Motor City Drum Ensemble

I've been jamming to a recent DJ-Kicks mix,  one in a long series put out by the !K7 label. DJ-Kicks started sometime in the mid-'90s as a compilation of electronic dance music (mostly techno but house also). Remember Kruder and Dorfmeister? They did one. Remember Thievery Corporation? They did one. Certainly there was a bit of a vanilla/loungey kind of vibe that's gone out of style but more recently the music has become incredibly diverse, incorporating a lot of really good and sometimes obscure 1970s funk and Afrobeat. The one that I've been listening came out last year, and was done by Motor City Drum Ensemble, basically a young Cologne-based kid named Danilo Plessow, who has made quite a name for himself. Very talented dude.

This is a stellar mix of jazz, soul, Afrobeat, Chicago house, etc. There's a lot of good music here, beginning with Sun Ra, Curtis Mayfield, passing by Aphex Twin, and ending up with Timo Lassy and James Mason. He throws in one original track too. More information here.

Definitely worth the $10. Get it on iTunes here.

A Whisper In The Noise

A Whisper In the Noise, a band from Minneapolis-St. Paul, has a new album out called To Forget. Here is the track "Black Shroud."

Greil Marcus

In the Spring of 2001, I was the TA for an undergraduate course called "The Roots of Rock'n'Roll" which was one of the best experiences of my life. (Long story). But either way, one of the things the professor (who profoundly influenced me in many ways that he probably doesn't know) assigned for the class was Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (which was republished later as The Old, Weird America). Now, I had never heard Dylan's Basement Tapes, and to tell you the truth, I still haven't really heard it that well--I couldn't tell you much about it. But I do know that Marcus' writings about these recordings by Dylan and the Band in 1967 tapped into something that I was struggling to pinpoint for a long time, particularly what it is about "America" that has so drawn me over the years. As an immigrant to these shores, it's a question that often pops up. I think most Caucasian Americans reflexively assume that people come to America for "freedom" or "economic opportunity" or similar notions. But my journey was determined by neither. Sure, I came here for an education but at some deeper level, what is important is why I chose to stay here. And that has to do with the standard of living, yes, but at least 50% of it is something more ineffable and intangible, something to do with American culture. It's not as simple as "popular culture"--most of American popular culture is patently horrible, self-centered, and execrable, but some of it has been deeply meaningful to me. And the culture that has been meaningful spans high and low and middlebrow, it is everything from Television (the band) to television (the object), everything from Joseph Heller to Flipper, from Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On' " to the Books' Lemon of Pink, from John Kennedy Toole to the B-52's "My Own Private Idaho."

Anyway, Marcus was one of two American music writers that have meant a lot to this journey of mine (the other being, of course, the GREATEST rock'n'roll writer of all time, Lester Bangs), partly because of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, a history book with a provocative structure and claim. I had read Lipstick Traces for the first time in college in the late 1980s, and like Invisible Republic, it also forced me to think in entirely new ways about things, in this case, about the writing and recording of history. In the book, Marcus connected seemingly disparate moments in twentieth century culture (Dada, Letterist International, the Situationists at Paris '68, the Modern Lovers and the Sex Pistols, etc.) to construct an entirely different history of the twentieth century. His claim was that the orthodox notion of history--big events, cataclysms, wars, politicians, social upheavals, generational changes, Elvis, Beatles, feminism, etc.--only tell one layer of history. Look beneath all of this stuff and you'll find another entirely different story. And to reconstruct this other history (or in this case "secret history") you have to make connections that are not at all obvious. Marcus begins with punk, particularly the Sex Pistols, but then the proto-garage-punk of the Modern Lovers but then begins to construct an entirely surprising history of cultural "refusals" that veers into all sorts of unexpected places. The blurb at Harvard University Press notes:

This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands—demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday life—seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris—based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and ’60s; the rioting students and workers of May ’68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen."

It's undoubtedly one of the most ambitious books on music ever written but it is also an unabashedly innovative work of cultural history. It's not an easy read but well worth if if you are interested in how culture can have as much power as politics or wars or technologies.

