here remains the home of Brazil’s biggest samba festivities, its best musicians and greatest dancers. The samba rhythm reaches almost every corner of the city, and it is of no surprise to discover that Cariocas seem born with an innate ability to move gracefully to the music.
Danced to a two/four beat with three steps to every bar, a focus on the hip action, and a cheerful attitude channeling the Carnival joy, samba comes in many different forms, ranging from the most basic to highly complex and from subtle to jaw-dropping, lending it an everyman appeal to be enjoyed in different forms at a variety of events. …
Read more in The Rio Times
Los Angeles: Jazz lives!
From the home page
Now there are folks who say jazz is all but dead—and statistics seem to bear them out. According to a recent survey, jazz is listened to “often” by only 14 percent of Americans. (Classical didn’t fare much better.)
But if jazz’s audience is in decline, jazz itself seems hardier than ever. You can still find it all over the Southland—you just may have to look a little harder. Clearly visible are the mainstay clubs: Catalina Jazz Club, Charlie O’s, Vitello’s, Spazio.
“Farther afield are such venues as Steamers in Fullerton and Cafe 322 in Sierra Madre ...
And legends still come to town: May saw the Heath Brothers—“Tootie” and Jimmy—at Spazio. And the bill at this year’s Playboy Jazz Festival mixes international stars such as Chick Corea and Bobby Hutcherson with local luminaries, including the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. ...
Jazz today, as always, is an amalgam of old and new. The longer it lasts, the more history there is to draw on. And young players are adept at blending what’s been said before with their own fresh statements. …
Read more in LA, the Los Angeles Times Magazine
Going back into ‘Exile’
From the home page
ROLLING STONES
EXILE ON MAIN ST
And I’m lookin’ out my window baby
And I’m standing by my door
Have you ever had the feeling baby
That you been here before?
— “I’m Not Signifying”
MICHAEL E. ROSS
05.21.2010
In May 1972, back when the Rolling Stones could lay legitimate claim to being the best rock and roll band on the planet, it was difficult to see where “Exile on Main St” belonged in the group’s catalog, much less the rock canon. A year or so after “Sticky Fingers” and the group’s launch of its own label, in the midst of internal dissension and Keith Richards’ persistent drug problems, and with the music industry making the first real push to being an Industry, it seemed to be as hard for the Stones to get a handle on anything as it was for a fickle, changing public to grasp the intention of the Stones. Or so it seemed.
What a difference tree-ring time makes. We can see clearly now how “Exile on Main St” distills their rough, ragged, streetwise greatness. They appeared to be the sloppiest fricking rock band around, all rough edges and scruffy angles, three chords and sharp elbows, songs like barbed wire, their words rife with danger and passion, debauch and rage. In this is their genius — to have transmuted the base metals of rock, the blues and the singularly keen edge of life in the postwar age into a stunning document by turns historical and contemporary, raw and refined, braggart and confessional, sprawling and precise: one of the greatest recordings in the history of rock.
Thirty-eight years after it was released, the band has re-released the original 18-track album remastered, along with 10 unreleased tracks. And of course there’re other options: the obligatory mondo package of CDs, DVD, artwork and ephemera for the diehard collector.
The big attraction is the 10 “bonus” tracks added to the original “Exile” lineup; their addition is being marketed (in typical Stones fashion) with portent, as if they were the Eleventh through Twentieth Commandments Moses brought down after a second trip to the Mount. But hearing these additional songs against the totality of the original album, it’s striking how, in ways you don’t expect until you’ve heard them, they do nothing more — can do nothing more — than reinforce our sense of the power of the original article.
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Some of the birth of “Exile” occurred in one of those classic “forged in the crucible” occasions. From July to November 1971, the Stones, literally made tax exiles due to the crushing British tax laws of the era, decamped to Nellcôte, a French villa then owned by Keith Richards and partly converted to a recording studio. The time at Nellcôte gave the Stones, numerous friends, fellow musicians and associates both privacy and an expansive physical laboratory for various indulgences, musical and otherwise.
The music that resulted from that voluntary rock ‘n’ roll incarceration, and from earlier sessions recorded elsewhere, has stood the test of time; the bonus tracks (the focus of this piece) are novel additions to our sense of how EOMS came to be, but partly because of how long it’s taken for them to see the light of day, it’s easier to hear some of these tracks in the context of the Stones’ next phase or an earlier one, rather than in the context of the classic we’ve known and partied with all these years.
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When you consider that Jagger recorded new vocals over instrumental tracks on the bonus disc, it’s clear the Stones hope to lift this reissue beyond being just a revisitation of an old sound; with tracks whose vocals and lyrics leapfrog in and out of a logical chronology, there’s an attempt to infuse the past with the present. Jagger and company have often used their vaults of music as artist’s canvas, as motion picture, and as their own personal TARDIS, a la the time machine of “Doctor Who”: releasing records that seek to defy the convenience of chronology for its own sake. Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.
◊ ◊ ◊
For example, “Pass the Wine (Sophia Loren),” which opens the bonus disc, has a drive and an almost Latin ethnic tropicality that feels like New York City in the late 70’s, to these ears dovetailing more with the Stones of “Some Girls” and “Tattoo You,” both recorded some years after “Exile.”
On “So Divine (Aladdin Story),” the first notes — a lick copied from the opening of “Paint It Black” (from 1966) — expands into a moody, ethereal melody possessed of an arresting exoticism and a hazy languidity that feel like something native to “Sticky Fingers.”
“Following the River” – a Stones approach to the classic break-up song — bears some of Jagger’s most heartfelt lyrics; the arc of the monologue in the lyrics feels real; not the rant of a millionaire registering a complaint with his latest conquest, but the real and lamented end of a relationship. It acquires additional resonance when you consider Jagger added the lyrics and vocals years later, when the fading of love’s glory has presumably taken on more depth and meaning than it did when he was in his prime.
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The bonus album ends with “Title 5,” an R&B-flavored instrumental rave-up featuring Richards, founding bass player Bill Wyman, and drummer Charlie Watts, a song that’s diverting in its reveal of the relationship between Watts and Wyman as the group’s rhythmic anchors.
