I always imagine Joni Mitchell's Blue as the auditory equivalent to Joan Didion's book of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: a quite, intelligent sort of beauty in its lyrics and music. Plus it contain the only "holiday" song I come close to liking, "River"
Truth is, if I listen to Joni Mitchell too long she ruins me for other artists. In an interview with Cameron Crowe for Rolling Stone, she said "The Blue album, there's hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either"
I'm always happy when I find a Joni cover that does justice to her original. Jay Brannan's version of "All I Want" is full of reverence and heart:
Wave is not the most critically lauded album is Patti Smith's canon, but it deserves a second look. Released in 1979, it was noticeably more commercial-sounding than its predecessors, Easter, Radio Ethiopia and Horses, and tends to get a little lost in the shuffle, but it was the album that introduced me to her music.
There are only two real standout tracks in my opinion: "Frederick," written for her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith of the MC5, and "Dancing Barefoot," written with composer Ivan Kral.
If this sound like a soft sell... well, it sort of is. Wave doesn't have the same notoriety as Easter and Horses, and while not essential, it's still a good rock album. A very good rock album.The radio-friendly sound doesn't mar the songwriting or the performances in the least, but to be honest, I wanted to feature Wave because one, I'd almost forgotten it existed, and two, I wanted an excuse to write about Patti Smith's inclusion in the pantheon of feminist, or feminist-inspired, rock.
Full disclosure (though probably unnecessary at this point): I am a longtime Patti Smith fan. I finally got to see her perform in 2004, the second time, and as of now the last, she'd play my city. I've been an atheist as long as I've been a Patti Smith fan, and her show was as close as I've ever been to true "religion." That being said, I take issue with some of the things she's done, namely appropriating the "N-word" for a song title, and her place as a feminist icon. As far as I know (unless she's changed her position recently), Patti Smith has never identified as a feminist. On the surface, I have no issue with this. Many women don't, especially those who feel that traditional feminism doesn't serve their needs, but she's always aligned herself with men. Her idols and heros have been these tragic-romantic figures -- Rimbaud, Bob Dylan or Keith Richards -- an essentially "male" archetype. I've always thought of Patti Smith as the prototypical "guy's girl," one who plays well at being one of the boys. And yet, I have to admire her for designing her own gender expression in a time when a woman's role in popular music was typically that of a muse: Taken from Simon Renyolds's The Sex Revolts, this is what she said in a 1993 interview for Details magazine:
All through childhood I resisted the role of confused skirt (emphasis mine) tagging after the hero... I never wanted to be Wendy -- I always wanted to be Peter Pan.
I hate saying I give Patti Smith a "pass," because it's important to note that they're were other women making music and creating art during the sixties and seventies without trying to wedge themselves into the boys' club, but they're all but unheard of: folk artists like Cris Williamson and the Chicago Women's LIberation Rock Band. What Patti Smith did was provide an alternate template for those who followed.
One thing: that voice. It's unreal. Voice Of The Xtabay showcases Yma Sumac's otherwordly vocals, from operatic highs, to low, guttural growls.
Born in Peru, Yma Sumac's claim to fame is a four-octave (five at her peak) soprano. She could also sing as low as baritone, and produced this creepy "double voice" sound that I can only compare to the Tuvan throat singers of Sibera.
Most people associate her with mambo, but I love the eerie "Chuncho," from the aforementioned, Voice of the Xtabay, which showcases the full range of her amazing voice.
Most of what's on At the Gate of the Horn can be found on the 2-disc Tradition Masters compilation, but I really should focus on the now out-of-print original. Released in 1957, At the Gate of the Horn, a mix of traditional African-American spirituals and English folk songs, is thought to be Odetta's best.
I'm pretty sure I discovered Odetta by way of Bob Dylan (more about my relationship with Dylan's music here), and I fell in love with her deep, resonant voice. Born Odetta Holmes on New Year's Eve, 1930, Odetta is a singer-songwriter, activist and has been referred to as "The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement." (Wikipedia). She died two years ago, just before her 78th birthday.
When the weather turns, I like to run. Unfortunately, my iPod had been stuck on mopey, singer-songwriter types for a while, and I needed music to make me, well, actually want to move. So sandwiched between recent downloads from Robyn and Scissor Sisters is an old favorite, Gossip's Standing in the Way of Control.
