I love my city man, we’re out in front of the Lincoln just doing what we do. This is a joint I actually wrote to keep people abreast on politics. I’m not a politician, but we all need to be aware of certain things. Enjoy.

They all rep hard…..But they need to put Em on a remix. Seems fitting since the rumor is he’s trying to sign them. Watch him DESTROY this beat at 3:10

CunninLynguists @ Highline Ballroom December 11, 2009

Cunninlynguists @ Highline

CunninLynguists

Featuring –
Grieves with Budo
Looptrop Rockers
Tunji

Doors Open @ 11:00 p.m.
Show Starts @ 11:30 p.m.

Tickets – Advance – $15
General Admission / All Ages
Standing Room Only

Buy Tickets

Highline Ballroom
431 W. 16th St.
New York, NY 10011
1.212.414.5994

For More Information

Jean Grae Live @ Joe’s Pub in New York City on November 28, 2009

Jean Grae

Tickets – Advance – $15

Buy Tickets

Show To Start @ 11:30 p.m.
November 28, 2009

Joe’s Pub
425 Lafayette St.
New York, NY 10003
Joe’s Pub

@JoesPubNYC

For More Information

For more Information on – Jean Grae

For More Events Featuring – Jean Grae

Jean Grae

Talib Kweli @ Highline Ballroom on December 23, 2009

Talib Kweli @ Highline Ballroom on December 23, 2009

Talib Kweli @ Highline Ballroom on December 23, 2009
Featuring -
Jean Grae
Strong Arm Steady
Pete Rock

Doors Open @ 7:00 p.m.
Show Starts @ 9:00 p.m.

Tickets – Advance – $15 / Day of Show – $?
General Admission / All Ages
Standing Room Only

Buy Tickets

Highline Ballroom
431 W. 16th St.
New York, NY 10011
1.212.414.5994
Highline Ballroom

For More Information

[Presented by Jill Newman Productions]

Wale

Monday, November 9, 2009

NEW YORK,NY – Wale’s album Attention Deficit will be available in stores and on-line at Midnight on Tuesday, November 10, 2009. Recently, the album was leaked on the Internet. Still industry executives expect the leak will not affect sales. The album release party will be held at Marquee on Monday, November 9, 2009.

For more information on Wale’s Album Release Party @Marquee

To Purchase Wale’s Attention Deficit

Wale mixtapes

Wale - Back to the Feature

Download mixtape – Wale – Back to the Feature

Wale - Back to the Feature - Tracks

Download mixtape – Wale – Back to the Feature

Release Date: June 19, 2009

# Tracks: 1-22

Wale - The Mixtape About Nothing

Download mixtape – Wale – The Mixtape About Nothing

Wale - The Mixtape About Nothing

Download mixtape – Wale – The Mixtape About Nothing

Release Date: December 3, 2008

# Tracks: 1-19

Kid Cudi – mixtapes

Kid Cudi – Dat Kid From Cleveland

Download mixtape – Kid Cudi – Dat Kid From Cleveland

Kid Cudi - Dat Kid From Cleveland

Kid Cudi – Dat Kid From Cleveland

Kid Cudi - Dat Kid From Cleveland - Tracks

Kid Cudi mixtape – A Kid Named Cudi

Download mixtape – A Kid Named Cudi

Kid Cudi - A Kid Named Cudi

Download mixtape – A Kid Named Cudi

Kid Cudi - A Kid Named Cudi - Tracks

Rakim @ B.B. King Blues Club in New York on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 9:00 p.m.

Rakim on The Seventh Season Tour - 2009

Rakim
Rhymefest
Special Guest(s)

Tickets – Advance: $30 / Day of Show: $35
Buy Tickets

General Admission / All Ages

Doors To Open @ 7 p.m.
Show To Start @ 9 p.m.

B.B. King Blues Club
237 W. 42nd St.
New York, NY 10036
1.212.997.4144
http://www.bbkingblues.com/

For More Information

Goodie Mob (Cee-Lo, Big Gipp, Khujo, T-Mo) & Scarface of Geto Boys & Slick Rick @ B.B. King Blues Club on Friday, November 13, 2009 @ 11:30 p.m.

Featuring -

Bad Rabbits (Live Band to Perform with Slick Rick)
Outasight
Special Guests

Doors To Open @ 11 p.m.
Show To Start @ 11:30 p.m.