I mention Marcus today because Simon Reynolds (another great music writer, a British transplant who lives in LA now) recently interviewed Greil Marcus for the Los Angeles Review of Books. The first of four lengthy excerpts is now on-line. Well worth the read if you are interested in the history of popular music.

Pinback

This is (a slightly edited) review of a Pinback show in Boston, May 26, 2005, originally published in 2005 here:

I showed up late for the show because an old friend was in town visiting. Was torn between wanting to see her and wanting to see the band. I opted to do both and missed out equally on both ends. This was the first time I saw Pinback and they looked nothing like I'd expected of them. I'd expected some college rock types with glasses and self-conscious artfulness; I got a Black Francis-like lead singer wearing a Black Flag t-shirt with a chain to his wallet. They looked even less like people who are in a band called Goblin Cock, which believe it or not, they are. (They actually released an album titled Bagged and Boarded last year. Check out the album cover). By the time I got to the [Pinback] show, I missed some of the best songs (including my favorite "Soaked," a song that could have been a megahit in 1974 for some brutha from Philadelphia) but I did catch "Fortress," a track guaranteed to drill its melody deep into your brain for eternity the moment the air around your ears vibrates the tune into you. The recent album, Summer in Abbadon, is brilliant pop, one of the best albums of the past five years, but the show itself—perhaps because I was caught between half-seeing an old friend and half-seeing a great band—was underwhelming. They were clearly brilliant instrumentalists, effortlessly playing extraordinarily intricate arrangements and a dizzying array of instruments, and harmonizing as if channeling Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison on Rubber Soul. At the show, they were selling copies of a new e.p., Too Many Shadows, which contained new songs as good as those on Abbadon, brilliant songs which no one will ever hear or care about, their obscurity consigning them to a line in some unclicked link on an indie music website from the first decade of this century. What a wonderful band.

Halcyon + On + On

Back when I moved to New York in 2001, there used to be a DJ/bar/cafe called Halcyon on 227 Smith Street (in Cobble Hill) in Brooklyn. I used to go there a lot, check out new techno records, chill out and drink with friends. I was young, I think. Good times. It closed at some point, I don't know when, maybe in 2004? Everything ends. My trips to Brooklyn became infrequent.

I don't know what the bar Halcyon was named after, but perhaps it was named after "Halcyon + On + On," the beautiful track by Orbital, a band that has burrowed deep into my consciousness over the past 15 or so years. It's hard for me to remember exactly when and where I first heard the music of Orbital but it was probably in 1996 when I randomly picked up a cassette of their most recent album In Sides. It was one of those purchases without any foreknowledge or warning, having heard nothing of their music. My red pickup truck had no stereo so I would plug in my cassette walkman into my ears and after a few plays, the album began to seep into skin. It was a sprawling 72 minute opus that began with a ten-and-a-half minute spectacular wake-you-in-morning epic track called "The Girl with the Sun In Her Head," dedicated to one Sally Harding, a journalist/photographer who had recently passed away. The track began with percussive (heart)beats that exploded into synth runs like sunshine bursting through the clouds; it was recorded using only electricity from a Greenpeace solar power generator.

For the next few years, I would make innumerable (perhaps more than a hundred) road trips from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and back, and In Sides would be the perfect soundtrack to begin the trip, as I slowly wound myself onto the Pennsylvania turnpike. Like almost all other Orbital albums, the first and last tracks were just magnificent, rolling instrumental techno masterpieces that seemed to uncoil and unfold into mysterious places. If electronic dance music had ever reached nirvana, this was it. It wasn't the four-on-the-floor techno that was beginning to dominate English electronic dance music of the period; it was slower than drum-and-bass (remember drum-and-bass?), much more pop, more transcendent, if possible.

Orbital were/are two English brothers (Phil and Paul Hartnoll) who emerged from the late '80s English rave scene, but were influenced by punk, hip hop, early electro, and '80s pop. Their nineties albums, in my mind, still remain the pinnacle of fantastic dance pop, not the slightest bit dated.