I have a confession to make: the only way I can really tolerate punk rock is for it to be exceedingly danceable. Conversely, I don't really like "dance" music unless it's tinge with punk. The Gossip's Standing in the Way of Control is a nice marriage of the two -- with a little R&B thrown in for good measure. And who doesn't love cowbell?
I just finished reading Kristin Hersh's new book, Rat Girl. It's a pretty interesting look into not only her life in the Muses early days, but her creative process. (She's synesthetic: seeing colors in sound.)
I wanted to go back to the Muses first, their self-titled album, but it's unavailable as a single record right now. The two-disc set, In a Doghouse, contains both that album, and the EP Chains Changed. It was one of the first albums I had a visceral reaction to. It scared me, and I put it away for a long time after that first encounter. It was a lot of emotion to take it all at once -- almost too raw and suffocatingly close. But I learned to see the beauty in that.
If there ever was a record that could truly and honestly wear the label of "feminist album," it would be this one. Penis Envy is the only one of Crass's albums that features the band's female members (notably Joy de Vivre and Eve Libertine) on vocals, and actually managed to break into the British top twenty.
Released in 1981 as punk was taking its last breath, Penis Envy's themes of sexual harassment, sexual repression and the patriarchy's control over women's brains and bodies was really subversive stuff. In a recent article for the Guardian, Rosie Swash writes:
"If you were a teenage romantic in the 80s, you might have been the kind of little dreamer who bought Loving magazine. Filled with swooning love stories, it must have seemed an unlikely place to hear the latest record by an anarcho-punk outfit from Essex. And yet that's exactly what happened when a flexi-disc with a song titled "Our Wedding" by an artist called Joy De Vivre – purported by Loving to capture the happiness of your big day for "true romantics" – was given away to readers. Famously, the mag was forced to issue an apology when it emerged this was actually a subversive piece of feminist agit-prop from an album called Penis Envy by a band called Crass. This lent new meaning to the lines: "All I am I give to you, you'll honour me, I'll obey you" and caused the News of the World to describe them as a 'band of hate'."
Full disclosure: I came to this record pretty late in my music listening life, and I'm glad I did. The songs on Penis Envy are scathing, seething, and absolutely essential for anyone, especially a young feminist.
While we're on the subject of throaty German contraltos, I have to talk about Nina Hagen. Born in 1955 in what was formerly known as East Berlin, Nina Hagen was studying ballet by age four and was considered an opera prodigy by nine. From the deepest growls to ear-bleeding highs her operatic voice serves her well on Nunsexmonkrock , a blend of punk, goth, dance and reggae -- and her first English-speaking album.
Unfortunately, Nunsexmonrock has been out of print for a while, though it was re-issued on cd sometime in the mid-90s. It's worth a dig through the cut-outs because it's also not available for download anywhere.
(Note: I'm dropping the tag "retro" on my album of the week posts since it seems they're all retro these days. I no longer need the qualifier, I guess.)
I'll admit it, the cover is what drew me in: tinted blue, face obscure by a hand, lips parted and the neon tip of a lit cigarette. It reeked of late-70s cool. It's still among my top albums, though to be honest, Broken English 's disco-era production hasn't aged well. It's a little cold and aloof, but a handful of the songs stand the test of time, notably "Why'd Ya Do It," one of the bitterest, nastiest songs ever committed to record:
Her cover of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" is a bit robotic, but still effective. (I'm biased, though. I fell in love with the original when I was a kid because it was the first time I ever heard someone drop an f-bomb in song. Silly, I know, but powerful for a seventh grader.) "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" is the outlier here. Written by Shel Silverstein, it's since been covered by many artists, including Bobby Bare and Lucinda Williams, and was featured in the movie Thelma and Louise.
This isn't a record I run to often, but when I do, I get to be "that girl" for while: glamorous and cool, but still a little rough around the edges.
Named after a the restaurant she opened in Boston's Back Bay, Dixie Kitchen is singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier's criminally overlooked first album. The centerpiece of the record is a intensely personal ballad called, "Goddamn HIV," sung from the perspective of a young gay man during the early days of AIDS. Unfortunately, I cannot find a stream or video of the song anywhere online, though it is in last.fm's catalog. (You can listen to a thirty-second sample there, or, if you have a last.f, account, add the song to your playlist.)
In case you're wondering, she sold the restaurant to fund her second album, 1999's superb Drag Queens in Limousines , but Dixie Kitchen remains a lost classic.
if my early thirties could have had an official soundtrack, I'd nominate Truly She Is None Other. Of course, I'm not nearly as cool as Holly. (Yes, Holly Golightly is her real name.)
