Cover of Björk's Homogenic (One Little Indian, 1997); image courtesy of slantmagazine.com

Cover for Björk's Vespertine (One Little Indian, 2001); image courtesy of harmony-korine.com

When I began conceptualizing this blog in the ol’ brainspace, one of the first sections I came up with was “Records That Made Me a Feminist.” I knew Björk was going to get at least one entry. Homogenic and Vespertine each played a vital part of shaping my politics. So, I figured out I’d probably have to write about them together.

Pairing albums for this section of the blog is something I originally wanted to do this when covering Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, which I started listening to around the same time as PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. I liked the idea of dialoguing seemingly dissimilar work by female artists with one another, but I feared covering those two albums together would short-shrift the artists who made them. However, talking about two distinct pieces of work by one woman seemed easier. And essential. So here we go.

I must admit that covering Björk’s 1997 and 2000 full-length releases present its own political challenges that makes me think critically about how I understand and practice feminism. Both of these albums made me a feminist largely because of the boys I was preoccupied with at the time.

But while my initial reception and resulting connections to them were tied up with potentially normative feelings around romantic angst and heterosexual coupling, I feel the albums speak to my development at the time as well as transcend it. In other words, Homogenic and Vespertine may remind me of boys I used to date, but they speak to larger, more overtly feminist issues as well.

Of course, being a feminist doesn’t mean you can’t like boys or be hung up on them from time to time, so long as you don’t let them run your life. Which I don’t think Björk endorses in either of these records, even though she herself has an ambivalent relationship with feminism (though not with calling out the music industry’s sexist practices of attributing male engineers and instrumental songwriters).

Importantly, as both albums were prescient to my development, they also went over my head when I first listened to them. Debut and Post were more accessible and, as a result, I liked them almost immediately. It was hard for 10-year-old me not to fall for the girl dancing through New York City on a flatbed in the music video for “Big Time Sensuality.”

But Björk’s next two albums took more time to process. Both albums mark advances in the artist’s production sensibilities, approaches to music-making, and interest in electronic instrumentation. Thus, just as Björk had to evolve as a musician before creating these albums, I had to mature a bit as a person before liking them as a fan.

So, Homogenic came out just as I was starting high school. I don’t exactly remember when I bought it, but I think it was sometime toward the end of junior year. I completely ignored it at the time. Or rather, I listened to it once, went “ooh, so angry!” and put Post back on.

The particulars I’ll keep to myself for the sake of decorum. Suffice it to say that I dated someone for a little while, fell in love, we broke up, and I spent a little over a year trying to get us back together. It didn’t work out. Eventually I got over him and whatever I thought we were, but not without some pain and denial and then serious personal re-evaluation. The healing process involved some righteous anger, loud parties, several bottles of wine and other goodies, and burgeoning feminist development. After a rough start, 19 turned out to be a pretty okay year. Homogenic was its soundtrack.

Now, I have no problem acknowledging that this guy was a total jerk to me. But feminism isn’t only about recognizing and calling out chauvinistic bullshit. It’s also about self-empowerment, personal accountability, and un-learning heteronormativity and patriarchal co-dependence. It isn’t always just the guy’s fault, even when it is.

Thus, I also have to own up to being really needy and delusional at the time. I pinned my worth on whoever I was dating without questioning whether being with them was actually good for me. So I projected my own big feelings and insecurities on someone who clearly didn’t want to be with me. I was ignoring the reality of the situation and, as a result, my own well-being. I finally recognized what I was doing when confronted with the lyric “How could I be so immature to think he could replace the missing elements in me — how extremely lazy of me.” 

Kinda appropriate that a break-up record got me over mine, no? Apparently, Björk made the album after breaking up with drum’n'bass musician Goldie while they were working on their own project. Hence lines like “So you left me on my own to complete the mission, but now I’m leaving it all behind.” But it pretty much hit all the right notes of melancholy, indignation, rage, and feisty recovery for me. I’m a quarter Norwegian on my mother’s side, so even the line ”I thought I could organize freedom — how Scandinavian of me” in “Hunter” applied.