Tickets – Advance: $35 / Day of Show: $40

Buy Tickets

VIP Booth Reservations Available for 4 & 6 People -$60 per ticket
VIP Booth for 4 – $240
VIP Booth for 6 – $360

B.B. King Blues Club
237 W. 42nd St.
New York, NY 10036
1.212.997.4144
B.B. King Blues Club

For More Information

Ghostface Killah Live with Special Guests @ BB King Blues Club in New York on November 11, 2009

Ghostface Killah of Wu-Tag Clan
With Special Guests
Blu.
Sosh B
Skyzoo

Doors To Open @ 7 p.m.
Show To Start @ 9 p.m.

Tickets – Advance & Day of Show: $26.00
Buy Tickets

General Admission (Standing Room Only)

B.B. King Blues Club
237 W. 42nd St.
New York, NY 10036
1.212.997.4144
http://www.bbkingblues.com/

For More Information

Afrika Bambaataa 35th Anniversary of Hip Hop Culture @ SOBs in New York, NY on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 8 p.m.

Afrika Bambaataa To Celebrate the 35th Anniversary of Hip Hop Culture @ SOBs in New York on November 15, 2009

35th Anniversary Anniversary of Hip-Hop Culture
36th Anniversary of the Universal Zulu Nation

Sunday, November 15, 2009 / 11-15-2009

Tickets* – Advance: $25/ Day of Show: $30
*$10 discount with Zulu Nation or Moorish Nationality Card
Buy Tickets

Doors To Open @ 7 p.m.
Show To Start @ 8 p.m.

Performances By:

Naughty by Nature
Positive K
Grandmaster Melle Mel
Chill Rob G
Large Professor
Craig G
Shaheim
Dana Dane

DJ DP One
DJ Chuck Chillout

SOB’s – Home of Universal Music
204 Varick St., Basement
New York, NY 10014
1.212.243.4940
SOBs
@SOBs via Twitter

For More Information About the Afrika Bambaataa 35th Anniversary Show at SOBs – November 15, 2009

Event Presented Nubian Productions

THE BRONZE MESSENGER, by Ericka Midiri

I’m very happy to report that cornetist Danny Tobias has finally come out with his own CD, aptly called CHEERFUL LITTLE EARFUL – a subtle trio session, intimate yet propulsive.

I was fortunate enough to write the very brief notes for the CD:

Danny Tobias is an old-fashioned jazz player in the best modern way, at home in any swinging jazz context. Like his heroes Buck Clayton and Ruby Braff, he loves melody, his improvisations have a beautiful shape, and he is always recognizably himself. Danny didn’t learn his jazz from a textbook but through experience – early gigs with Ed Metz, Jr., Paul Midiri, and Joe Holt, and a fifteen-year musical apprenticeship with drummer Tony Di Nicola and master clarinetist Kenny Davern.

Kenny was an inspiration. He taught me what not to play, how to play in an ensemble, and how to construct a solo. He could build a solo as well as anyone who has ever played. Period. Tony and Kenny were always willing to teach me and I loved every night that I had the privilege to work with them. Since those two passed away I’ve been traveling with the Midiri brothers to festivals all over the country and leading my own groups whenever possible. It’s funny but when I looked at the tunes I’d picked for this CD almost all of them were written between 1925 and1935. I don’t think of these songs as old. They speak to me and remind me of Tony and Kenny.

When I asked Danny about his original compositions, he said, The names of my tunes are rather silly. I rehearse with an organ trio once a week in Trenton saxophonist Dom DeFranco’s cellar. Hence the name DOMINIC’S BIG CELLAR, which is based on LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME. When I brought up NO MATH, he just grinned. And the song with the most striking title has an intriguing explanation: HOW’S YOUR MOTHER was first written as a Christmas song for my three sons. The title comes from a gag of mine (with people I know very well): when someone mentions something off color or foul, I will say “How’s your mother?” as if the bawdy comment has jogged a memory.

Danny’s trio is completed by two very sympathetic and supportive players. Pianist Joe Holt is a fixture in jazz rooms along the Eastern Seaboard, and he and Danny have been playing together for years, often with the Midiri brothers. (You can see them on YouTube.) Gary Cattley has his Ph.D. from North Texas State University, plays tuba in addition to string bass, and appears with the Princeton Symphony as well as Marty Grosz.

This easy-going trio got together for sessions in summer 2009, with the head arrangements done by Danny. The results remind me of the finest sessions for Keynote Records in the Forties or the John Hammond sessions for Vanguard a decade later: neat but inspired. Each performance was completed in one or two takes. This CD captures the kind of jazz that musicians play for their own pleasure when only the attentive customers are in the club. It’s comfortable, late-evening music, from the sorrowing SAY IT ISN’T SO to the romping CHICAGO RHYTHM and the title tune, a perfect description of Danny Tobias’s jazz.

