Browsed by
Category: Music

The Alien Suggests a Song

The Alien Suggests a Song

We live in a towering multiplex, on a shining hill, the Alien and I. And for the last several years, we’ve enjoyed the sights and sounds here, for the most part, living so close to the heavens, able to touch the clouds on certain days.

But along with those breathtaking moments, and those white, fluffy clouds, we’ve had to, on occasion, deal with some rather obnoxious neighbors now and then. Loud, boastful, given to incessant claims without the slightest merit, these neighbors appear all too certain in their ugly wrongheadedness, which continuously puzzles and worries the Alien.

He struggles mightily to reconcile all of this with our landscapes, earthly arts and sciences, and he wishes our neighbors would read Wittgenstein, and heed the ending of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

Not long after this remembrance of Viennese wisdom, a spark of inspiration hit me. Perhaps it was the good red wine. Perhaps it was the cloudless day and the radiant sunshine that reflected the best we can be. I introduced him to the music of Ray Charles. We listened to several of his songs, and laughed merrily when we happened upon this one.

So it was settled. This would be our gift to our neighbors, when they finally leave the tower:

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein, who may well have been an Alien too, died in 1951, ten years before Ray Charles recorded Percy Mayfield’s song. My good friend believes that creative sparks never die, and time, as we earthlings perceive it, is an illusion. I like to think they all knew each other well, in life, in death, or in the Bardo.

 

Phoebe Freakin’ Bridgers Knows the End is Here

Phoebe Freakin’ Bridgers Knows the End is Here

Catharsis. We always need at least a bit. In recent times, in the light and darkness of current events, the degree of need has elevated, worldwide, to levels (perhaps) previously unknown. Because along with the endless crises of war, and war, and more war, hunger, homelessness, poverty, and environmental destruction, we also have a pandemic in the mix, and a politics of fear and division that seems to have taken over most of the world.

As is usually the case when perfect storms are raging, we get a lot of people telling us what we really need right now, the special something to at least temporarily alleviate said crises. I’m guilty of such (annoying) gestures at times too, but I won’t be in this particular point in the space/time discontinuum. I will say, however, that I’d strongly suggest . . . it’s just a suggestion, mindya . . . that we may well benefit from some Phoebe Fucking Bridgers (the brilliant and oh so timely name of her website), especially this song/lament/journey/dystopian shock show right now.

It’s Catharsis × 10, as well as being strangely, beautifully vulnerable, edgy, laden with contradictions and just plain old original. In other words, she rocks:

 

Zeitgeist Voices Figure it Out

Zeitgeist Voices Figure it Out

Fiona Apple really doesn’t care what you think of her. Well, that’s the impression I get when I consider the way she handled her early stardom, back in 1996, and the fact she’s only put out four albums since then. Her most recent, Fetch The Bolt Cutters, released this past spring, seems as fresh as her first, penned when she was 17, 18 and 19. Back then, she seemed like a unicorn of sorts, bold, but vulnerable, classically trained, but willing to step out and away from tradition. And she could scat. She could jazz it up and still sound like the newest, coolest woman on the block. Actually, not just new — beautifully strange.

“Under the Table”

So when I heard her song on the radio, I didn’t even know it was Fiona Apple, but I did think it was something new, fresh, and influenced by Fiona Apple. Why did the chords, the bridges, the runs hit me that way? Primarily because Gen Z and Millennial singers, especially the women, love to scat. They love to run words into one another like there’s too much in their heads in need of quick release, and far too little time to do so. Perhaps. Maybe. And then they chill. And then they scat again. Chill. Scat. They do Ella, and then Nick Drake it. Bebop to Hip Hop and somewhere altogether different.

“Figure it Out”

Listening to a local alternative radio station, Blu DeTiger caught my ear, sounding like the current manifestation of the Zeitgeist in several ways. All of 21, she scats too, vocally and with her bass, and her lyrics throw a mix at my ears of fatalism, damage, stoicism and cool. It’s impossibly understated. Humbly confident. Blu “made the scene” as a DJ first, played bass, OTJ, “graduated” to Tik Tok, and now she’s full-fledged. I think she and Fiona should make records together. Pass the torch!

Out of the darkness, into the light

Out of the darkness, into the light

Are there such things as “generations,” and if there are, can they have a conscience? Can they have voices that represent those consciences?
I’m not sure about the first question, though I have my doubts. Far too many variables and feedback loops. But I’ll say yes for now and posit this: For the young at heart in the 1960s and 1970s, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young certainly qualified, as did Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, Melanie, Cat Stevens and, of course, the Beatles.