But to my ears, two bonus tracks early in the lineup —“Plundered My Soul” and “I’m Not Signifying” — seem to truly emerge organically from the “Exile” sessions, in spirit if not in specifics. The first of these is Jagger in full-throated she-done-me-wrong mode, with a soulful (and recent) vocal delivery undimmed by the years.
“I’m Not Signifying” is stealthier in its strength. Building from a terrific piano riff by the late, great Nicky Hopkins, the Stones weigh in slowly but powerfully. Punctuated by the horns section of Bobby Keys and Jim Price, “Signifying” swings into the kind of bluesy shuffle that characterizes so much of “Exile’s” original mood.
◊ ◊ ◊
There are some disappointments: It’s safe to say “Good Time Women” either inspires or is inspired by “Tumblin’ Dice.” We can’t know which came first, or whether or not “Good Time Women” was a test drive for “Tumbling Dice.” As it is, and either way, you can vocally superimpose the vocal phrasing and lyrics of that rock classic on this new track and not miss a beat.
The alternate version of “Loving Cup,” deliberate to a fault and recorded before the bunkering at Nellcôte, has none of the romp and bite of the classic version.
Likewise, the alternate take of “Soul Survivor” is something of a throwaway, with Keith Richards’ lyrical meandering, there’s none of the narrative focus that could make this rough draft more than a footnote. He recognizes how much of a discard this version is when he starts saying “et cetera, et cetera,” where the real lyrics would be (and maybe already were) on the gold-standard version.
Et cetera indeed. Keith’s offhand phrase distills one of my reactions to the “Exile” reissue; the bonus tracks themselves seem to reinforce their own “et cetera”-ness. They’re music out of context, songs whose willful rattling of the comforts of chronology finally come to frustrate any sense of organically belonging here at all.
Or maybe it’s just hard to imagine the Stones improving on the spark and velocity of ”Rip This Joint,” “Rocks Off,” “All Down the Line,” “Happy” and “Tumbling Dice — then and now the emotional tentpoles of “Exile.” The fact of when and how the original “Exile” tracks were recorded — or whether the “forged in the crucible of Nellcôte” narrative is even valid — pales in comparison with what they’ve come to mean after a generation of scrutiny and exegesis.
They’ve held up after all these years because their sense of risk, of struggle and even danger, typifies not just rock’s essential core but also the essence of modern times, the risk and danger and struggle inherent in the world we live in.
◊ ◊ ◊
Richards’ deepening heroin addiction, Mick Taylor’s departure and Jagger’s social climbing distractions would become some of the forces that seemed to pull the Stones apart by the early 70’s. You can make the case that the band never fully, creatively coalesced again until 1978, with the release of “Some Girls” — an album whose raw, unvarnished production values were much like those of “Exile” six years before.
You can’t help but wonder what else we haven’t heard (yet?) from the “Exile” period. It’s been reported, but maybe too easily forgotten, that Gram Parsons, former member of the Byrds and founder of the Flying Burrito Brothers, stayed at Nellcôte before the “Exile” sessions began.
In his excellent 1983 biography of the Stones, the musicologist and journalist Robert Palmer (a former colleague of mine at The New York Times) wrote of Parsons’ relationship with Richards:
“Parsons ... taught Keith the songs, the sad inflections and other expressive fine points of country & western and particularly honky-tonk music. Parsons stayed at Nellcôte for months, playing informal duets with Keith almost every day.”
Parsons wasn’t credited for a note of music on the “Exile” reissue. A tantalizing idea: Were any of those “informal duets” ever captured on tape?
◊ ◊ ◊
In the stripped-down version of the reissue, without the bells and whistles of the special edition, is a photo booklet that shows the Stones in rehearsal — the closeness, the relentless intimacy, the sweat and stink of the creative process underway, absent the bells and whistles of celebrity.
More than anything else, this is the value of the new improved “Exile,” not only as a musical portrait of a great band as it literally evolved and bloomed in a veritable hothouse in the south of France, but also as a freshly burnished historical artifact, a (slightly) wider window on what we’ve already heard and witnessed and celebrated for literally generations, in arenas and dorm rooms and living rooms and bedrooms, lighters aloft, glasses raised, bongs afire, passions ablaze.
Why does “Exile” persist in the culture, the memory, the heart and soul? It’s rock and roll at its highest state of grandeur, which ultimately means reflecting not so much grandeur as grit, as recognizing the weight of the world and our collective intent to endure that weight, to strive for indomitability, to be “soul survivors” in spite of everything (or maybe because of everything). Thirty-eight years after the original fact, that’s the triumph of “Exile.”
And if you’re still around to hear it, congratulations. It’s your triumph, too.
Michael E. Ross is the editor of Culcha.
'Let It Be' at 40
From the home page
“We can see more clearly today how Let It Be stands at a particular crossroads in popular music, valiantly trying to oppose the homogenizing trend in musical taste that was just about to set in as they sought to return to an earlier authentic style—a style that they had left behind when they made the decision three years prior to record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and in so doing begin their own music revolution.
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"The 700 hours spent in the Abbey Road studios painstakingly recording the tracks as opposed to the 200 hours spent on their first album sent a clear signal to their peers that the group’s true calling was not as concert performers but as studio artists.”
More at PopMatters
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Lena Horne (1917-2010)
From the home page
"I knew her from the time I was born, and whenever I needed anything she was there. She was funny, sophisticated and truly one of a kind. We lost an original. Thank you Lena." Liza Minnelli
"It's just a great loss. She brought much joy into everyone's lives — even the younger generations, younger than myself. She was such a great talent. She opened up such doors for artists like myself."