The disc is available from the modest, soft-spoken Mr. Tobias himself for $15.00.  Send check, cash, or other negotiable instruments to Danny at 38 Fenwood Avenue, Mercerville, New Jersey 08619.  More to come!

P.S.   When Dan Barrett started his New York City tour — sadly too brief — one of the first things he said to me was that he had played two concerts in New Jersey with a wonderful cornet player, Danny Tobias.  Did I know him?  (I murmured assent but Dan was so intent that I don’t know if it registered.)  That young Mr. Tobias was so good, so melodic that he reminded the elder Dan why he had taken up the cornet himself: to play the melody.  Dan (Barrett) continued, looking at me sternly, “You really ought to mention Danny in your blog,” and I happily said, “I have, at length, and he’s coming out with his own CD.  He’s a fine player and a fine person!”  All true!

Since the mid-Seventies, when I first saw him as an integral part of Soprano Summit, Marty Grosz has been one of my heroes — although I know he would have something mildly comic to say about this.  I find his particular brand of hot jazz exquisitely moving in every meaning of that word: his ballads get at the heart of the lyrical sentiment allied to the jazz he loves, and his swinging creations have their own delightful momentum. 

Thus I was once again thrilled to see him at the 2009 Jazz at Chautauqua — allotted a brief set (among several) on Saturday afternoon to pay tribute to one of his heroes, the singer / musician Red McKenzie.  People either adore McKenzie or his particular brand of “hot” and Irish sentimentality eludes them entirely.  But Red worked with the best musicians, got jobs and record contracts for them as well (if memory serves, he not only got Eddie Condon that pioneering 1927 date but also took Jack Kapp down to to the Apex Club to hear Jimmie Noone).  Although Marty is, in person, reasonably unsentimental, McKenzie’s brand of feeling appeals to him — balanced against the prevailing strain of mockery that has some of its roots in his own worldview and some in the music of Fats Waller. 

This afternoon, Marty was surrounded by his greatly talented friends: Vince Giordano, keeping the beat and playing lovely melodies on bass sax and string bass; Andy Stein, doubling violin and baritone sax; Dan Block, alternating between clarinet and bass clarinet, and James Dapogny, calling up several dozen pianistic worlds with ease.  They performed three numbers in honor of Red McKenzie.  Each one has a certain on-the-spot quality (head arrangements getting worked out then and there) which leads to occasional tentativeness, but I didn’t care then and I don’t now.  As if to follow suit, my cinematography is much more experimental than usual — which is a polite way of saying that I found myself hemmed in between the light on top of the piano and a music stand . . . but there are some (to me) rewarding closeups, and I captured musicians smiling at each others’ solos, always reassuring.

‘WAY DOWN YONDER IN NEW ORLEANS began the set . . . with some stern leadership about when to stop (when the lyrics say “Stop!”) but no one was hurt.  And Dan Block swung out on his bass clarinet:

Then, a real jewel, even with a slightly uncertain beginning — I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH ME, a song that gets performed at a quick bounce these days but began life as a yearning ballad.  And Dan Block throws himself into it body and soul:

Finally, FROM MONDAY ON, a cheerful remembrance of McKenzie, early and later:

As a coda: I would have my readers listen closely to the interplay within this group — Andy Stein’s lyrical baritone and pizzicato violin passages; Vince’s wonderful bass playing and lyrical bass sax solos; Dapogny’s “Spanish tinge” Morton-inspired passage on the first song; Marty’s delightful stage presence, and Dan Block, who has music flowing through him as if it were his soul’s electrical current.  A priceless band, I think, with each of its members an anointed prophet of Hot.

electri-fying, defying laws of gravity (what?),
avidly,
rapidly,
firing lyrics I’m shattering, the abdominal cavity,
then I’m travelling out the spinal,
finalizing your paralysis on the microphone (what?),

Shakira’s new album She Wolf is her first album in four years (since 2005’s Oral Fixation volumes 1 & 2, which represented her best work to date, especially on the Spanish-language vol. 1) and represents a similar transformation to Jewel’s 0304 – Shakira has made an almost-purely danceable, modern album.  Unlike Jewel’s efforts prior to 0304, Shakira has made addictive up-tempo music before: see “Whenever, Wherever”, “Objection (Tango)”, “La Tortura”, “Hips Don’t Lie”.  But never before has she devoted an entire album to the stuff; gone are the tender, thoughtful ballads such as “Underneath Your Clothes” or “Illegal”.  The question nevertheless remains – is Shakira, whose image is now more sexually potent than ever (straight blonde hair, dancing in a half-catsuit in her “She Wolf” video), cashing in, or does she still remain herself?