Having first devoured In Sides, I started to make my way back in the Orbital catalog, first to Snivilisation (1994) and then to Orbital II (1993), very very different records, but both with spectacular opening and closing tracks and delicious fillings.

I was lucky to see Orbital in concert (on October 12, 2001, Philadelphia) and although I showed up alone, it was one of the most happy concert experiences I've ever had. Without knowing anyone in the audience, I felt an (embarrassingly hippie-esque) communal bond with the crowd. The two brothers on stage had headsets with tiny twin headlights; they seemed like little alien robots on stage.

Orbital's latter output (The Middle of Nowhere in 1999, The Altogether in 2001, and The Blue Album in 2004) were all surprisingly underwhelming. They weren't bad, but they lacked killer melodies: a few good ideas stretched to the limit. (But perhaps I need to go back and revisit those albums.) Either way, Orbital took a looooong hiatus, almost a decade long, and is now back with a new album, Wonky, which just came out a few days ago. I'm so fucking excited. By all preliminary reports, the album is fantastic, comparing remarkably well to their nineties heyday without sounding dated. [See effusive reviews in The Quietus, Drowned In Sound, and Pitchfork.]

Here then are two tracks. The first is "New France" off the new album.



The second track below is "Halcyon + On + On," my vote for one of the best musical pieces of all time. "Halcyon" was originally released on the Radiccio EP in late 1992 but later completely revamped, remixed, and redone as "Halcyon + On + On" as the final musical track on Orbital II. What it became, in the process, was one of the most sublime pieces of music ever put to tape, the kind of music specially made for traveling into space, or falling in love, or watching a child smile, or hearing rain fall, or any number of corny/cheesy experiences from the world of Hallmark sentimentality. Sure, it's sentimental, but tell me, was sentiment ever expressed so beautifully?

Deerhunter / Atlas Sound / Lotus Plaza

I know I often write about the band Deerhunter in this here blog but for some reason the past years I've been coming back to them over and over. They're a 4-piece band originally from Atlanta, Ga., more or less "led" by a guy named Bradford Cox who play a mix of 60s pop, shoegaze, punk, whatever. They write great pop songs, always well arranged and played. I came to them late (as I usually do with music), around the end of 2008 when I was living in Boston (actually Cambridge). I was there for a fellowship or something that I only dimly remember now.

Either way, the walk from my apartment to campus was nice, especially on the cold snowy mornings. And Deerhunter would frequently pop up on my headphones. At that time I still had a habit of making mixes to sample new music. I started this habit about 10 years ago when I still made mix CDs (CDs!) but at some point, they just became iPod playlists and on Mix 27, there were two songs by Deerhunter, one called "Nothing Ever Happened," originally from the album Microcastle. The studio version is a rocking rush of a song. As Bradford Cox sings, he evokes late 1960s psychedelia in the melody, but by the end of the song, it moves slowly into early 1990s shoegaze: a hypnotic metronomic beat with rushes of glide guitar envelops you. Those two styles pretty much sum up many of their songs: 60s perfect pop and 90s fuzzy guitar. On "Nothing Ever Happened," the two styles clash and race ahead with urgency leaving you almost breathless. I always got to campus faster when that song came on.

Since Microcastle (my top album of 2008), Deerhunter has released another album, Halcyon Digest (my top album of 2010), also filled with an amazing number of pop goodies, like songs made of candy. My favorite song from the recent album was "Desire Lines," written actually by the lead guitarist of the band (and all around shy dude) with the unlikely name Lockett Pundt. Like many good Deerhunter songs, it begins as a perfect pop song, and then moves into being a mood piece of guitar and chimes. Pundt's modus operandi seems to be bliss-through-repetition and that ethic is clearly on display in the last few minutes of "Desire Lines." Here is the song performed live in the studio. Pundt is the guy singing on the right.