Truly, Holly Golightly's 11th album, is hip without being pretentious, and has a healthy does of retro cool. "Tell Me Now So I Know" is a cover of a fairly obscure Kinks' song:
Of the nine original songs, my favorite is "Without You Here." She borrows a lot from 60s garage and girl group, but the result is modern and fresh, and still sounds good nearly a decade later:
Due to a complete lack of inspiration, I've been rereading Andrea Juno's Angry Women in Rock. It's a little -- okay a lot -- heavy on punkier side of rock, and it's pretty dated (it was published in 1996), but I'm finding a lot of artists I missed the first time around.
Jarboe was a member of Swans with Michael Gira, but has gone on to a pretty intriguing solo career (they reformed earlier this year). On touring with the band:
"I had to be macho. I had to be tough. I had lug my own equipment and everything. I owned myself; I couldn't ask for any help. I had to be in an enclosed bus with everyone chain-smoking and not say anything even though i didn't smoke or drink or do drugs the; I was completely 'straight' in every sense of the word. I had ti put up with almost constant drunkenness from nearly every member of the group, constant chain-smoking and a whole behavior system that was counter to my way of thinking., which involved body-building and vegetarianism." (Angry Women in Rock)
I really know how to describe this -- it's pretty far from my comfort zone. "Lavender Girl" is goth, electronic, perfectly orchestrated trippiness.
Turning from a teenage girl into a woman in the early nineties, before the nineties were "The 90s," I've always regretted that I didn't have a "Liz Phair." Or a Courtney. Or an Alanis. Or a Kathleen. Either I was slightly too old for these artists to have made much of an impact on me (when you're young, there's a lifetime between seventeen and twenty-two), or I was unaware of their existence. I grew up on crappy 80s metal, eventually finding my way to less crappy 80s indie, but those were still "boy bands." Oh, I owe a lot of my musical knowledge to acts like REM and The Replacements, but when I hear other women's stories of how that one album changed their lives, I can't help but feel a little jealous. Turns out I had one in Lucinda William's self-titled album from 1992.
The Mekons have always had a predilection for deconstructing American country music (the British band even recorded a silly cover of Hank Williams's "Lost Highway), but veering to far outside one's comfort zone carries a high risk of failure. Country covers in particular are either too goofy, dealing in too much irony, or they're a little too reverent (boring). Frontwoman Sally Timms straddles the line nicely with her decade-old Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos. Self-described as "art country," her first full-length album features originals co-written with former band member, Jon Langford, and a number of classics from Johnny Cash and Robbie Fulks. From Pitchfork:
"If genuine country music can be likened to a shot of Jack Daniels with a Jim Beam chaser, then Sally Timms' collection of country-tinged tunes might be like sipping a cup of Earl Grey tea. And I guess by "genuine" country I mean the bastard shit-kickin' Johnny Paycheck and Merle Haggard kinda country. Timms' take on the genre isn't exactly strong, intoxicating medicine for your troubles, but it might do just fine on a lonely winter's eve."
Standout track: Timms's version of Johnny Cash's "Cry Cry Cry"
Every Tuesday for the past few months I've written about an album that was released that week, or maybe a week or two earlier. It was easier when I could preview an album through LaLa or even Last.fm when they still had a listen on-demand service. Since I don't have those things available to me anymore, I've been obviously going through the motions. It's really, really hard to talk up a record you've only heard once, and even harder to talk up one you haven't heard at all. So for a few weeks I'll be going retro.
I first heard of Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, via Much Music, Canada's answer to MTV. For whatever reason, in the late 90s, my cable system added the station to our basic package, and I soon discovered it was better than MTV. "Cross Bone Style," from Moon Pix was in heavy rotation than year, and I fell in love with its off-kilter, haunting melody. The video itself was lit bright white and hypnotic. And Chan was on roller skates.
The album didn't hit me right away. I hate when people call records "growers," but I think that aptly describes Moon Pix. My favorite track from that record is the sleepy/sad "Colors and the Kids."
JP and Chrissie are Welsh songer-songwriter JP Jones, and Pretenders leader, Chrissie Hynde, respectively (they are a real life couple), and they've made a record together, Fidelity! Here's the first single:
This summer's been a little slow on the new releases front; ergo, I have a handful of things I've been meaning to get to.