Mainly, I argue for the latter.  Once the initial shock of the dense production and pounding bass subsides, the melding of cultures and instruments that has always been evident in Shakira’s work is here too.  Listen to “Long Time”, and its reggae beat which gives way to an instrumental bridge that prominently features what sounds like a gypsy saxophone; “Mon Amour” employs a rocky half-time clap that is reminscent of Shakira’s spunkier moments such as Fijación Oral vol. 1’s “Escondite Inglés”; the only semi-slow moment on the album is to be found in “Gypsy”, where Shakira employs an island feel with a plucked guitar, Caribbean-esque drums and Eastern-European string accents on the chorus.  Not to forget “Why Wait”, which is 2009’s update of “Ojos Así / Eyes Like Yours” with its Middle-East-meets-West instrumentation and production over a storming 4/4 bassline (which becomes positively incendiary in the bridge).  Musically, although it’s a little bit of a readjustment to our expectations of what Shakira’s music sounds like, it is still definitely her, and her claims of wanting to make a “bassy, beat-driven record that maintains experimentation with sounds from other parts of the world” ring true.

Shakira’s lyrics have always been put under a microscope – a fact that has irritated me immensely through the years.  Not only is Shakira an incredibly intelligent woman, but her lyrics are far and away of a much higher quality than those of the majority of traditional pop made by native-English-speaking artists.  The criticism she has gained from reviewers and comedy sketches alike (see MADTV’s parodies of “Whenever, Wherever” and “Objection (Tango)” on youtube – they’re funny, but they’re also unwarranted) is totally unfair and disrespectful of an artist who has mastered a complex language (once you get past the basics, English is a complicated language to speak fluently – I should know, since I have taught it) when I wager that the majority of these critics can’t speak more than a few basic sentences of phrase-book Spanish.  Because Shakira dared to say “Lucky that my breasts are small and humble” in her first English hit does not make her nonsensical.  Listen to “Octavo Día” and “Timor”, songs in both Spanish and English that express criticism with the way that the world is run and our own media-obsessed culture, and you’ll understand that Shakira is very well-aware of what she sings and what she has written.  On She Wolf, there is nothing as incisive as “Timor” or “How Do You Do” (both from Oral Fixation vol. 2) but its opening salvo of “A domesticated girl, that’s all you ask of me / Darling it is no joke, this is lycanthropy” is certainly more sophisticated than “I think you wanna come over, yeah I heard it through the grapevine / Are you drunk, are you sober? Think about it, doesn’t matter” from Madonna’s current hit “Celebration”.  ”Mon Amour” delivers a fantastic kiss-off to a boyfriend who has gone to Paris with another woman, while “Men In This Town” ruminates on where are all the good men who can appreciate what Shakira has to offer?  (I feel her on that one.)

I suppose that a certain amount of lyrical straightforwardness is to be expected on an album which is almost purely uptempo and flirts specifically with the electro-pop genre – I can’t get too mad that some of Shakira’s more insightful and wittier metaphors have been sacrificed.  But the three Spanish tracks that round out the album – “Lo Hecho Está Hecho” (“Did It Again”), “Años Luz” (“Why Wait”) and “Loba” (“She Wolf”) – are lyrically superior to any of the album’s English tracks.  For example, “Años Luz”’s “Esperar es un mar que aún no sé navegar / No te quedes años luz, ya estoy decidida y quiero saber si lo estás tú” translates as “Waiting is a sea that I don’t know how to navigate / You haven’t got light years, I’ve already made my mind up and I want to know whether you have too”.  The English version, “Why Wait”, says “One more night with you, I won’t think it through / Time’s money, but you knew / There’s nothing in the world you can think of that I won’t do to you”.  It’s the same thought, but in Spanish it just comes across as much more elegant and sophisticated.  Not to mention that “Loba” in particular seems to flow much more naturally in Spanish than in English, and the lyrics are perhaps more comprehensible.  In any case, the Spanish tracks add to the album, even though they are retakes of English songs from its first half – it serves to reinforce the fact that Shakira is a bilingual artist who refuses to neglect either her Spanish or English audiences, but instead (as on the Oral Fixation era) seeks to satisfy them both.  This is laudable, and I hope that Shakira comes out with a full Spanish album next year (as has been rumoured).