Both Pundt and especially Cox have had pretty prolific "solo" careers outside of Deerhunter. Cox is a man driven by some ineffable need to constantly write and record music. At one point, be posted four volumes of demos of songs on his blog entitled "Bedroom Databank." I think a lot of other contemporary songwriters would kill to be possessed of that kind of prolific creativity. The fact that he has a genetic disorder known as Marfan syndrome (and also probably the fact that he's gay) would seem to suggest a certain outsider status that informs his songwriting. He seems to have a vast knowledge about the history and mythology of rock'n'roll and you can argue that that kind of thing can make your music too calculated and contrived, but his undeniable musical talent makes up for that. Cox calls his solo act Atlas Sound; as Atlas Sound he's released a bunch of albums, all of them worth hearing. They're a bit more experimental than Deerhunter, less unified, more bedroom-ish electropop. Here are two songs. The first is from Logos (2009) and is a song called "Quick Canal." On lead vocals is Laetitia Sadier, one of the main forces behind the French band Stereolab. The song recalls some of Sadier's best Stereolab work and is (nearly) 9 minutes of electrobliss:



And here is Bradford Cox playing the song "Te Amo" live during a radio broadcast. The song is from the most recent Atlas Sound called Parallax, released last year.



Which brings me back to the aforementioned Lockett Pundt, who has just released a new album under the his solo career moniker Lotus Plaza. The new album is called Spooky Action at a Distance is getting some good reviews. I just got it myself and have only heard it a couple of times, and what I hear I am loving. Here is the song "Strangers" from it, evocative of 1980s jangle pop and shoegaze. Takes me back to 1989 and... um that adolescent state of pining for pretty hipster girls:



And finally, finally, let us return to Deerhunter's "Nothing Ever Happened," the first song by the band I ever heard on those walks to campus in Cambridge in late 2008. Deerhunter is good on record but they kick some major ass on stage. Here is the live version of the song, transformed into a frenetic and mesmerizing epic. You can see the band playing like a well-oiled machine that seems to teeter on the edge of total collapse. As the song rises into hallucinogenic psychedelia in the latter part, Cox begins to sing/talk the lyrics to Patti Smith's classic "Land" from Horses.

Eple

It was an innocent time, 2005. I saw Royksopp in concert. (My review here). The soundtrack to happiness. I just figured out that "eple" means "apple"in Norwegian.

Tennis as Text

Back when Roger Federer was at the peak of his abilities as a tennis player and was speedily breaking through every tennis record known to humankind, David Foster Wallace wrote a piece on Federer for the New York Times. This was in 2006, when Wallace was.... well, he was alive for a start. He was 44 years old and it had been ten years since the publication of his greatest novel Infinite Jest. An incredibly ambitious work that operates on several meta-levels between fiction and non-fiction, this book, footnoted to death, was considered by some in the list of top 100 works of "fiction" written in the English language in the previous 75 years or so. Wikipedia describes it thus:

[a] lengthy and complex work [that] takes place in a semi-parodic future version of North America and touches on tennis, substance addiction and recovery programs, depression, child abuse, family relationships, advertising and popular entertainment, film theory, and Quebec separatism... The novel includes 388 numbered endnotes (some of which have footnotes of their own) that explain or expound on points in the story. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Wallace characterized their use as a method of disrupting the linearity of the text while maintaining some sense of narrative cohesion.

Wallace went on to much fame. He even received the MacArthur Foundation grant, the so-called genius award, but he never finished another novel. He did, however, write quite a bit of short non-fiction, including about Federer and tennis, more broadly. In 2006, I wasn't paying that much attention to tennis. I think I may have heard of Federer at the time but I'm not sure I had any sense of his capabilities or where he fit into the pantheon. I used to be a tennis freak, as in, I obsessively watched tennis on TV as a young kid (couldn't play worth a damn) but sometime during the reign of Pete Sampras, I basically lost all interest. Something about his game (or perhaps his personality) dampened my enthusiasm for the game, and if there was a sport I followed at all in the early 2000s, it was basketball, inspired to some degree by a stint living in Philadelphia and watching the 76ers. Remember Allen Iverson?

Sports writing as a genre is largely a dull breed of writing. But something about Wallace's writing was intriguing. His peculiar choice of diction, his language, his circuitous description of Federer mimicked Federer's play itself. It's supremely elegant and effective but you don't know how he did it. The essay, recently republished in an anthology was described by its editors as one that "still stands as one of the most stirring, illuminating essays ever written about the beauty of sports at its highest level." In time, Wallace's essay itself has assumed a strange iconic significance, with other people writing essays about his essay, especially after Wallace committed suicide in September 2008.