Attention must be paid to the album’s sound and how it marked a musical departure for Björk. Post was an eclectic mix that boasted songs like “Army of Me,” “Enjoy,” and “Headphones,” that opened up her sound to include state-of-the-art aggressive digital distortion and serene electronic minimalism.

While this was evident in the production work Tricky and 808 State’s Graham Massey did on Post, it wasn’t the focus. It would come to define the artistic work she began doing with producers like Mark Bell on Homogenic and would continue to do with Matmos on Vespertine. But I’d hedge that most casual listeners just remember Post’s ”It’s Oh So Quiet,” which was produced by Björk’s then-mainstay, Nellee Hooper, the man responsible for all the production on her breakthrough Debut. He was also responsible for “Hyperballad,” which I’d argue suggests the artist’s shift, which is fully evident on her next album.

Man, I wish I could post the music video, but WMG has apparently disabled the audio. All the more reason to check out Michel Gondry’s Directors Label DVD, or any of the other myriad DVD titles that have documented her videography.

So Homogenic marks a transition from being a pop star to an artist who challenges her listeners’ ears and expectations with each release. By 1997, we also heard alternative pop stars like Beck and Radiohead establish themselves similarly with Odelay and OK Computer. We would hear Radiohead do it again in 2000 with the mind-blowing Kid A, where they really demonstrated their love for electronic instrumentation and experimental production techniques.

Björk was already on this path in 1997, but while Radiohead looked outward toward the fallabilities of modern life, Björk looked inward at the seductive pleasures and wobbly peculiarities of domestic life and partnership on her next record, rapturing at her voice’s clicks and finding percussive possibilities out of shuffled decks of cards. I don’t think these innovations went unnoticed when Radiohead went to work on In Rainbows. To me, Vespertine’s influence is all over a song like “Nude,” which was originally an outtake from OK Computer. This is further confirmed by the band’s rendition of Homogenic’s ”Unravel” as a tip of the hat. As if lead singer Thom Yorke’s backing vocals on “Náttúra” aren’t enough.

Hmmm. Maybe at some point, I’ll consider Yorke’s duets with Björk and PJ Harvey. Yorke is one of my favorite vocalists, a fact confirmed by a recent revisit of Hail to the Thief. If one of my friends ran a blog on male masculinity and music culture, I’d pen a guest entry in a second.

But I was afflicted with a troubled mind when Vespertine first came out. In addition to boy heartache, I was going through some considerable familial strife. I was also starting my first semester of college, so a tackier person might blame 9/11.

After seeing the music video for “Hidden Place,” I dutifully bought the album, along with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, another at-the-time inscrutable release, at the Tower Records by campus. I listened to the album a few times, but my head was not in the right place for it. It was too contented and quiet. I couldn’t hear it. And then for a little while all I could hear was Homogenic at full volume.

Stills from the video that convinced me to buy "Vespertine"; image courtesy of unit.bjork.com

To be blunt, Vespertine didn’t really make sense to me until I started having sex. Critics like Ryan Dombal would seem to concur. I remember seeing her performance of ”Cocoon” on Jay Leno and thinking that it was really quiet, but totally not getting how micro-embodied intimacy is the song’s entire purpose. While I had a good understanding of mechanics and had engaged in related activities before going into my first listen, I don’t think a song like “Cocoon” makes sense to a person unless they’ve experienced it, to speak euphemistically, in a corporeal sense.

BTW, yes that is Bill O’Reilly adjusting his tie. If he was actually listening to the song, I’m sure he’d be appalled by how delightfully, defiantly sexual this song is and that it was performed uncensored on network television. Watching it now, I can’t believe I wasn’t really listening. Maybe I should have been leaning into the television.  

Again, the particulars here aren’t really important. I was a week or so into being 20 and, frankly,  didn’t want to be a virgin anymore. The guy was someone willing, it was fun, and didn’t last very long.