Janet Jackson
“What Horne passionately insisted on was the right to be regarded not as the designated representative of a group, or the personification of some abstract ideal, but as a one-of-a-kind individual — neither more, nor less. Horne posited herself as the active subject of her own life, not the object of the mainstream white audience's ‘exotic’ fantasies and fears.” Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times
"Lena Horne was a pioneering groundbreaker, making inroads into a world that had never before been explored by African-American women, and she did it on her own terms. Our nation and the world has lost one of the great artistic icons of the 20th century. There will never be another like Lena Horne and I will miss her deeply." Quincy Jones
Lena Horne performs her signature, 'Stormy Weather' In Movies >>>
Pearl Jam rocks New Orleans
“I'd like to make a toast to the fine folks at BP," Eddie Vedder said, raising a bottle of wine at last night's show in New Orleans. "Send your sons and daughters to clean up your fucking mess." While Pearl Jam rocked the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico crept closer to the Louisiana coast.”
Read the rest of Alex Rawls’ dispatch in Rolling Stone
Image credits: This page: Bateria group in New York: Samba New York. Exile on Main St cover: Rolling Stones Records/Universal Music Group. Mick Jagger: Associated Press. Keith Richards: WENN. Home page: Courtney Love, Bumbershoot 2010: © Laura Musselman. Hendrix pin: © Experience Hendrix LLC. Samba dancer: Sibel Tinar/The Rio Times. Art Pepper: Date and photographer unknown. Jagger: Still from "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon," NBC. Lena Horne: © Leo Friedman.
... there’s nothing particularly easy or user-friendly about The King of Limbs: The new release continues to play out the millennial drama between human imagination and artificial intelligence that has driven Radiohead since at least OK Computer, though perhaps more on a compositional level than as a conceptual thematic on this occasion. Yet despite the dark, vacuum-sealed soundscapes that producer Nigel Godrich creates for Radiohead’s alternate universe, The King of Limbs, on balance, finds this band as optimistic as it can be about the prospects of forging and strengthening human connections ...
Read Arnold Pan’s full review at PopMatters
Arcade Fire tops Grammys
From the home page
Arcade Fire, the seven-member Canadian group that wowed listeners and critics last year with its emotionally riveting album The Suburbs, took the top Grammy for 2011, with that collection winning honors for Album of the Year.
Rolling Stone has a full list of the winners, and everything else. Of course.
Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times
Pop provocateurs Lady Gaga and Eminem may have brought more compelling career stories to the 53rd annual Grammy Awards, but on a shocking night the big trophies went home Sunday with Southern trio Lady Antebellum and Montreal indie-rock band Arcade Fire.
Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now," a harmony hit of closing-time yearning, was named record and song of the year (the former is for best overall track; the latter is specifically for song writing), while the best album honors went to Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, the third studio album from the seven-member band led by the married couple Win Butler and Régine Chassagne.
A dizzying string of envelope surprises at Staples Center began with perhaps the biggest shock of all: Esperanza Spalding, the 26-year-old jazz bassist and vocalist from Portland, Ore., was named best new artist, beating out far more famous nominees, among them kid-pop sensation Justin Bieber and rapper-singer Drake.
Michael E. Ross, Culcha
By the time the 53rd annual Grammy Awards was over last night, the Staples Center in Los Angeles had become a multipurpose room like its builders never intended. It was a mosh pit for Janelle Monae, the site of a sexy indoor bonfire for Rihanna and Drake, a suburban bicycle park for Arcade Fire, a street battleground for Muse and a room Mick Jagger worked like an intimate club.
But from the over-the-top spectacle of fashion gone nuts to the spontaneous onstage happenings to the real source of surprise — the winners nobody saw coming — the location of the 2011 Grammys was where some faith was restored in the power of the unexpected. For the sheer joy in some of its performances, and the way the evening’s big winners reflected the ability of the star-maker machinery to break from script, this year’s Grammys was one of the better ones in recent years.
You want spectacle? Lady Gaga did her part, but there was no deli-ready wardrobe this year. So 2010, you know. Gaga appeared from a giant translucent egg carried Cleopatra-style by courtiers onstage. Emerging adorned in a yellow latex number, she sang “Born This Way,” the title track from her new album, due to drop soon.
Channeling George Clinton and 1970’s-era Elton John, Cee-Lo Green played his Grammy-nominated “F*** You” dressed in red fur and feather boas and sporting a sequined flapper headdress — in all, looking like the bastard child of Liberace and Big Bird on steroids. And surrounded by puppets, no less. His partner in song: Gwyneth Paltrow, doing her best to, well, do her best.
And in his tribute to the late Solomon Burke, Mick Jagger showed why he still commands the spotlight. Pushing 68, Jagger sprinted around the stage, his signature voice still versatile in its range. He remains ever the showman. So Mick … about that tour …
◊ ◊ ◊
But the winners of the prizes that are maybe the most important — Best New Artist and Album of the Year — were the big surprises last night. Justin Bieber (who worked it on the broadcast with Usher and Jayden Smith) was supposed to be coronated Best New Artist. It was all but done. (Buzzer sound here.) Not to be. Esperanza Spalding, the phenomenal Portland singer and jazz bass player, took it instead.
When it was said and done, the Album of the Year honors looked to be a two-way battle between Lady Gaga (whose The Fame Monster, a catchy exploration of the downside of fame, is the latest from the electropop-cultural juggernaut) and Eminem, whose emotionally raw, autobiographical Recovery album garnered him 10 nominations.
When the Arcade Fire won, the seven-piece unit from Montreal was huddled backstage, completely unaware. Like most of the rest of us. The group, a long-time indie favorite, gains major crossover exposure with a Grammy for The Suburbs. The days of Arcade Who are definitely over.
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And maybe, for now, the days of more such surprises will be back at the Grammys on a regular basis. Last night was a validation of how heart can prevail over marketing campaigns … how sometimes the underdog can chase the smart money out of the building.
Commenters on HuffPost’s live stream agreed, and said as much about Arcade Fire’s win:
Shawn Hugus: “A rare moment where the Grammy Awards don't pick the ancient relic or the disposable product and pick an actual band in their peak.”
Toomuchpr: “I woke up on New Year's Day 2011 and played the Suburbs at very high volume. I played it back to back about 10 times when I got it... I'm still really surprised Arcade Fire won the Grammys because they have picked really boring albums of the year …”
And the band itself, reacting to the win on Twitter, was suitably restrained: “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD. Thank you EVERYONE.”