For some reason, I'm really not sure why, sometime around early 2008, I began to watch a lot of tennis. I saw the Australian Open which I think was in January and noticed this guy Roger Federer. He didn't win it, nor did he with the subsequent French Open a few months later. But soon after, there was the epic battle between Federer and his then arch rival Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon. It was July 2008, and I was visiting a friend in San Francisco. It was a spectacular final that Sunday, some claiming the greatest tennis match ever played. Somebody's even written a book--an entire book!--about that match. Watching Federer that year, a year when he was ostensibly in decline, I found myself drawn to tennis again.

All sports have knowledge systems that undergird them. For the laypublic, especially men, sports operates at the level of minutae: scores, averages, statistics, and so on. There's a lot of that in tennis too, of course, but there's also an ineffably individualistic quality about tennis that sets it apart from other popular sports of today. When you are on the court, there is no one but you. There is no coach, no helmet, no protective padding, no fellow players, no special costume: it is just you and a tennis racket. There's something both humanistic and animalistic in that ritual. What I think Federer did for the game was to infuse the loneliness of the tennis player with an inextricable naturalness. People talk about his grace, and yes, he is graceful, but he also seems to operate at a level where the science of angles and velocities disappear into mystery. His playing is both mysterious but utterly within reach. He makes it look easy enough that you, yes you, could do it if you just swung the racket in the right direction.

Wallace's writing about Federer captured that quality more precisely than anything I've ever read, indeed anything I've read about any sports. There's a lovely part where Wallace notes:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war. The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body. 

Of course, in men's sports no one talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their "love" of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalistic fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's. You too may find them so, in which case Spain's mesomorphic and totally martial Rafael Nadal is the man's man for you---he of the unsleeved biceps and Kabuki self-exhortations.

Oddly enough, since 2008, when I found myself interested in Federer, he has been in a slow decline. After winning five Wimbledon championships in a row, he lost to Nadal in the finals in July 2008. Coincidentally, few months later, David Foster Wallace killed himself. In the last years of his life, Wallace had struggled to finish his second novel. In a lengthy post-mortem on Wallace published in the New Yorker a year after his death, the author, D. T. Max, recalled the outpouring of sadness from the literary world at Wallace's death:

He was only forty-six when he killed himself, which helped explain the sense of loss readers and critics felt. There was also Wallace's outsized passion for the printed word at at time when it looked like it needed champions. His novels were overstuffed with facts, humor, digressions, silence, and sadness. He conjured the world in two-hundred word sentences that mixed formal diction and street slang, technicalese and plain speech; his prose slid forward with a controlled lack of control that mimed through itself.

Was there some weird inexplicable parallel between the talents of Wallace and Federer? Probably not. But the fact that one provided a window into the beauty of the other, brought into relief for me the very primal link between words and bodies. When we watch the theater of sports, we are at once celebrating the physicality of the human body and at the same time reading the body.

Since 2008, Roger Federer has had a reasonably successful career as a tennis player. While he has never managed to (re)attain the halcyon heights of his peak level between 2004 to 2007, he remains very much in the mix as one of the best tennis players. If he has been eclipsed at the top by Nadal and Novak Djokovic, he still retains his odd capacity to create movement--kinetic beauty--on the tennis court bar none. As a 'real' person, he remains oddly sterile, someone who is probably rather well-intentioned and polite, but not terribly interesting, but more than a bit self-involved. He reminds me a little bit of people like Kanye West: incredibly talented, unduly self-absorbed, and and possessed of some questionable aesthetic choices.

In the past few months suddenly, Federer has been on the rise again. He has won six of the eight tournaments he has entered, the last won being a major tournament played at Indian Wells in California. The above picture is from the final match played last Sunday when he beat John Isner, an American player, in straight sets. Something about that picture, for a brief moment, reminded me of David Foster Wallace. If you could disassemble that picture and abstract those pieces into words, you might get something akin to Wallace's essay. Mysterious, confounding, elegant, humanistic, animalistic, contradictory, beautiful.