The young, back then, actually looked to songwriters for inspiration, messages, a Way. They actually cared enough about what they said to act physically on the song’s behalf. On the word’s behalf. To make it their own or share it with friends, or both at the same time. And if they were really lucky, they got to see their prophets in concert, hopefully at their peak, and they could dance the song into being in still another sense, kinetically, and share that too.
Carry On sounds to me like a message of hope for the shipwrecked, a call to awaken from one’s slumbering drift, alone at sea, alone anywhere. Perhaps the way CSNY crafted the song — written by Stephen Stills to open the Deja Vu album — has something to do with that too. The way they jammed. Their improv methods. Dallas Taylor, in the liner notes (1991 box set release):

“The song was written in the middle of the Deja Vu sessions, when Nash told Stephen they still didn’t have an opener for the album. It was something of a message to the group, since it had become a real struggle to keep the band together at that point. Stephen combined two unfinished songs and stuck them onto a jam we’d had out in the studio a few nights before, me on drums and Stephen on a Hammond B-3 organ. As the track begins I’m playing bass drums and high hat, and Graham is playing congas. Then we go into a 6/8 groove, which is rather obscure – Stephen loved to change gears that way. The sessions would go on all night, sometimes 3 or 4 days non-stop. The thing I loved about the studio was you could never tell if it was day or night, and we hid all the clocks so no one knew what time it was.”

Who speaks for the young at heart today? Who is the voice for the rising generations? I have no idea. But I do know we likely need songs of peace, love and reconciliation now more than ever. And there’s always room for hope.

Understated Angelic Choirs in Cynicstan

Understated Angelic Choirs in Cynicstan

Some things are meant to be in pairs. They’re meant to be twinned, coupled, one and one. Not because dualism wins. Not because we’ve lost out to dualism, in all of its permutations. After all, it’s dualistic to think in terms of the pairs and us, of the pairs not existing and us. Even of the need for pairs in this world, as if it isn’t already that way, and so.
 
Fix You and Run, by Coldplay and Snow Patrol, respectively, form such a pair for me. They belong to a category I’ve just invented, stolen from myself, stolen from a non-dualistic sphere, or from someone within it. No. It’s no one’s category, really. As long as no one grasps, it’s no one’s.

Official Video of Fix You, by Coldplay. 2005

Fix You is a song of rescue and healing, ostensibly. But because we live in Cynicstan, that can’t be. It’s not allowed. It has to have loud guitars here and there, to make up for the beautiful organ and piano, the falsetto, the words of light, hope and home. We need this or we’ll overdose. We’ve come too far. We’ve come much too far for this sort of thing . . .

Setting part of the video at a concert is a form of rescue from the rescue. This turns cynicism on its head, because how can we argue with huge crowds coming together, paired in song, paired in a kind of love — for the music, each other, the band, the idea of resolutions in the night?

And I imagine the marvelous feeling of the band as they let the beautiful, dizzying crowds sing the song for them, how that must feel, down deep, the revelation of thousands knowing your work by heart, caring enough about it to sing like that, to merge with the idea of resolution and restoration.

In Snow Patrol’s video of Run, the healing takes place apart somehow, while in the same setting, or so we think until the end is nigh. The band appears in concert, but to no one, to an empty audience, to an empty hall, and part of the song’s lyrics reflect this emptiness when it admits that the object of love, the person in need of saving, of rescue, may not be able to hear the singer at all — his talk of light and love.

But it doesn’t matter either way.

And then I wonder, How does this affect the twinning? What if it were reversed, with Fix You sung to no one, and Run to everyone?
I don’t really need to know. It’s not important in this world. What matters is that we can still find it in ourselves to think about this kind of thing, this reaching out, as knights on a mission to save — one thing, two things, everything. What really matters is that there are sparks that connect us, and at all points along the way. They start somewhere below angelic choirs and rise, understated, humbled through the millennia, and we’re still here.
 

Anonymous Within Bright Lights, Big City

Anonymous Within Bright Lights, Big City

Gary Clark Jr. is one of those guitarists other guitarists, and musicians in general, just love. Just love to be on stage with. Born in Austin, Texas, in 1984, he quickly gained a reputation as one of the finest guitar players of his generation. In 2011, Rolling Stone named him “Best Young Gun.” Extreme skills on that instrument, even after some 60 years of Rock N Roll, still carry a great deal of weight. And when they’re Bluesy and Root’s based, they tend to garner even more respect.

 

The lyrics for the above song, from his 2012 album, Blak and Blu, seem to contest their own ground, with an ironic subtext of famous people singing about anonymity, demanding to be known by name, assuring they will before the night is through. The cool confidence and self-assured performance deepens this contradiction, and the edgy belief in the power of one’s own skills cuts across many realms.