You want passion? There it is, after the fact no less than before. “When it came right down to it Sunday night,” the Calgary Herald reported, “passion trumped spectacle every time.”
Read more at The Washington Post
The White Stripes pack it in
From the home page
Nekesa Mumbi Moody, Associated Press
NEW YORK — The White Stripes are done.
The groundbreaking rock duo, which helped revive and reshape a stale rock scene with their scorching, guitar-fueled, blues-tinged songs, announced Wednesday they are splitting up after more than a decade and six albums together.
Read more at The Huffington Post
Teena Marie, godmother of hip-hop
From the home page
Paul Devlin, The Root
I don't know what you do, but like Nas in "Book of Rhymes" (at 2:30 in), I pump some Rick James with that Teena Marie. The R&B legend passed away on Sunday at age 54, leaving one of the great vocal legacies in music, in a career that spanned nearly 40 years. From her world-famous and somehow incredibly awesome 1981 rap (at 3:47 in -- complete with pre-Nicki Minaj inflections!) to her catchy 2004 single (with Cash Money Records, complete with contextualizing intro by Birdman/Baby), Teena's career was inextricably intertwined with hip-hop. She was a hip lady who embraced the music that embraced her. Important and fascinating, her rap celebrates a white person's unabashed and unambiguous affection for black culture -- and black audiences returned the love for nearly 30 years.
Read more at The Root
Billy Taylor dies at 89
From the home page
Peter Keepnews, The New York Times
Billy Taylor, a pianist and composer who was also an eloquent spokesman and advocate for jazz as well as a familiar presence for many years on television and radio, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 89 and lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, Kim Taylor-Thompson.
Dr. Taylor, as he preferred to be called (he earned a doctorate in music education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975), was a living refutation of the stereotype of jazz musicians as unschooled, unsophisticated and inarticulate, an image that was prevalent when he began his career in the 1940s, and that he did as much as any other musician to erase.
Read more at The New York Times
McCartney plays the Apollo!?
From the home page
Jim Fusilli, The Wall Street Journal
There aren’t many veritable concert halls that Paul McCartney hasn’t played in his 53-year career, but last night in New York he made his first appearance at the Harlem landmark, the Apollo Theater. McCartney, now 68 years old, and his backing quartet delivered a nearly two-hour show that reinforced the idea that though he’s among the most familiar rock performers, he’s still capable of surprise. …
Though he is a supremely accomplished musician whose body of work is unsurpassed by any of his peers or musical descendants, he remained the charming, thoroughly approachable pop star, his ready smile and unwavering confidence guiding him and his audience through triumph and a mistake or two.
Read more at The Journal
Reports: Aretha has pancreatic cancer
From the home page
Various reports
New York Daily News: Following news of Aretha Franklin's cancer diagnosis, the legendary singer's cousin said she is "doing better than doctors expected" and will be released from the hospital this weekend.
Brenda Corbett said Franklin "has a long life in front of her and will be back in concert, on stage, late spring or early summer," according to the Detroit Free Press.
Reverend Jesse Jackson has visited the Detroit native in the hospital several times since her surgery, and told the Detroit News that she is "recovering, and her spirits are high. She's doing very well. She's very prayerful."
Detroit Free Press: Amid grim reports and with details hard to come by, at least one thing about Aretha Franklin was clear: The world is worried about her.
Read more at the Free Press
Billboard gets social on ya
From the home page
Billboard.biz
Billboard announced today (Dec. 2) that it is expanding its suite of chart offerings to include a new chart, the Social 50, presented by ZYNC from American Express, which ranks the most active artists on the world's leading social networking sites.
Rihanna becomes the 'only girl in the world' to top the Social 50 chart in its debut week, followed by Justin Bieber, Eminem, Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj, respectively, to round out the top five. …
Serving as a complement to Billboard's existing weekly rankings, the Social 50 chart will tally artists' popularity using a formula blending weekly additions of friends/fans/followers along with weekly artist page views and weekly song plays on MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and iLike. Data from these sites is gathered and provided to Billboard by social music tracking service Next Big Sound. …
"The Social 50 provides a weekly snapshot of the artists that music fans engage with the most in the social arena, which in today's world is a significant validation of their investment in an act," says Billboard chart director, Silvio Pietroluongo.
The full chart’s available at Billboard.com
Los Angeles: Eminem paces Grammy field
From the home page
Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times
The beleaguered record industry couldn’t have been happier about the return to the spotlight in 2010 of rapper Eminem, the biggest-selling artist of the new millennium, and heaped upon him a field-leading 10 Grammy Award nominations for his “Recovery” album, including nods in all three top categories of album, record and song of the year.
Although it was widely expected that Eminem would do well in this year’s Grammy competition, Hawaiian-born producer-singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Bruno Mars caught many by surprise as runner-up to Eminem with seven nominations, announced Wednesday in conjunction with a televised Grammy nomination concert from the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles. …
The other three nominees for record of the year, which honors performance, production and engineering, are “Love the Way You Lie” from Eminem and Rihanna; Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ love letter to the Big Apple, “Empire State of Mind”; and country trio Lady Antebellum’s romantically desperate closing-time phone call, “Need You Now,” which also earned the country trio an album of the year nomination.
Eminem and Lady A are vying in the album category with Lady Gaga’s “The Fame Monster,” Katy Perry’s frothy “Teenage Dream” and the latest critically acclaimed effort from Canadian indie rock group Arcade Fire, “The Suburbs.” …
Read the full story in The Envelope
The interview
From the home page
Culcha: I'm admittedly a little late to the party, since the EP and "Come Home" have been out for a while. But I get a sense that, maybe because of the iPod deal, or because "Come Home" is so thoroughly infectious, things are just starting to lift up for you in the public eye. I'm not the only one that can't get that song out of his head right now. What's your sense of where Chappo is on its creative glide path?
Chappo: You're not late to the party at all! It's just getting started! We feel like the path has been steadily picking up steam, and we're at a cool place on it right now. This year has been kind of a blur. We finished the Plastique Universe EP, recording it all on shitty equipment in our kitchen, we started touring, and also (self) released the EP back in New York. The tours went great, and we've been adding new music to our live shows. We have a bunch of new music, which will be kind of a continuation of the sci-fi bandit story, that we're getting ready to record soon so it's all kind of great timing.