Read it here.

25 Most Original Films of All Time

PaperStreetCinema posted the top 25 most original movies of all time. The list (below) suggests that there's some overlap between "original" and "influential." I think it's easier to measure the latter but more difficult to measure the former. "Influential" basically means that the movie in question incorportaed stylistic features that later repeatedly showed up in later films. You could also measure "influential" by reading interviews with directors and getting a rough estimate of how many times directors tend to invoke particular movies. "Original" is a different matter. It's really about creating new idioms, new languages of film.

Here is PaperStreetCinema's list. My comments are in red.

1. Citizen Kane (Welles)
1. Birth of a Nation (Griffith) --Tied with Citizen Kane. Every movie made since Griffith and Welles has been inextricably influenced by both in equal measure. No film since has added much more to the medium than what's in these two. They are cinema's most basic building blocks.
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
This would have been my number 1.
4. Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
5. Pulp Fiction (Tarentino) --The most groundbreaking screenplay/dialogue of all time.
6. Star Wars (Lucas)
Influential or original? I tend to think more influential. Star Wars inaugurated the era of big budget special effects sci-fi/fantasy popcorn blockbusters. But was it original? Star Wars took bits and pieces of everything from Greek tragedies Hindu mythology, cowboys-and-Indians movies, the Bible, Flash Gordon, and Freud, added some operatic overtones, and put the whole thing in space. Maybe Lucas' genius was to mix all of this stuff into a greater whole?
7. Fantasia (Disney)
8. Rashomon (Kurosawa)
Yes, for sure.
9. Jaws (Spielberg) --one of my favorite films but I would argue that Spielberg ruined Hollywood by creating the "event movie" phenomenon (Lucas shares the blame too).
This is definitely original. I think the modern special effects thriller was born here.
10. Toy Story (Lassiter)
Good call.
11. Die Hard (McTiernan) --yes, really.
What?
12. The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (Wiene)
13. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
14. The Last Laugh (Murnau)
15. Blade Runner (Scott)
Yes, most definitely.
16. Cleopatra (Mankiewicz) --Groundbreaking in the sense that it single-handedly ended the classic Hollywood generation.
Again, are we talking landmark or original?
17. Night of the Living Dead (Romero) The first significant independent film.
Probably my number 2.
18. Batman (Burton)
19. A Trip to the Moon (Méliès)
Yes, absolutely.
20. Psycho (Hitchcock)
21. Stagecoach (Ford)
22. Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel/Dali)
23. Metropolis (Lang)
Again, essential in the "original" category.
24. Halloween (Carpenter)
25. The Blair Witch Project (Myrick/Sanchez)
I'm not a fan of this movie but I can see this.

Others for consideration: Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick) for its ground-breaking combination of satire, apocalypse, realism, and alternate reality. Also: Alien (Scott) for its original contribution of the alien archetype, the class warfare on the ship, and grunt protagonists, etc.. Can any other sci-fi movie ever claim such originality? Other possible candidates: Manhattan and/or Annie Hall (for its combination of comedy and meta dialogue with the audience). Also The Player (Altman)? Russian Ark (Sokurov)? Rope (Hitchcock)?

Besides

For some reason, as long as I have owned music, I've fetishized the rare. Here, "rare"is a relative term, for the quality of being "rare" (let's call it "rarity") is a slippery term, often carefully constructed by corporations and faceless musical conglomerates. But conceding that the whole edifice of the music industry is built around interventions designed to create consumer demand for useless things, I'll argue that there was something oddly attractive about rare musical artifacts: b-sides, alternate versions released specially for the Belgian market, extra tracks on Japanese releases, EPs that had been deleted and never included on a proper album, singles released on 45s that never made it onto CDs, etc.