So it all sounds good so far.  Well, the album is a consistent listen, and its brevity means that each song gets you moving but doesn’t outstay its welcome.  The dense production, in the main courtesy of Pharrell and John Hill, flows throughout (except for the break provided by the relatively lightweight “Gypsy”).  Because of this, there are no really weak tracks, although surprisingly, the Wyclef Jean collaboration “Spy” seems the most rote and uninspired song on the set – its straightforward 4/4 beat has nothing extra to catch the listener’s ear, and sounds lazy compared to Pharrell’s musically adventurous soundscapes in “Why Wait” and “Long Time”.  ”Gypsy” sounds like nothing else on the album, but its dip in tempo serves as a break which can sometimes be appreciated by the listener, but at other times seem like an interruption of the party, so depending on your mood, it could be a help or a hindrance.  Other than that, all the tracks are solid, but none of them are immediate standouts save the last track, “Mon Amour”.  With its decidedly rocky, guitar-led music and handclap-driven beat that intensify into a crunchy, heady chorus, it’s the kind of track that you can’t help but get wrapped up in.  Shakira’s vitriolic lyrics, snarling vocals and cutesy airline announcement closing out the song are the icing on the cake, and perfectly embody a girl’s anger with her straying lover’s neglect of her (perhaps similar to 2005’s “Don’t Bother”).  With repeated plays, the appeal of “Did It Again”, “Why Wait” and “Men In This Town” reveals itself, but the songs are certainly not immediate hits like “Hips Don’t Lie”, “La Tortura” or “Objection (Tango)”.

I therefore think that this is a solid Shakira album, and definitely stronger than her breakthrough Laundry Service which contained some fantastic songs but also some uninspired, pedestrian ones (here, the only track I recommend skipping is “Spy”).  However, for me it falls just short of Oral Fixation Vol. 2, because She Wolf is a tiny bit too one-note in its electro-pop approach, and slightly diminishes Shakira’s lyrical mastery in the process.  In terms of her entire catalogue, Dónde Están Los Ladrones? and particularly Fijación Oral Vol. 1 (the Freudian / Eve in the garden of Eden / Madonna and child symbolism were inspired and have yet to be matched in this album’s artwork and photography) are still Shakira’s crowning glories, but the Spanish-language tracks on She Wolf are lyrically more adept than their English counterparts and a worthy addition to both the album itself and to Shakira’s Spanish-music legacy as a whole.  In short, Shakira has far from sold out, and has made a pop album that other artists should be humbled by, such as it melds other cultures and quirky wordplay more than most radio-oriented pop.  And perhaps it is a compliment to Shakira herself that this album still falls somewhat short of her best work, and what I know she is capable of.

BLOOD OF A POET: SAM PECKINPAH AND THE WILD BUNCH

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism,

a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

George Eliot, Adam Bede

Films have the power to possess you, enthral you, snaring you in its poetic lyricism. In that short phrase, “Blood of a poet”, Pauline Kael conveys something vital and elemental about Sam Peckinpah’s rich cinematic oeuvre, something that is often ignored: the resonance, the vitality and poetic eloquence of his aesthetics. Instead, when the name Sam Peckinpah comes up, the focus is frequently on regurgitating Peckinpah’s personal mythology. Peckinpah is said to be many things: a drunk, a coke addict, a sentimental romantic, a misogynist and chauvinist. And from the late ‘60s to the ‘70s, Peckinpah was both celebrated and condemned as the cinematic poet of violence. But less is said about his poeticism, humanism and troubled obsession with the role of violence in dislocating pedestrian notions and pious hypocrisies held sacred in our official culture. He is certainly not tame; he overturned every absolute he encountered, so fearlessly that it is impossible not to recognise in him the wounded Romantic and agonised believer.

When asked what my favourite film is, my reply is always The Wild Bunch. But when asked why The Wild Bunch, I often wonder how to work out an adequate reply.

The Wild Bunch (original poster)

One’s most impressionable years are one’s childhood years. The first song you hear or the first film you watch; these all become woven into the fabric of your being, retaining emotional and somatic resonance, always tied to who you were and where you were when you first saw it.