What's the thumbnail history of the group, and how does Brooklyn figure in its genesis?
Chappo: Weirdly enough, we were a craigslist success story. If they start doing big advertising, we'd love to be spokesmen for them. Chris responded to Alex's ad: seeking a roommate with an interest in an interdimensional but close-quartered lifestyle, with rambunctious tendencies. We lived in an East Village apartment building where Allen Ginsberg used to live. We both were playing with different bands at that time, but it didn't take long for us to start working on music together. Then we became roommates again when Alex moved out to Chris' new house in Brooklyn. Chris' roommate [Zac Colwell, the EP’s producer] became our drummer and produced the album with us. We just did that all summer and into the fall. It was great. We also went out to all of Brooklyn's 'hottest' beaches for "Beach Sundays."
What makes "Come Home" work so well as a song? I've read some tweets at your Web site and elsewhere, from office workers who said it was indispensable to them this past summer, like a soundtrack for the workplace. Other people say it's "hooky." But it still works.
That's a good question. To us, it feels like a fast, fun engine that accelerates and just doesn't stop, while also maintaining some sort of innocence to it. It's nice that it made an impression on other people too. At the time, we got a lot of comments that it was really "summery," which is cool. Hopefully people will still like it in the winter, too, and play it at tons of holiday office parties.
You've seen the write-ups, of course, with some calling Chappo psychedelic garage rock. Somebody said it's a cross between the Rolling Stones and the Flaming Lips. I've seen that comparison more than once. It's a given those writers take it seriously. Do you?
We love those bands; it's pretty flattering considering how early we are in our output. Hopefully we can be at it for a long time, and different sides of our music will come out as well, as they have for those bands. Maybe on the next album we'll want to combine Talking Heads and Kenny Rogers or something. We have some work to do if we're going to make it that long and be in as good shape as Mick Jagger when we're pushing 70.
Who inspired your sound, what are your touchstones musically?
Since we're from Baton Rouge (Alex) & Seattle (Chris), there was plenty of different stuff that we grew up around (Dr. John and Galactic vs. Nirvana & Quincy Jones). We definitely connected over a lot of different kinds of music. Albums that resonated for Alex when he was a kid: Stereo Pathetic Soul Manure by Beck; Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers by the Stones; Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star by Sonic Youth; tons of Bowie and Dylan records. Also Violent Femmes, Pixies, Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Fleetwood Mac. Also a bunch of hip hop: Jurassic 5, Aesop Rock, Biggie, 2pac. For Chris: a lot of his parents' folk albums, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Harry Nilsson. Also a lot of classical music and jazz that he got into as a kid. When we first became roommates, it was evident that we both listened to a lot of different things from each other, but were both interested in new things too. When we started recording the EP, we definitely were into a lot of the newer dancey rock music.
Without arousing the ire of the lawyers at Apple, what was the process like when they picked your song for the iPod Touch G4 campaign?
They got in touch with us right after we had gotten back from our West Coast tour. We got an email, and initially figured it was a joke or spam. But immediately after responding, they called us. Chris was in the shower at the time. Things actually moved pretty quickly. Steve Jobs gets stuff done, ya know?
Apparently so. How have things changed A.A. (After Apple)? What's next for Chappo? Is another tour in the offing?
The fact that it's now playing all over the world is really cool, in that people that would never have a chance to stumble onto our music normally, potentially could now. Without a label at this point, that's a huge thing for us. As it's still a pretty small operation, we're overwhelmed with all the new people finding out about the band and taking interest. We're looking at recording really soon. Touring, for sure!! We're looking forward to getting out again, probably early in the new year after recording. Hopefully we can get to some far reaching places of the globe with warm beaches. A longer- term goal is also to be the first band in space. Literally. Pass it on if you know anyone at NASA.
Seattle: Change afoot at Bumbershoot?
From the home page
Chris Kornelis, Seattle Weekly
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Last week, One Reel--the umbrella non-profit that runs Bumbershoot--laid off eight of their 14 festival staffers, folks who run the Family Fourth and Bumbershoot. Executive director Jon Stone says the primary factors included low sponsorship and attendance at Bumbershoot, the latter of which he blames primarily on the economy and weather.
Stone says attendance was in the neighborhood of 103,000 over three days, down from about 150,000 the festival averaged a decade ago when artist fees and ticket prices were lower and the festival was a four-day event. ...
"Now we really have that mandate in front of us to find something that works," he says. "What we did this year doesn't really work."
Read more at Seattle Weekly
Jimi's new return
From the home page
Michael E. Ross, theGrio
So much of the musical legacy of Jimi Hendrix rests on memory of the legendary guitarist as the fluid, inventive musical maverick who burst on the scene in 1967 — almost single-handedly defining the creative extravagance of the Summer of Love —or the legend who exited that scene three years later, dying in London on Sept. 18, 1970, at the age of 27.
This even-numbered anniversary year of his passing has already seen a flurry of previously unreleased music and images, and there’s more to come before year’s end, other opportunities to discover the Hendrix that existed before the world discovered him, the lean Seattle kid struggling to survive the critical formative years that helped make him what he would become, before his talents seemed to explode on the world fully formed.
“People think that he just ... appeared one day,” Janie Hendrix — Jimi’s stepsister, and president/CEO of Experience Hendrix LLC, the Hendrix family company — said in 2003. “But he also had a history and a life, from birth to childhood to adolescence to adulthood.” That year the Experience Music Project, a Seattle museum, joined forces with Experience Hendrix on an exhibition of Hendrix’s early life and childhood.
Forty years after Hendrix’s death, fans and scholars alike are again re-examining his music, his persistent impact on popular culture, and his status as a trailblazer whose impact on rock culture sought to transcend the confines of racial identity. ...
Read the rest at theGrio
Rockin’ for Pakistan
From the home page
BBC News
Pakistani-born rock star Salman Ahmad is penning a new song to raise funds for the country's flood disaster.
