Music

Counterlife

by

Green Border, which is showing until Thursday in NYC, is my idea of counterprogramming to the RNC. You won’t get out of the flic without tears, but it’s not for goodies only. While the movie leaves the implication that human beings may be “cured by altruism” (per Stanley Corngold’s First review), it also implies that such cures are not matters of opinion. What’s “good for body and soul” is “to risk your well-being in caring for others.”

One Brit critic had caveats and I’ll allow Green Border might not be a work of art that will work a century from now. Director Agnieszka Holland hasn’t come up with a genius metaphor for Fortress Europa. (There’s no cinematic equivalent to the hi-tech marijuana factory run by gangsters in the Dardennes’ immigration saga, Tori and Lokita.) But right here, right now — as I flash on the charmer Nur (a Syrian boy who drowns in a Polish swamp) — Holland’s humanism without borders is undeniable.

What follows is the soulful song that soundtracks a minute of joy in Green Border. A couple Polish teenagers nod their heads with three African refugees who rap along to Youssoupha’s testament…

Read more

Ode to Joy

by

Originally posted here seven years ago…

The other week, deep summer, we went to see David Johansen in his persona as Buster Poindexter. For many years now, Johansen, former New York Dolls lead singer and front flounce, has in his cabaret act been one of the great American songbook curators (Jonathan Schwartz wishes), lurking in the brilliant corners of U.S. pop. (Without Johansen I’d never have heard Katie Lee’s late-1950s pop-Freudian homage, Songs of Couch and Consultation, lead song “Shrinker Man.”) At the end of this particular set at City Winery, he called to the stage his wife Mara Hennessey, who announced that she had a particular favorite she’d like David to sing, whereupon she started to intone the line, “that summer feeling, that summer feeling, that summer feeling,” and Johansen took off into the lyrics. It was so haunting! I knew that song! What was it again? When I got home I looked it up and of course: Jonathan Richman’s “That Summer Feeling.” Astonishing song.

Read more

Into the Tradition

by

I perked up when “Taxi Brousse,” which sounded like a kora-cized version of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” came on Spotify’s Oumou Sangaré Radio. This 1 plus 1/2 minute song was put down a few years ago by 3MA — an Afropop supergroup made up of three players of different string instruments: Ballaké Sissoko from Mali on kora, Driss El Maloumi from Morocco on oud and Rajery from Madagascar on valiha. The band takes its name from the first two letters of each member’s country of origin in French: Madagascar, Mali, and Maroc.

One song led to another…

Read more

In and OUT

by

Pullen’s tribute to Monk (and Powell), which comes with his own perfect swirls, is echt modern jazz, like Monk plays Ellington.

Homie

by

I hadn’t seen my musician-friend for a bit, but we met up by the 125th St. pier one evening before the heat wave hit. I headed down to the same spot the next night, hopped the fence and sat closer to the river. He’d sent me a link to “Unwind” after I got home the day before. It was in my ear as I unwound with the breeze and a corona, though the song is more exacting than relaxing…

Hope you feel the precise ache in the singing/playing, and don’t pass over the lovely wordless outro. Like the singer, you may feel like you’re waiting on someone, but I wonder if it’ll turn out better than this song’s ender…B.D.

“Rap is Clear, So Write Clear” (Redux)

by

Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi was sentenced to death on April 24 for lyrics that excoriated the Islamic Republic’s rulers and enablers. His uncle tweeted a message for the Iranian diaspora that should be heard by every believer in free speech…

xxx

The following First dispatch was originally posted in January, 2023…

Toomaj Salehi has been imprisoned and tortured by Iran’s regime scum who hate how his lucid rap exposes “the filth behind the clouds.” You can find out more about his music and the international campaign on his behalf here. Toomaj should be free as a bird, free as the Iranian woman he images, sans hijab, “…liberty’s mane blowing in the wind.”

Read more

Afropean Fraternity

by

https://youtu.be/pXx7bT282dk?si=xdzhI2A0ZEAPKtHF

Headie One and Koba LaD are brothers under the Channel. Their rap song, “Link In the Ends,” establishes a connection between French Banlieue and English council estate.

Read more

Pop History Play

by

Let’s start with a hypothetical. Suppose you’re 21 years old, you’re a raging Anglophile obsessed with British music, culture, and history, and you’re in London for the first time ever, with a flat to yourself for 1 week. For that week only, you have no responsibilities and are free to do whatsoever you fancy, in this city which Samuel Johnson once remarked that to be tired of is to be tired of life. How do you choose to spend your time?