I grew up on an unrelenting diet of Westerns. And because of those early years spent consuming Westerns, as a young child, I’d always say I was a Gregory Peck girl. But when asked what my favourite all time film is, I always unhesitatingly reply Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.  Of all the films in my memory palace, The Wild Bunch holds a special place. It had a profound visceral effect on me when I first encountered it as a young child; it still persists to exert its hypnotising power on me. It continues to be extraordinary, representing bravura editing, physical direction and an appreciation of the American literary tradition which includes Faulkner, Hemingway and Mailer. However it is its profound humanism which has captured my heart. And Peckinpah’s humanism was hard won. The affirmation of virtue in his films is intimately entwined with vice and human frailty; the impression one receives is that of a man trying to claw himself back to the decent places within himself. His oeuvre is suffused with a deep and expansive love for low-rent miners, bums, losers, loners, drifters and misfits who struggle to assert themselves in a world that is doing its best to be rid of them; for the tarnished valour of flawed heroes who discover deep within themselves a possibility of honour, long thought lost but re-discovered when all that’s left is to die protecting it.

Book-ended by a Götterdämmerung of screen violence, The Wild Bunch set the precedent for all filmmakers who wish to follow in its footsteps; it raised the bar, becoming the father of the modern action film. Neither Walter Hill’sThe Long Riders nor Michael Mann’s Heat would be possible without The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah’s meditation on the role violence in deconstructing masculinity left a legacy that is clearly acknowledged by many contemporary filmmakers, including John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, Coppola, Scorsese and Kathryn Bigelow.

I have fond memories of the opening sequence in The Wild Bunch. It never fails to be extraordinary. That First Act, in all its terrifying, gut-wrenching piece of physical direction and obsessive attention to detail, represents all that is truly dazzling about Peckinpah, who was then at the height of his powers. We are utterly seduced by the Peckinpah’s moral vision of proud, yet tarnished, warrior-heroes who know they are doomed relics to a heroic past.

The Wild Bunch tells the story of the last days of the outlaw, Pike Bishop, and the men he leads. The action takes place in Peckinpah’s favourite fictional terrain: the no-man’s land of the Texas-Mexico border in 1913. Revolving round the band of aging outlaws who have outlived their time, they find themselves trapped between revolutionary and reactionary forces in 1913 Mexico, between a disappearing America and an encroaching modernism, and in flight from bounty hunters working for the American railroad company they’ve robbed; it is a study of violence in American life and the meaning of loyalty, honour and courage.

I remember the first time I encountered that memorable First Act, it grabbed me; transfixing me to my seat, convincing me I was in the presence of someone who understood what I needed to know. It was the opening scene of those angelic looking children laughing at some game they are playing. There is a cut, and Peckinpah shows us what’s making the children laugh; they are slowly feeding the live scorpion to a bed of swarming red ants. Later they will set fire to the ants and scorpions amid ecstatic cries of delight. While it establishes the tone of the movie, that scene sums up Peckinpah’s philosophy of what it means to be in the world made savage by man and the consequent unenviable Promethean struggle to become otherwise. We are not born, rather we become. I knew then in my young mind that this wasn’t going to be a John Ford movie or for that matter, a John Wayne Western. This magnificent opening sequence, followed by that triangulation of elements culminating in that famous shoot-out in the square, and terminating with Buck getting shot by Pike Bishop (William Holden) represented a radical departure from the traditional narrative built into the Western genre of its day; we the viewers are now in a welcome alien territory. That First Act clearly cut through all the dearly held preconceptions of the Western, exerting a profound de-familiarising effect, holding the mirror up to its contemporary audience, putting into question the national fascination with violence which had suffused the inner fantasy life of late sixties’ culture.

Exploding on to the screens in 1969, The Wild Bunch changed everything contemporary audiences knew or expected from the Westerns. Book-ended with dizzying shoot-outs that would make Michael Mann and John Woo weep, Peckinpah’s editors Robert Wolfe and Louis Lombardo intercut variable-speed footage (those much admired slow-mo shoot outs), multi-camera filming and montage editing to create wondrous sensuous kaleidoscopes of operatic carnage and balletic action, seeming to make the kinetic spectacle more intense and visceral. Unsurprisingly, given contemporary sensibilities, riots broke out at the film’s first screenings, particularly at the Kansas City previews.