Khwab - the Urdu word for dream - is due to be ready in a couple of weeks' time and Ahmad hopes to record it with Pakistani and Western artists.
He told the BBC it was important to let young Pakistanis know the world cared for them in their hour of need. ...
Speaking from New York, he told BBC World Service that he realised that people in the West were hesitant about helping, asking why they should care for a country associated with extremism.
"[But] there are 100 million-plus young people under the age of 25 who can go two possible ways into the future," he said.
"They can follow their dreams or they can give in to the extremists and the Taliban who want them to go blow themselves up.
"If they feel that the world cares for them, you may change the destiny of Pakistan. Not only is it humane but it is urgent self-interest - this is a moment to win hearts and minds."
Read more at BBC News
Exile on el Centro
From the home page
Daniel Hernandez, Los Angeles Times
It's like the Beatles being banned from returning to Liverpool, the Red Hot Chili Peppers being yanked from stages in Los Angeles, or Jay-Z's music stopped in a source of his inspiration, New York. Since last November, Los Tucanes de Tijuana, one of the most recognizable bands in the Mexican norteño regional genre, are banned from playing in their hometown and namesake, the border city of Tijuana.
The ban is a result of a 2008 concert in which the band's lead singer sent his regards from the stage to the city's most notorious and wanted men, "El Teo and his compadre, El Muletas." The city's get-tough police chief, Julian Leyzaola, was outraged.
Leyzaola pulled the plug on shows by Los Tucanes as they prepared to perform at the city's storied Agua Caliente racetrack in November. Leyzaola said the band's polka-driven narcocorrido songs glorify drug lords and their exploits and are therefore inappropriate to play in a city that has suffered soaring drug-related violence in recent years. The band, with millions of record sales and a fan base as broad as the international border, hasn't been allowed to play in Tijuana since. ...
Read more in the Los Angeles Times
Abbey Lincoln: Music as political act
From the home page
Nate Chinen, The New York Times
Abbey Lincoln, a singer whose dramatic vocal command and tersely poetic songs made her a singular figure in jazz, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side.
Her death was announced by her brother David Wooldridge.
Ms. Lincoln’s career encompassed outspoken civil rights advocacy in the 1960s and fearless introspection in more recent years, and for a time in the 1960s she acted in films, including one with Sidney Poitier.
Long recognized as one of jazz’s most arresting and uncompromising singers, Ms. Lincoln gained similar stature as a songwriter only over the last two decades. Her songs, rich in metaphor and philosophical reflection, provide the substance of “Abbey Sings Abbey,” an album released on Verve in 2007. As a body of work, the songs formed the basis of a three-concert retrospective presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2002.
Her singing style was unique, a combined result of bold projection and expressive restraint. Because of her ability to inhabit the emotional dimensions of a song, she was often likened to Billie Holiday, her chief influence. But Ms. Lincoln had a deeper register and a darker tone, and her way with phrasing was more declarative. ...
Read more at The New York Times
Fighting the powers, 20 years on
From the home page
Sean McCarthy, PopMatters
Issue-wise, few bands can top Midnight Oil in terms of environmental credibility. Long before it was the adopted cause for many musicians, the Oils were deeply involved in environmental and Aborigine rights. The environmental-themed songs on Blue Sky Mining—namely “River Runs Red” and “Antarctica”—pack just as much of a wallop now as they did 20 years ago. ...
Fear of a Black Planet was Public Enemy’s amazing follow-up to its 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Upon its release, talk quickly went from “this is the best album of the year” to “this is the best album of the decade”. And like all great albums, it scared the shit out of the mainstream. ...
Blue Sky Mining and Fear of a Black Planet came out when I was a sophomore in high school. These two albums (along with Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love) were practically melted into my Walkman and made sense of a world that often seemed chaotic on its best days and apocalyptic at its worst. Little did I know that 20 years down the road, both albums would do a better job summing up a summer of media-engineered race baiting and environmental catastrophe than any album released today.
Read the full analysis at PopMatters
They can’t work it out
From the home page
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 5 - Don't hold your breath waiting for Beatles songs to go on sale at iTunes or other online retailers, Yoko Ono said on Thursday.
The Fab Four have long resisted the allure of digital downloads, instead selling millions of old-fashioned compact discs last year after remastering the catalog.
Apple Corps, the group's holding company has been unable to agree on terms with EMI Group, which licenses the Beatles' recordings. And then there's the unrelated Apple Inc (AAPL.O), owner of iTunes, the world's largest music retailer. ...
"(Apple CEO) Steve Jobs has his own idea and he's a brilliant guy," Ono, the 77-year-old widow of John Lennon, told Reuters. "There's just an element that we're not very happy about, as people. We are holding out.
"Don't hold your breath ... for anything," she said with a laugh.
Read more at Reuters
Rio de Janeiro: Samba 365!
From the home page
Sibel Tinar, The Rio Times:
RIO DE JANEIRO – Performed to one of the liveliest, most captivating rhythms of the world, the fast and sensual samba is the driving force of the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro; what may not be as obvious to an outsider is how it is integral to the Carioca way of life, 365 days a year.
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Quite possibly the most famous product of Brazilian culture outside of their yellow soccer jersey, samba originated and evolved in Rio from its African roots, and here remains the home of Brazil’s biggest samba festivities, its best musicians and greatest dancers. The samba rhythm reaches almost every corner of the city, and it is of no surprise to discover that Cariocas seem born with an innate ability to move gracefully to the music. Danced to a two/four beat with three steps to every bar, a focus on the hip action, and a cheerful attitude channeling the Carnival joy, samba comes in many different forms, ranging from the most basic to highly complex and from subtle to jaw-dropping, lending it an everyman appeal to be enjoyed in different forms at a variety of events. …
Read more in The Rio Times
Los Angeles: Jazz lives!
From the home page
Now there are folks who say jazz is all but dead—and statistics seem to bear them out. According to a recent survey, jazz is listened to “often” by only 14 percent of Americans. (Classical didn’t fare much better.)