In short, the romanticism and emotional connectedness that is often built into such an experience was not there, nor do I regret that it wasn’t. I would find that later, which would make my understanding of those aspects of Vespertine more profound and further develop my feminist principles.

I bring sex into the discussion because I, to borrow briefly from Arrested Development’s George Michael Bluth, find Vespertine’s complex eroticism one of its most key contributions to what made me a feminist. Though perhaps a stretch and certainly not without its own distinctions, I tend to think of this album in accord with Audre Lorde’s wonderful essay “Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power.”

And while I don’t know if this entry’s subject has read the essay, something tells me that the same woman who identifies as bisexual and recognizes the erotic potential in mundane activities would concur with much of the theorist’s thesis.

Of course, feminists must also have the wherewithal to recognize that eroticism, even ephemeral evidence like orgasms, are luxuries to some women and girls. Not everyone is given a space, a country, or a political system that allows them the safety and freedom to enjoy and explore these possibilities.

But eroticism isn’t about cataloging who did what to whom for Björk. As David Fricke gestured toward in his review of the album for Rolling Stone, it might be everywhere, at once tangible and theoretical.

This is where I think it’s important to consider the album’s production sensibilities and Björk’s particular uses of her voice. In addition to non-conventional practices like sampling and turning seemingly non-musical domestic items into instruments, the singer’s voice is the album’s real focus. Because of how closely she’s miked, you can hear every tic, breath, whispered turn of phrase, and any other sound coming out of her mouth. As a result, her voice becomes a varied and vital instrument, an idea she has continued to develop and that has continued to stay with me.

Recorded before Beck hit it big with Mellow Gold and released afterwards, One Foot in the Grave certainly would have stood in stark contrast the first time around. One Foot is a strongly focused folk record: mostly acoustic; very stripped down. It’s not necessarily high audio quality, (hell, it was recorded in producer Calvin Johnson’s basement studio), but still at the high level of musicianship and songwriting that Beck would go on to solidify.

He only fails in the utter mess of “Ziplock Bag”. With all the songs available at the time, I have to question why he and Calvin had to include “Ziplock Bag” and not just switch it out with something that was remotely listenable. That being said, not every over track is made of gold, (or copper, considering). “See Water” and “Forcefield” could be called lullabies, purely for the fact that they put me to sleep, and the people serving as backup vocalists aren’t the greatest I’ve ever heard, especially Calvin Johnson himself. Nonetheless, One Foot in the Grave is still very much a record to seek out for Beck fans. A whole second album’s worth of bonus content from the new reissue makes it even more worth it.

 Oh yeah. A whole album’s worth.

Cover of Viva! La Woman, released in 1996 on Warner Bros.

Some super-smart feminist friends have been talking about records and musicians that made them feminists lately and it makes me wanna wax nostalgic too. I’m really excited to be talking about Viva! La Woman, one of many albums that made me a feminist but the first that left quite an indelible impression. I basically put this blog together so that I could, at some point, thank Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda for blowing my mind. Thanks, ladies.

Right before I turned 13, I saw the video for “Know Your Chicken” on 120 Minutes, which was the pinnacle of my pre-teen Sunday nights. This video, with the two amazingly cool ladies bolted me upright. I’d get to the clip’s deliberately cheap aesthetic style and its parodying of both the sitcom and the genre’s gendered relational dynamics later. In junior high, I just needed to find out who the ladies were.

Sunday, the day of ritual for many, was also one for me. At 7 p.m., Houston’s alternative station (then Rocket 107.5 the Buzz, now 94.5 the Buzz) would broadcast “Lunar Rotation,” where director David Sadoff would play new stuff and oldies that didn’t make into heavy rotation. At 10, the station would broadcast “Modern Rock Live,” KROQ’s syndicated call-in program. Finally, at midnight, the station would have an hour of “whatever” programming. Usually, some guest would play whatever they wanted. The one that most immediately comes to mind was Self’s Matt Mahaffey serving as guest deejay, playing album cuts from Portishead’s Dummy. It never mattered, because it was always white noise for 120 Minutes, which ran the coolest, newest videos that never aired on MTV during the day.