The Wild Bunch forever changed the art of filmmaking.  Pauline Kael is correct when she surmises, “All they saw was the violence” but what is often forgotten is the haunting lyricism and strange complexity of The Wild Bunch. Indeed, we are often informed by the critics that Peckinpah’s films represent anti-social nihilism. He has been labelled sadistic, amoral and misogynistic. The film-maker, who came from a pioneering family with a long history of judges and legislators (who go all the way back to the inception of the native town and country) who played a role in shaping local, state and national history, came to be known as ‘Bloody Sam’ and grew up watching studio era films, witnessing firsthand the disappearance of the American West. In the early 1960s, following a successful career making series television, Peckinpah established himself as a distinctive revisionist of the Western genre with Ride the High Country, Major Dundee and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Sam Peckinpah

The Wild Bunch is his masterpiece, disclosing a Peckinpah as a self-conscious artist; highly sensitive to the European and American literary and cinematic legacy to which he was paying homage and the conventions he delighted in up-turning. At the same time, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Wild Bunch reveal a man committed to making sense of the cultural tumult surrounding him. “The outlaws of the West have always fascinated me”, Sam would later explain. “They were people who lived not only by violence, but for it. And the whole underside of our society has always been violence – it will be and still is. It’s a reflection of society itself”.

The production of The Wild Bunch in 1969, a savage allegory of the Vietnam War, reflects Peckinpah’s guiding preoccupation with violence and trauma as central to American notions of heroism, masculinity, sacrifice and redemption. Clearly obsessed with the nature of violence in contemporary media, statement after statement demonstrates a Peckinpah grappling with the torporific effects of contemporary media, especially the nightly images of television violence. A series of letters, including one to Richard Nixon, reveals the profundity of his adverse responses to My Lai. Excerpts from a 1972 interview with Peckinpah reveals a man struggling with comprehending violence and aggression, particularly the animal origins of human violence.

This is clearly an artist as horrified observer of turbulent times, preoccupied with the brutalities against the body and the deformation of the spirit that defined that era, articulating  in his cinematic oeuvre sixties radical thought and anti-establishment sentiments. But by the mid-1970s, Peckinpah came to recognize the slipperiness of cinematic violence, the inevitable fact that a given horrific image could provoke repulsion in one viewer but thrilling amusement in another. He came to the acknowledgement that regardless of his political intentions, he was unable to control the terms of his films’ confrontation with viewers or the effects of his spectacle. He was dismayed by audiences’ reception and simplistic interpretation of The Wild Bunch and their seeming failure to appreciate the psychological and spiritual costs of physical trauma and his critique of violence in Straw Dogs.

Peckinpah himself once said that some people want to walk out of his films: “But they can’t. They can’t turn their faces away. They watch, and that makes them mad”. One important difference between him and his deluded imitators lie in how deeply and passionately felt his violence is, and how securely it is tied to character, to milieu, to story, and to meaning.

Peckinpah drove home the point that the viewer is not innocent; he is always implicated in this violent world. To accomplish this, Peckinpah used everything at this disposal, everything and the kitchen sink, to draw the viewer into his morality tales. Throughout his career, he deployed stylistic and narrative techniques that implicate the viewer, compelling him to reflect upon and even feel accountable for the spectacle they witness.

Foremost among these were Peckinpah’s distinctive montage-based aesthetic characterized by multiple-camera filming at varying speeds and rapid cutting disorienting contemporary viewers who were accustomed to straightforward cinematography and linear editing. The Wild Bunch contained more individual cuts than any other in Hollywood history; 3642 cuts appeared in the original version compared to the roughly 600 in an average two-hour production of the late 1960s. Many of the cuts are as short as three or four frames, or one-eighth of a second. The film’s opening and closing sequences feature hundreds of cuts of varying lengths; some again lasting for only three or four frames and conflicting rapidly cut images rupture the viewer’s sense of time, space and movement. The final battle scene, for example, unfolds with 339 cuts in only seven minutes of film. The result is an emphasis on kinetic spectacle and a distension of temporal continuity. It was Eisensteinian montage freed from ideology and turned to a profound psychological realism which left few films that came in its wake untouched by its influence. With Peckinpah, every bullet, hit and fall hurts with real feeling. The action is always charged with volatile tension and expresses something far darker and subversive: the thirst for violence and aggression that brings the viewer to violent entertainment in the first place.

Like Bunuel, Peckinpah wants to worry his audience and force them to confront the awful truth that a capacity to violence lie within all of us; his excesses derive from a sane, passionate, old-fashioned set of values confronted by insane, uncompassionate world. Asked about The Wild Bunch and his attitude towards violence, Peckinpah replied, “Actually it’s an anti-violence film because I use violence as it is. It’s ugly, brutalizing, and bloody fucking awful. It’s not fun and games and cowboys and Indians, it’s a terrible, ugly thing. And yet there’s a certain response that you get from it, an excitement, because we’re all violent people, we have violence within us. I don’t know if you can legislate against it. It’s in children, as I bring out in the film. I don’t know about violence on television. I object to it because I think it’s usually so goddamned dull. They just have a lot of violence for its own sake, it’s not motivated. Violence is a part of life, and I don’t think we can bury our heads in the sand and ignore it”.