But if jazz’s audience is in decline, jazz itself seems hardier than ever. You can still find it all over the Southland—you just may have to look a little harder. Clearly visible are the mainstay clubs: Catalina Jazz Club, Charlie O’s, Vitello’s, Spazio.
“Farther afield are such venues as Steamers in Fullerton and Cafe 322 in Sierra Madre ...
And legends still come to town: May saw the Heath Brothers—“Tootie” and Jimmy—at Spazio. And the bill at this year’s Playboy Jazz Festival mixes international stars such as Chick Corea and Bobby Hutcherson with local luminaries, including the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. ...
Jazz today, as always, is an amalgam of old and new. The longer it lasts, the more history there is to draw on. And young players are adept at blending what’s been said before with their own fresh statements. …
Read more in LA, the Los Angeles Times Magazine
Going back into ‘Exile’
From the home page
ROLLING STONESEXILE ON MAIN ST
And I’m lookin’ out my window baby
And I’m standing by my door
Have you ever had the feeling baby
That you been here before?
— “I’m Not Signifying”
MICHAEL E. ROSS
05.21.2010
In May 1972, back when the Rolling Stones could lay legitimate claim to being the best rock and roll band on the planet, it was difficult to see where “Exile on Main St” belonged in the group’s catalog, much less the rock canon. A year or so after “Sticky Fingers” and the group’s launch of its own label, in the midst of internal dissension and Keith Richards’ persistent drug problems, and with the music industry making the first real push to being an Industry, it seemed to be as hard for the Stones to get a handle on anything as it was for a fickle, changing public to grasp the intention of the Stones. Or so it seemed.
What a difference tree-ring time makes. We can see clearly now how “Exile on Main St” distills their rough, ragged, streetwise greatness. They appeared to be the sloppiest fricking rock band around, all rough edges and scruffy angles, three chords and sharp elbows, songs like barbed wire, their words rife with danger and passion, debauch and rage. In this is their genius — to have transmuted the base metals of rock, the blues and the singularly keen edge of life in the postwar age into a stunning document by turns historical and contemporary, raw and refined, braggart and confessional, sprawling and precise: one of the greatest recordings in the history of rock.
Thirty-eight years after it was released, the band has re-released the original 18-track album remastered, along with 10 unreleased tracks. And of course there’re other options: the obligatory mondo package of CDs, DVD, artwork and ephemera for the diehard collector.
The big attraction is the 10 “bonus” tracks added to the original “Exile” lineup; their addition is being marketed (in typical Stones fashion) with portent, as if they were the Eleventh through Twentieth Commandments Moses brought down after a second trip to the Mount. But hearing these additional songs against the totality of the original album, it’s striking how, in ways you don’t expect until you’ve heard them, they do nothing more — can do nothing more — than reinforce our sense of the power of the original article.
◊ ◊ ◊
Some of the birth of “Exile” occurred in one of those classic “forged in the crucible” occasions. From July to November 1971, the Stones, literally made tax exiles due to the crushing British tax laws of the era, decamped to Nellcôte, a French villa then owned by Keith Richards and partly converted to a recording studio. The time at Nellcôte gave the Stones, numerous friends, fellow musicians and associates both privacy and an expansive physical laboratory for various indulgences, musical and otherwise.
The music that resulted from that voluntary rock ‘n’ roll incarceration, and from earlier sessions recorded elsewhere, has stood the test of time; the bonus tracks (the focus of this piece) are novel additions to our sense of how EOMS came to be, but partly because of how long it’s taken for them to see the light of day, it’s easier to hear some of these tracks in the context of the Stones’ next phase or an earlier one, rather than in the context of the classic we’ve known and partied with all these years.
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When you consider that Jagger recorded new vocals over instrumental tracks on the bonus disc, it’s clear the Stones hope to lift this reissue beyond being just a revisitation of an old sound; with tracks whose vocals and lyrics leapfrog in and out of a logical chronology, there’s an attempt to infuse the past with the present. Jagger and company have often used their vaults of music as artist’s canvas, as motion picture, and as their own personal TARDIS, a la the time machine of “Doctor Who”: releasing records that seek to defy the convenience of chronology for its own sake. Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.◊ ◊ ◊
For example, “Pass the Wine (Sophia Loren),” which opens the bonus disc, has a drive and an almost Latin ethnic tropicality that feels like New York City in the late 70’s, to these ears dovetailing more with the Stones of “Some Girls” and “Tattoo You,” both recorded some years after “Exile.”
On “So Divine (Aladdin Story),” the first notes — a lick copied from the opening of “Paint It Black” (from 1966) — expands into a moody, ethereal melody possessed of an arresting exoticism and a hazy languidity that feel like something native to “Sticky Fingers.”
“Following the River” – a Stones approach to the classic break-up song — bears some of Jagger’s most heartfelt lyrics; the arc of the monologue in the lyrics feels real; not the rant of a millionaire registering a complaint with his latest conquest, but the real and lamented end of a relationship. It acquires additional resonance when you consider Jagger added the lyrics and vocals years later, when the fading of love’s glory has presumably taken on more depth and meaning than it did when he was in his prime.
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But to my ears, two bonus tracks early in the lineup —“Plundered My Soul” and “I’m Not Signifying” — seem to truly emerge organically from the “Exile” sessions, in spirit if not in specifics. The first of these is Jagger in full-throated she-done-me-wrong mode, with a soulful (and recent) vocal delivery undimmed by the years.
“I’m Not Signifying” is stealthier in its strength. Building from a terrific piano riff by the late, great Nicky Hopkins, the Stones weigh in slowly but powerfully. Punctuated by the horns section of Bobby Keys and Jim Price, “Signifying” swings into the kind of bluesy shuffle that characterizes so much of “Exile’s” original mood.
◊ ◊ ◊
There are some disappointments: It’s safe to say “Good Time Women” either inspires or is inspired by “Tumblin’ Dice.” We can’t know which came first, or whether or not “Good Time Women” was a test drive for “Tumbling Dice.” As it is, and either way, you can vocally superimpose the vocal phrasing and lyrics of that rock classic on this new track and not miss a beat.