Read more

River Sides (“Hey, hey, hey”)

by

A cover from last summer’s leg of the Never Ending tour…

Well I was born up in the mountains
Raised up in a desert town
And I never saw the ocean
Till I was close to your age now…

Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you
Hey, hey, hey, you rolling river
Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you
Hey, hey, hey
Only a river gonna make things right
Only a river gonna make things right
Only a river gonna make things right

Read more

Driving in Circles

by

Songs can work like time capsules, shooting us through space to remember the sweet awkwardness of a first dance. Or sink us back into the free magic flowing through every vein at the party of our lives. Yet sometimes we get stuck inside that time capsule: Tracy Chapman speeds down the highway in her fast car, and Luke Combs turns out to be the little kid singing in the backseat the whole time, all grown up now.

Read more

Brothers Under the Skin (Redux)

by

Wesley Hogan’s felt appreciation of Tracy Chapman’s Grammy duet with Luke Combs (here) sent your editor back to another crossover move by the Man of Country, Morgan Wallen. I’m reposting the video of his duet with Lil Durk (along with a short comment on it below). Wallen’s & Durk’s mannish boys’ stance seems backward compared to Chapman’s and Combs’ progressive politesse. Yet the rougher guys’ vernacular — “I’d’ve stayed my ass at home” — brings home the less than colloquial lyrics — …”I’ll get a promotion…we’ll buy a bigger house and move to the suburbs” — that undercut (slightly) Chapman’s attempt to make a song of the people, by the people, for the people. You need to keep an ear out for how underdogs talk now if you mean to write to/for them. I’m glad Wes Hogan is out to make sure we don’t forget C’ and C’s award show turn, but Wallen’s & Durk’s forgotten collab belongs to a river of song that runs below all the Broadways in this world — deep beneath the attention of the gentility.  B.D.

Read more

Levon’s Blues

by

I have a few notes from years ago when Levon Helm died and I’m realizing now that I must have written them just after having taught “Sonny’s Blues.” A story that, for reasons I may get into, leaves me on the verge of tears, even in class, when to cry in front of students would embarrass me and, surely, shock them. But it has happened; it also happened that I cried in the car the morning I heard about Levon…

Read more

Sturdy New Acquisitions

by

Forgive me if I’m committing the sin of self-promotion, but I’d like to add an annex to my piece last month about the MET’s class-focused New Acquisitions show. There’s a trio of music videos—with soundscapes evoking hoods all across the world—that could have added a contemporary flash to that MET show.

“Ghetto Phénomène” Houari’s Le Chant des Ra ta ta—with its bass pace, main string riff, and Houari’s amped but unvocodered voice—was a constant on my Marseille rap playlist. Yet I didn’t realize the song was more than just catchy until I watched the video.

Read more

A Dylanist’s Diary (“sugar and salt/ if you never listen to the basement tapes/ it’s your own damn fault”)

by

Originally posted here in 2016… 

11/7

My monthly income is $500. I just spent $130 of that on the newly released Dylan Basement Tapes. My daddy thinks I’m no good with money.

They haven’t arrived yet so I’ve been listening to the bootleg of those 6 CDs I bought in ‘93 in NYC. One thing now occurs to me—this is boy music. It’s like a frat party of geniuses. It’s a lot of fun to be invited.

My friend in NYC and I were discussing the relative merits of the 2CD release vs. the 6CD box.  How many times do you have to hear 3 takes of “Open the Door Homer” (wherein Homer’s name is Richard)?? I explained my sense that the 2CD set is the trailer, and a damn fine one, and the 6CD set is the documentary. (I didn’t mention I already have 3 copies of 3 takes of “Open the Door Homer.”)

I’m not a fanatic nor a cultist—it just seemed obvious to me get the box. Also I was stoned when I ordered it. My daddy thinks I’m not good with money.

Read more

Invisible Republicanism (Redux): Greil Marcus’s Negro Problem (Circa 1998)

by

I published the following piece in a tabloid issue of First in 1998 and then posted it at this website after Bob Dylan released Love and Theft in 2001.  I took it down once Greil Marcus became an occasional contributor to First. In the era of Substack, though, journos’ back pages find new readers and it seems timid rather than tactful to hide “I.R.” in a memory hole.

Read more