6 posts tagged “music”
I've wanted to pick this one up for a while. I haven't been disappointed. Her voice is so pure and guileless, with a winsomeness similar to John Denver, but seeming less effete in a female voice. It's clear that Mitchell was a big influence on Jewel's aesthetic and sound, with a plainspoken folksiness. Very soft, melancholic. Beautiful.
I've had my eye on this since hearing the debut single about four months ago. Born in Sri Lanka, raised in England, with a background in visual and video art, MIA is this superflex mix of influences. Taking the source influences of Third World/developing contries, and running them through the filter of traditional western electronic music. Visually and aurally, this voice crying from the edges of geopolitical influence, and the heart of the modern city.
Debut single from "Kala":
And top single from her first album:
If love truly is going out of fashion, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other's objects of reverence. . . . We will continue to fragment in this manner because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.
via MeFi
Working on my Photoshop skills. It's funny, but making something playful proves to be a helpful way to pick up skills. Product of the video game generation, I suppose. I like the image cropping, and the depth of field work with color and layout, and the transparent text. Fits well with the song that inspired the title as well--Avett's "Colorshow". Source image is taken from a detail shot of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
So, I've been reading this collection of essays, The Show I'll Never Forget, about memorable concert experiences. It's been an interesting process, working my way forward through the book. The 50 essays are organized chronologically by the date of the concert.
I have to say I went through most of the book pretty disappointed, namely because for a book titled ...Never Forget, authors had forgotten a lot of the actual details from concerts from the 60's and 70's! I'm a detail person, I want people to share these telling observations from the show that will give me a sense of having been there. Most of the first 36 essays didn't really achieve that for me, and I would incredulously come to the last page of another essay, and realize the author had expended most of their capital just describing the drive to the show, or what their friends were like in '73, etc. Seemed frustrating, myopic, poorly planned. What's more, the emotional environment seemed totally remote. I had no connection point to the time period, or even really the music of the eras in question, but thought the power of language could establish a connection.
Right around essay #37 (the Lounge Lizards, NYC, 1992), I started to click with the essays. For one, the author of essay 37, Rick Moody, brought a more detatched analytical structure, a welcome change to the scattered chronological accounts. Something else, too, that 1992 was around the time that I started paying more attention to popular music. I was still a few years away from buying REM's "Monster" album in 1995, but it started passing into my neighborhood of experience, which made the essays more interesting, like entering the moving picture era of the 1910's. That sense of a generation gap of experience surprises me. I thought I would have more of a connection with the progression of popular music before my time, but those essays are written in such an "in-group" mentality, that not having been there, I find them difficult to engage with.
Looking again at essays 37-47, these aren't even artists I recognize: Katell Keinig, Joe Maneri, The Mekons, but there is a sense of situational familiarity that intrinsically connects me with the social context in which the music is taking place. I find myself sympathetically linking with the author's backstories, whereas the authors from the 60's-80's seem wildly disaffected, drugged out, or nihilistic. (Getting thrown out of a Bon Jovi concert, and smashing all the windows in the parking lot, Essay #32).
Another fun thing about the book is the cross-genre idea of using one art form to describe another. These aren't essays about National Geographic subjects, or political campaigns, etc. This is creative writing about creative music, one genre describing another, which leads to a slight hall of mirrors affect, of one person aesthetically describing another persons aesthetic musical decisions. Kind of a fun mash up, like watching the television, muted, while listening to a cd, you get interesting cross-moginations.
Another piece that catches me is the spiritual vacuum most of the writers live within. Music seems their only form of transcendence, and these concerts come like gasps of air in an otherwise airless existence. It's hard not to be judgemental of a connection so heavily weighted with personal need, but music has never been as significant as literature, movies, or for that matter, church, in my own soul care superstructure. Still, the feeling I have in essays 1-36 is not unlike the strange discomfort and fascination I feel watching Hungarians weep in ecstacy at a 1980's Michael Jackson concert. Something disturbingly intimate about the level of their need, and the transparence of their self-care through music.
Interesting glimpse at the ferocious, shared alienation of early punk rock culture. The way that the larger culture seemed maliciously corrupted, and conversely, the fierce loyalty felt toward one another within the subculture.
The later essays have seemed better at this, but capturing the communal sense of live music, the pleasure of the shared experience, and the way in which this intimate bond with strangers is formed in the shared fixation on the performers. Many authors write from this perspective of "You remember this, right?" knowing that even a small fraction of their audience saw similar concerts, or perhaps even attended the same show. Literature, for one, does not have that same sense of shared experience, the moments of appreciation are more personal than communal, regrettably.
The last impression is the sense that alienation was much more genuine back in the day, that kids these days don't have the same things to be angsty about, so that the music I hear doesn't have the same raw urgency I feel communicated through these essays, particularly Patti Smith (#19), the Horselips (#25) and the Pogues (#29). All struck me with the rawness of the authors' experience of the music. Of course, I may be well out of touch with the vital bands of today that people will be writing about 25 years from now.
I heard about this clip on Metafilter. There's something about it that is so winsome, and aggressive at the same time. Interesting to think of it in the context of a memorial concert, remembering, grieving at the same time time. Prince's guitar work is just scorching, starting around 3:30.
Also, the person over Tom Petty's shoulder is George Harrison's son, Dhani