But it is in the central section of the film, when the Bunch visits Angel’s village, a pivotal scene of the movie, that most critics who haven’t really seen the movie often neglect to mention. Angel’s village, despite having survived ransacking by Mapache’s bandits, is a garden, built into a sunny glade and appears as an oasis to The Bunch, who have become used to using their wits to survive in a harsh cruel world. In an all too brief moment of respite from constant battle, we find our tarnished battle weary Bunch in an idyllic hacienda, quietly reflecting all that has come to pass and the doomed inevitability of their chosen paths. In this Edenic idyll, we recall that Robert Frost poem, while we watch the Bunch in an all-too brief moment of pensive reflection. In that Arden, these warriors realise that they are rapidly running out time and witness a world where they are increasingly strangers, a world they have missed out on; and the possibility of what could have been. It is a poignant scene. Pike Bishop and the men he leads realises, for them, there will be no recovery of innocence, “All of us wish to be a child again; even the worse of us, perhaps the worse of us most of all”. While it is an idealised version of what they wished their lives could have been, it is undeniably a pivotal sequence where the Bunch are caught between a violent past and their irretrievable march towards a doomed destiny. We watch them ride out of that verdant hacienda to the Mexican villagers’ lamentations and tearful farewells, and like them, we know, we just know it in our bones that they are riding to their final deaths; that they will never return to this moment again: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both, And be one traveller, long I stood, And looked down one as far as I could, [...] Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”

ON THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF REDEMPTION

In The Wild Bunch, we paradoxically encounter in the film’s denouement the life-affirming, increasingly fugitive codes such as honour, courage, loyalty, friendship, grace under pressure that have increasingly become clichés. Like Hawthorne, Peckinpah shares a quasi-religious streak, though it is set at an oblique, almost unrecognizable angle. For Hawthorne, the greatest sin is for one person to subjugate another completely; for Peckinpah, the greatest sin is always betrayal, which never cuts so deep as when it cuts closest.

The final shoot out

The key to the final scene is Angel, deliberately named, who serves as Bishop’s conscience. Angel is the protagonist capable of acting on ideals, of proclaiming his ideals in an uncompromising way. Over the course of the story, Bishop is forced to confront the ugly truth about himself and sees himself, not as he liked to be (a man of his word who lives by his own code of honour and integrity), but as he really is (a man whose code is a sham). Having abandoned Deke Thornton to his fate, the straw that finally breaks Bishop is when he realises that he has also abandoned Angel to his fate, who has now been taken prisoner and is being tortured by Mapache. The realisation finally dawns on Bishop that he has violated his own code repeatedly, that his is a hypocrisy serving to disguise the brutality and moral bankruptcy of his own life. This awakening propels Bishop and his Bunch to walk into Mapache’s territory in an attempt to rescue Angel, and thereby their own troubled conscience. But they know that this is doomed. Standing in the bordello, Bishop’s aging face is troubled, weary, full of regret. Realising that he could have been a very different man, he considers his present circumstances and is filled with self-loathing, guilt and grief. “Let’s go”, he says to the Bunch. Lyle Gorch (Warren Oats) realising the import of this exhortation replies, “Why not?” Having made their decision, the Bunch, in that famous doomed walk, marches off to the death they know is awaiting them. In front of his bandit army and the Bunch, Mapache slits Angel’s throat prompting Bishop to shoot him. In the extraordinary stillness that follows, we the viewers wait in bated expectation. What follows is the apocalypse, the final sacrificial bloodbath. But what is truly affirmed is their ethic of reciprocity, and their unhesitating attempt to give their lives, and deaths, some purpose, some meaning: “As for the meaning of life, I do not believe it has any…We make of it what we can and that is all there is about it.” (Isaiah Berlin)

 

The Wild Bunch: framed for posterity

Depicted in The Wild Bunch are portraits of flawed individuals, but also an existential sensibility caught between quixotic romanticism and the harsh realism of lived reality. What Peckinpah conveys in this magnificent uncompromising film is the possibility of an unsettling agonistic desperation to salvage quasi-knightly virtues of honour and the remnants of humanity, of the possibility of redemption for sinners who know they are beyond the pale. For me, the power of The Wild Bunch, to quote Max Weber, derives from “the secret anguish that modern man bears”. This anguish in turn is turned towards a feverish affirmative quest for long-lost for an incorruptible humanity.