The protagonist of the song may have a host of other things in mind beyond great guitar playing and carving out his moment of fame before the dawn. His vision of New York may be nothing like we imagine or assume it must be. Listening to the song or watching a live performance may give us a false sense of the character narrating his experience. But we the audience don’t have to care if we get it right. We don’t have to know the complete biography of the man in question, which is one of the beauties of Rock to begin with. It says so much without saying anything at all.

But still the interpretations linger, undercut or buttressed by the propulsive beat and electronic machinations. But the driving rhythms tell us to stay on track, more or less, to take it all at face value, and stop overthinking it all. This is about launching a new career, conquering a new town and the people one meets in the night — if the riffs speak the truth. If the buzz is as it appears to be.

New York City has long had a reputation as the Big Test for musicians, actors, artists and writers. If you can make it there . . . and so on. But the concentrated madness of the Big City seems like an especially tough nut to crack for a niche guitarist, fighting through a first night of alcoholic fog and shockingly bright lights that really can’t compete with the darkness of the unknown. As metaphor, as allegory, even as morality tale, a Bluesy, edgy guitar solo can cut straight through all of that in seconds, illuminating the darkness and standing up to those bright lights unlike most other art forms. Music as obsessive dynamite, midnight Ferrari or tropical machete. But one’s precise aim is paramount.

As long as there is a Big City, wave after wave of young people and the young at heart will try to conquer it. Always. There is no “right way” to do this, but hard-edged and ferocious sonic vibrations, thrown with easy confidence at its massive buildings, may be the fastest.

 

 

 

 

MUNA: Lay Down Your Weapon

MUNA: Lay Down Your Weapon

The young are lucky in so many ways. They haven’t seen too many expressions of youth. They haven’t passed through the labyrinth yet, looked back on their younger years, looked back on it again and again. If they try — better yet, if they don’t — they can be who they are, who they really are inside, without being crushed by the world and the idea that it’s all been done before. It has. Kinda. But not really. It hasn’t until they’ve spoken. Until they’ve sung. Year after year, it’s always new for the young. For another generation to take its turn falling through, running through, walking through the labyrinth.

But for some young people, it’s not just the usual obstacles. It’s breaking free of societal constraints, of stupidly absurd and arbitrary constraints, above and beyond the usual stupidly absurd and arbitrary constraints hurled at the young by the old at heart. For reasons that defy all reason, and all true “morality,” which is really nothing more than kindness in the flesh, flesh and blood kindness to all humans, to all of Nature, and to the future. True morality is just that: kindness, generosity of spirit, compassion, sympathy, empathy, and when we toss those aside, we’re “immoral,” even if our texts tell us we must. Because the old — or the old at heart — wrote those texts, the ones that impose those arbitrary, patently cruel constraints on others, and it’s immoral to continue doing so. It’s a thousand times unkind. Let them be.

Let them be who they are. Be moral. Be kind. And just listen.

MUNA – I Know A Place

Classic Contrapuntal: Panic at the Disco

Classic Contrapuntal: Panic at the Disco

Some songs follow a course that makes sense, mathematically. As if someone raises a hand, lowers it, raises it higher again, and forms a pattern you can count on, anticipicate. You basically can hear the next movement in your head before it happens, but that’s not a bad thing, or a boring thing, if the music can match emotion with the math.

Panic at the Disco, a Vegas band I had not bumped into until this year, does that with their song, “Death of a Bachelor,” from their new album by the same name. Though it might not be accurate to call “them” a band any longer. This album appears to be the work of its lone original member (from its inception in 2004), vocalist Brendon Urie, though one could say the band’s lineup is still in flux. Regardless, the new album is basically his baby, and the man can sang it!

In a 2015 interview with Alt 98.7, Urie said “It’s going to be a little bit different, it’s this mix between Sinatra and Queen, if that makes any sense.” It does. Speaking on the day of its release, Urie paid homage to Sinatra: “His music has been a major player in the soundtrack of my life. So it’s only right that I return the favor and/or pay it forward. I wrote a new album this year and even in the few songs that don’t sound remotely similar to any of his music I still felt his influence in the writing and the need to relate so personally to each song. “Death Of A Bachelor” is very important to me. It expresses the bittersweet (but mostly sweet) end of an era. A look back at a part of my life now deceased. An “It’s A Wonderful Life”-esque look into a possibly different future. But mostly an appreciation for the present.”

It’s a solid reminder that great music is never dated, or too old for the young to love, or anyone young at heart.

 

Scroll Up