I listened to a little of Cyndi Lauper's Memphis Blues, something I've been wanting to hear in its entirety, so I'll save a fleshed-out review for later. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little disappointed, though. I love when artists step outside their comfort zones, and lord knows Cyndi has the voice for these sings, but it was, dare I say, a little boring?
"Wareham and Phillips viewed hundreds of the screen tests in the museum's archives and chose 13 subjects, including Lou Reed, Nico, Edie Sedgwick and Dennis Hopper. Sponsored by the museum, the project has toured since September 2008 and released a DVD last year, but now Dean & Britta are responding to demand for the music itself. A double-CD package, "13 Most Beautiful Songs ...," including a disc of remixes and a 12-page booklet of essays by Wareham, will be available from the duo's own label, Double Feature Records, in a limited run of 3,000.'
The album also includes covers of Bob Dylan's "I'll Keep It With Mine," and Velvet Underground's, "Not A Young Man Anymore."
Concrete Blonde's Bloodletting was one of the first CDs I bought, and one of the first records I bought that was just creepy enough to make my mom nervous, but accessible enough that none its songs didn't sound too out-of-place next to George Michael's "Freedom '90" on a mixtape. The single "Joey" was all over the radio that summer, but "Tomorrow Wendy" was the better song. Twenty years have passed since I was a goth-poseur teen. How the hell did that happen?
Bloodletting is finally getting the reissue treatment. This 20th anniversary edition comes with six rarities as bonus tracks and a twelve-page booklet with lyrics, a new essay, and rare photos. Let your teenage freak flag fly.
Tracks
1. Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)
2. The Sky Is A Poisonous Garden
3. Caroline
4. Darkening Of The Light
5. I Don t Need A Hero
6. Days And Days
7. The Beast
8. Lullabye
9. Joey Listen
10. Tomorrow, Wendy
11. I Want You (B-side of Joey)
12. Little Wing (B-side of Caroline CD single)
13. Bloodletting (The Vampire Song) (French Extended Version)
14. Roses Grow (Live) (B-side of Caroline CD single)
15. The Sky Is A Poisonous Garden (Live) (B-side of Caroline CD single)
16. Tomorrow, Wendy (Live) (B-side of Caroline CD single)
(Note: I think I'm going to refer to this one as MAYA rather than typing /\/\ /\ Y /\ each time. My nearly middle-aged eyes can't handle it.)
M.I.A.'s much ballyhooed MAYA hits stores today, and the early press isn't exactly kind. Pitchfork gave it a whopping 4.4, saying:
"It's hard to tell whether /\/\/\Y/\ is half-assed or half-baked. There are certainly a number of good ideas in the mix here, but the execution is lacking. Tracks like "Story to Be Told", "Lovealot", and "Teqkilla" come across like mildly promising demos ready to be edited into sleeker, stronger compositions. Lead single "XXXO" sounds unfinished, as if everyone involved figured they may as well wait around for someone else to make a better remix. Most of the songs are built out of digital clangs and electronic noise, but unlike Kala's "Bird Flu", in which chaotic clatter was the basis for a brilliant track evoking panic and confusion, this cacophony doesn't signify much of anything, aside from perhaps a desire to seem confrontational and daring. There are moments of interesting noise, but in the absence of appealing grooves or memorable hooks, it barely matters."
PopMatters called it "lacking focus and confidence," and according to The Guardian , MAYA is "a headache-inducing patchwork of conspiracy theories, love, technological overload, world musics and sadness framed by the sort of poltergeist-in-the-machine noises you might expect from a new synthesiser called the Korg Kaosillator." Of the reviews I culled through this week, only the NY Times and Rolling Stone had anything positive to say, the former crediting MAYA's producers with the album's end result:
"The album’s producers, who include Blaqstarr, Diplo, Rusko and Switch, mingle propulsion and attack in tracks that can be fanatically layered or sparse but effective. M.I.A.’s drunk-on-the-dance-floor song, “Teqkilla,” is tambourine-shaking, synthesizer-blipping, sample-chirping mayhem. “Born Free,” despite its gratuitously violent video, recaptures the confrontational energy of the group it samples, Suicide. The rhythm track to “Steppin Up” starts with power drills and then thuds, whirs, power-chords and generally slams onward. And the sometimes inane lyrics of “Tell Me Why” arrive in waves of an Auto-Tuned chorale."
