Music

“Old Violin” & Hate Songs

by

Anger is an energy. Per Johnny Rotten and Richard Meltzer, though I couldn’t recall where/when Meltzer mused on animus in rock ‘n’ roll attitude so I asked him for a steer…

I’m sure—I know—I’ve said it…and things much like it…in lots of places over the years, but I couldn’t give you a GPS on it…it’s just in multiple creases and cracks in the rock-roll road.

I’m sure I’ve said, specifically, that SECOND-PERSON HOSTILITY is an omnipresent aspect of rock all the way back to its Delta Blues origins, much deeper than anything as benign as “attitude”: I dislike, detest, abhor YOU.  Add gender hostility to the package (usually, but not always, as “misogyny”) and you got one throbbing heap of reliably functional HATESTUFF.

Anger isn’t quite the same…no…but…well…good luck in your search.

Read more

“Baraye Azadi” (Iran’s Freedom Song)

by

The single best way to understand Iran’s uprising is not any book or essay, but Shervin Hajipour’s 2m anthem ‘Baraye’ which garnered over 40m views in 48 hours (before he was imprisoned). Its profundity requires multiple views. (Translation by @BBCArdalan)

The lyrics are a compilation of tweets for #MahsaAmini that evoke felt life among the young in a modern society ruled by a geriatric religious dictatorship. The tweets speak “to the yearning for ‘a normal life,’ instead of the ‘forced paradise’ of an Islamist police state.”  [Per Karim Sadjadpour. More adapted tweets from him below the song.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0De6Asvzuso&ab_channel=iWind%21

Read more

Killer Storm

by

What’s above is the entry on Jerry Lee Lewis from Greil Marcus’s annotated discography to the collection of essays he edited: Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island.

 

“Folk Music” (Amplified)

by

Greil Marcus’s new book on Bob Dylan opens with a Dylan quote—“I can see myself in others.”—from a loose press conference with journalists in Rome in 2001. I recall listening to audio of that same rap session on YouTube and noticing another line that’s not at odds with the one that jumped out at Marcus. Dylan responded to a convoluted question with his own humorous query: “Am I an idiot?” he asked. This wasn’t a mid-60s prickly (Neuwirthy?) tease. While Dylan was playing to the crowd and encouraging them to laugh with him, he wasn’t coming hard at his questioner (who seemed to take his soft goof well). What struck me was that Dylan, even though he was only acting as if he was clueless, seemed entirely alive to how it might feel to be hopelessly at sea mentally. After all, he’s known what it was to be an unworldly Midwesterner at a Village party with an older generation of haute-bohos. (“I was hungry and it was your world.”) And that, in turn, puts him a thousand thought-miles away from heads who act like they’ve been tenured since they were ten.

Read more

Bob Dylan: the Man; the Moment; the Italian Meats Sandwich[1]

by

Chickie Pomerantz was lit.

Opening night of the 1963 Brandeis Folk Festival had been lame.  All those green bookbags and black turtlenecks.  All those skanks and pears.  Then this skinny guy with this scratchy voice came on singing about some farmer starving to death in South Dakota.  Chickie and Kevin Cahill and Frannie St. Exupery and a couple other jocks tossed beer cans at the stage.[2]  “You shoulda seen the assholes run,” he said, coming back to the dorm.

I went the second night.

Read more

The Girl Who Fell to Earth

by

One day, I’ll come out of my shell, I’m sure,” says Aldous Harding. She does not seem to be speaking to anyone in particular; her words seem directed mostly at herself. A few minutes later, she repeats those exact words as if she hasn’t said them before. Aldous Harding—real name Hannah Harding; her stage name is presumably taken from the author of Brave New World and even now produces a brief mental ripple of confusion every time I say it out loud—is from New Zealand, and this is the second time I have seen her. My dear friend Andi is with me; this is the third time she’s seen her. Harding is just that sort of singer, the kind you wish you could see every year.

Read more

Arlo in Memphis (& Brooklyn)

by

Arlo McKinley (AKA Timothy Dairl Carr) made his great new CD, This Mess We’re In, in Memphis and you sense the lights up the river even as he gives it to you straight about the state of the white working class in Ohiopioid. The sound of This Mess is Memphis’s. Perfect weaves of country/soul/gospel with an inner power. Organ-and-fiddle melting into one another with the beat behind it as Arlo rolls on, strong as death, sweet as love.

Read more

“You’ve Got to Have Freedom” (Pharoah Sanders, Rest in Power)

by

Per Eric Lott: “A favorite instance of what Baraka describes in ‘The Screamers’ (1967), a ‘social tract of love,’ ‘the honked note that would be his personal evaluation of the world,’ watching us while he fixed his sky, no head and all head, no predicate, ‘the repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed in its insistence past music . . . hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair,’ spurting ‘out of the diphthong culture, and reinforced the black cults of emotion’ — ‘no compromise, no dreary sophistication, only the elegance of something that is too ugly to be described, and is diluted only at the agent’s peril.'”

May Pharoah wail again soon with John Hicks and Idris M. on the night shift!! B.D.

Poem for July 3rd (& Larkin Poe’s Covers)

by

hearing larkin poe ‘wade’ before seeing
being with them before knowing them
we was blind as willie johnson
………….(a hundred years ago)
………….(in the arms of Our Mother)

hearing what Studs T wanted me to hear
“ALL her uncles is musicians”
so how could we be [“culturally deprived”]
in the cotton patch…she won’t even say the words

Read more

P.A. Way Gone

by

A good friend lost his brother this week. They grew up in P.A. If only they could still go local together and hear Kurt Vile’s latest. While the video may be too twee even if my buddy wasn’t grieving hard right now, I’m hoping he might find some peace in Vile’s piece someday (soonish)…

Read more

A Black Woman Remembers Elvis

by

News of the new biopic about Elvis, which focuses attention on the nexus of black cultural creativity that fed his talent, moved Marsha Music to suggest your editor repost her remembrance…

elvis-presley-albums-34.jpg

Elvis was my first love. I was 5 years old in the 1950s, and I sat in the sun on the living room floor with my legs criss-crossed, album cover on my lap, in a pool of light from the leaded-glass window near the fireplace. Motes of dust bounced and drifted in the beam of sun, fairy-like. The sun shined on Elvis Presley too, on that cover; guitar strapped across his stripe-shirted shoulder, as he gazed upward into a faraway sun, or maybe into the light of Heaven itself.

Read more

Bob Dylan: On A Couch & Fifty Cents A Day

by

Peter McKenzie’s parents welcomed Bob Dylan into their life and New York City apartment where he slept on the couch for a couple seasons in 1961. Mac and Eve McKenzie helped introduce Dylan to Greenwich Village’s politics of culture. Peter was in high school (on his way to Harvard) when Dylan came to stay for a stretch. He hero-worshipped Dylan who acted big brotherly toward him.

Read more

Keystone Melodies

by

Long ago and far away in San Francisco, that lovely city by the bay, I maneuvered myself into the food concession at the Keystone Korner, a jazz club in North Beach. It was 1975, and I had many strange and wondrous adventures there.

Read more