The alternate version of “Loving Cup,” deliberate to a fault and recorded before the bunkering at Nellcôte, has none of the romp and bite of the classic version.
Likewise, the alternate take of “Soul Survivor” is something of a throwaway, with Keith Richards’ lyrical meandering, there’s none of the narrative focus that could make this rough draft more than a footnote. He recognizes how much of a discard this version is when he starts saying “et cetera, et cetera,” where the real lyrics would be (and maybe already were) on the gold-standard version.
Et cetera indeed. Keith’s offhand phrase distills one of my reactions to the “Exile” reissue; the bonus tracks themselves seem to reinforce their own “et cetera”-ness. They’re music out of context, songs whose willful rattling of the comforts of chronology finally come to frustrate any sense of organically belonging here at all.
Or maybe it’s just hard to imagine the Stones improving on the spark and velocity of ”Rip This Joint,” “Rocks Off,” “All Down the Line,” “Happy” and “Tumbling Dice — then and now the emotional tentpoles of “Exile.” The fact of when and how the original “Exile” tracks were recorded — or whether the “forged in the crucible of Nellcôte” narrative is even valid — pales in comparison with what they’ve come to mean after a generation of scrutiny and exegesis.
They’ve held up after all these years because their sense of risk, of struggle and even danger, typifies not just rock’s essential core but also the essence of modern times, the risk and danger and struggle inherent in the world we live in.
◊ ◊ ◊
Richards’ deepening heroin addiction, Mick Taylor’s departure and Jagger’s social climbing distractions would become some of the forces that seemed to pull the Stones apart by the early 70’s. You can make the case that the band never fully, creatively coalesced again until 1978, with the release of “Some Girls” — an album whose raw, unvarnished production values were much like those of “Exile” six years before.
You can’t help but wonder what else we haven’t heard (yet?) from the “Exile” period. It’s been reported, but maybe too easily forgotten, that Gram Parsons, former member of the Byrds and founder of the Flying Burrito Brothers, stayed at Nellcôte before the “Exile” sessions began.
In his excellent 1983 biography of the Stones, the musicologist and journalist Robert Palmer (a former colleague of mine at The New York Times) wrote of Parsons’ relationship with Richards:
“Parsons ... taught Keith the songs, the sad inflections and other expressive fine points of country & western and particularly honky-tonk music. Parsons stayed at Nellcôte for months, playing informal duets with Keith almost every day.”
Parsons wasn’t credited for a note of music on the “Exile” reissue. A tantalizing idea: Were any of those “informal duets” ever captured on tape?
◊ ◊ ◊
In the stripped-down version of the reissue, without the bells and whistles of the special edition, is a photo booklet that shows the Stones in rehearsal — the closeness, the relentless intimacy, the sweat and stink of the creative process underway, absent the bells and whistles of celebrity.
More than anything else, this is the value of the new improved “Exile,” not only as a musical portrait of a great band as it literally evolved and bloomed in a veritable hothouse in the south of France, but also as a freshly burnished historical artifact, a (slightly) wider window on what we’ve already heard and witnessed and celebrated for literally generations, in arenas and dorm rooms and living rooms and bedrooms, lighters aloft, glasses raised, bongs afire, passions ablaze.
Why does “Exile” persist in the culture, the memory, the heart and soul? It’s rock and roll at its highest state of grandeur, which ultimately means reflecting not so much grandeur as grit, as recognizing the weight of the world and our collective intent to endure that weight, to strive for indomitability, to be “soul survivors” in spite of everything (or maybe because of everything). Thirty-eight years after the original fact, that’s the triumph of “Exile.”
And if you’re still around to hear it, congratulations. It’s your triumph, too.
Michael E. Ross is the editor of Culcha.
'Let It Be' at 40
From the home page
“We can see more clearly today how Let It Be stands at a particular crossroads in popular music, valiantly trying to oppose the homogenizing trend in musical taste that was just about to set in as they sought to return to an earlier authentic style—a style that they had left behind when they made the decision three years prior to record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and in so doing begin their own music revolution.
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"The 700 hours spent in the Abbey Road studios painstakingly recording the tracks as opposed to the 200 hours spent on their first album sent a clear signal to their peers that the group’s true calling was not as concert performers but as studio artists.”
More at PopMatters
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Lena Horne (1917-2010)From the home page
"I knew her from the time I was born, and whenever I needed anything she was there. She was funny, sophisticated and truly one of a kind. We lost an original. Thank you Lena." Liza Minnelli
"It's just a great loss. She brought much joy into everyone's lives — even the younger generations, younger than myself. She was such a great talent. She opened up such doors for artists like myself."
Janet Jackson
“What Horne passionately insisted on was the right to be regarded not as the designated representative of a group, or the personification of some abstract ideal, but as a one-of-a-kind individual — neither more, nor less. Horne posited herself as the active subject of her own life, not the object of the mainstream white audience's ‘exotic’ fantasies and fears.” Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times
"Lena Horne was a pioneering groundbreaker, making inroads into a world that had never before been explored by African-American women, and she did it on her own terms. Our nation and the world has lost one of the great artistic icons of the 20th century. There will never be another like Lena Horne and I will miss her deeply." Quincy Jones
Lena Horne performs her signature, 'Stormy Weather' In Movies >>>
Pearl Jam rocks New Orleans
“I'd like to make a toast to the fine folks at BP," Eddie Vedder said, raising a bottle of wine at last night's show in New Orleans. "Send your sons and daughters to clean up your fucking mess." While Pearl Jam rocked the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico crept closer to the Louisiana coast.”
Read the rest of Alex Rawls’ dispatch in Rolling Stone
Image credits: This page: Bateria group in New York: Samba New York. Exile on Main St cover: Rolling Stones Records/Universal Music Group. Mick Jagger: Associated Press. Keith Richards: WENN. Home page: Courtney Love, Bumbershoot 2010: © Laura Musselman. Hendrix pin: © Experience Hendrix LLC. Samba dancer: Sibel Tinar/The Rio Times. Art Pepper: Date and photographer unknown. Jagger: Still from "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon," NBC. Lena Horne: © Leo Friedman.