In the late 1980s, as I grew to be a collector (or maybe a Collector), these sorts of stray songs, the ones left behind, assumed a sort of mystical quality in my imagination. I had to track them all down, even if I had to make friends in Belgium. I'm thinking of bands like the Smiths who not only released albums but also numerous singles which had songs that were never included (at least originally) on the proper albums. How did bands make these choices, what to keep on the album and what to leave off? I was recently listening to one of my favorite Smiths songs "William, It Was Really Nothing" which was originally released as a single in August 1984. The song was not originally featured on any album, i.e., the only way to get it and listen to it was to buy the 45 rpm single. And if you bought the 12" version of the single, you got a special treat, two songs on the b-side: "How Soon Is Now?" and "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want." What kind of a band would relegate such fantastic songs as forgotten b-sides?

Soon enough, of course, all three of these songs appeared on various Smiths compilations (and believe me, there are far too many to recount), but every band, however famous, always had a few tracks, lost to the world, lost to the general public. You had to be a bit industrious to track these songs down. If you lived in Texas, you might go to Sound Exchange or that big store in Austin. Because these "rare" purchases were rather expensive, you felt that you had to invest some time and attention to the songs you bought, even if they were mediocre (which they were, half the time). I remember buying Love and Rockets' "So Alive" as a 45 in 1989, and listening excitedly to the b-side, "Dreamtime" an absurdly bizarre (and let's face it, bad song). If you paid a lot of money for it, you forced yourself to appreciate the b-side.

But some bands in the 1980s took a lot of care and effort into these stray tracks. The Smiths of course, whose "Jeane" (the b-side of "This Charming Man") has been lost forever but was undoubtedly one of the best songs they ever recorded. And there was a certain kind of fetishistic joy I got simply from listening to these experiments in sound from bands like the Smiths, U2, the Cure, Flaming Lips, My Bloody Valentine, and so on.

Today I present five randomly chosen b-sides from the 1980s. The first is from a classic middlebrow easy listening band (and now firmly in the playing-in-the-doctors-office-waiting-room category), Tears for Fears. In March 1985, the band released "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (which I still love); but if you bought the 45 and flipped it over and played the b-side, what you got was a strange sound collage called "Pharoahs," a truly mesmerizing piece of 1980s-period experimental pop. If you listen to it carefully (at about 2:20), the band plays the exact guitar solo (one of my all time favorite guitar solos, actually) that is featured on the a-side. Play it. You'll recognize it. Simply fantastic:



The next one is from U2's single "When Love Comes to Town" (a frankly terrible song) released in April 1989. The b-side, however, is a song called "Dancing Barefoot," originally written and performed by Patti Smith on her album Wave from 1979. I had never heard the Patti Smith version when I heard U2 do it, and it's an understatement to say that it blew my mind. It's rare that U2 performs as a rock band--they're usually so overproduced (which I think, is the point of latter day U2)--but here they sound raw and just a band jamming, trying to find new spaces out of old chords.



The third one is a song by Siouxsie & the Banshees, originally released on the b-side of the 12" of "This Wheel's On Fire" in January 1987. The a-side was a (Bob Dylan) cover but the b-side had two originals, both of which were stellar. Here is "Sleepwalking (On The High Wire)," a strangely evocative song about God knows what. The production is dated, of course, but the mood is still powerful, emotionally taut.



The fourth one is "Erotic City," the b-side to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" from July 1984. I couldn't find the 7" version on youtube so here is the extended version in all its seven-and-a-half minute glory. This may be the best dance song Prince ever released; it's certainly in my list of the top 10 best dance songs of all time. Unbelievable genius.



Finally, we have, as (implicitly) promised, "Jeane."

We tried and we failed
We tried and we failed
We tried and we failed
Jeane

Originally released in October 1983, somehow the song got lost in the shuffle, missing a spot on various compilations. The song is ostensibly a subtle but powerful comment on Thatcherite England and the ways in which money (or lack of money) can tear even the best relationships apart. But you know, even if you know nothing about Thatcher or early 1980s England, it doesn't matter. The song just summarizes a lost cause relationship with economic precision. Here is the original version:



Here is a cover by Sandie Shaw (from April 1984) backed by Morrissey and Marr, who were big fans of Shaw and who invited her to do a cover.