In terms of feminist reflections on my girlhood, Sunday was this fantastical time where I could hang out in my room (usually playing Nintendo, sometimes reading, sometimes making wall collages out of clippings from Seventeen) and wrap my head around some new music. This was a bit hard to do as my hometown is a bit removed from much of anything new.

But Fridays on MTV gave me another place to access this beguiling song, via their short run of Squirt TV, originally a New York-based public access show that my boyfriend, Jake Fogelnest, would record in his bedroom. Liz Phair also came onto Fogelnest during the show’s MTV run, but Liz will get her own post when I write about my 17th birthday. For now, let’s watch Cibo Matto perform live.

And then they were on House of Style, eating dessert. Then the video for “Sugar Water” came out, which left such an impression that I wrote an entire section of my thesis on it. A short time after that, they were getting a write-up in Rolling Stone, with their album’s genre-melding, cut-and-paste sound being favorably compared (however problematically) to fugu. I would later come to call my college radio show “Cheesecake or Fugu” in tribute. And there they were on my stepbrother’s Tibetan Freedom Concert CD, a bit later, when I was a freshman, yelling “shut up so we can eat, too bad no bon appétit!”

So, even though they were on a major label and being promoted on MTV and Rolling Stone, Cibo Matto seemed like they were from Japan based in New York transmitted from the moon. And yet, they’ve followed me everywhere since, making themselves familiar, like a home.

All this hype, but I didn’t get the album until Christmas sophomore year, when I was 15. I wanted the purchase of this album to be special. When I finally got it, I spent hours ignoring the paperback of Wuthering Heights I had to read for school (which also made me a feminist, in opposition) so I could study the album’s packaging. Mike Mills’s cover alone was empowering — the curvy, muscular, perhaps multi-ethnic superwoman standing proudly in her gold bikini and sandals. And the curvilinear sketches that accompanied the lyric sheet was elegant and beguiling. But for me, it was all about the inlay image underneath the disc.

Viva! La Woman inlay

While this image was shot in New York, it looked like another world to me alone in my bedroom in Alvin, Texas. I wanted to know everyone in this scene and be their friends. I wanted to know where Yuka and Miho got those bikes and dresses. I wanted to listen to all of the records people were pouring over. And I actually did pull my stepbrother’s skateboard out of the garage, busting my ass as I attempted to use it. But more than that, I wanted the confident cool that these two women possessed.

The older I get, the more comfortable I feel with myself, and I feel much of this is indebted to Cibo Matto, especially this first album, as to me its basically a declaration for the powers, pleasures, and peculiarities of femaleness. One need only look to the title.

The concept of the album is important. “Concept album” as a construct tends to make me shudder, thinking about bearded dudes noodling with guitars and piles of synthesizers and writing tiresome odes to alienation, but, indeed, Viva! La Woman is a concept album. About food. Eating food. Each track, with the exception of “Theme,” is named after food and all of the songs mention eating or being consumed as if they were food. More times than not, it’s about eating instead of being eaten.

And OMG, they did something totally dirty with their cover of “Candyman,” turning the original, which I always found oppressively, creepily cheerful, and turning into some kind of porn soundtrack/trip hop/bossa nova thing, complete with sampled moaning (*blush*).

On that tack, this album is super-sexy, in ways both obvious and difficult to process. Perhaps it suggests that Asian and Asian American women don’t reflect the limited, servile, infantalized depictions others have circulated at their expense. With “White Pepper Ice Cream,” a slow, rollicking bass line accompanies lines like “black and white, Bonnie and Clyde” suggesting that women and girls can occupy both within themselves at once. And with “Theme,” the album’s centerpiece, what begins as a short story about a chance encounter with a handsome stranger while vacationing in Milan becomes a blind-folded S&M session that collapses into muffled, breathy coos; the music reflects the narrative changes at every turn. I didn’t know what to do with this as a teenager, and am still trying to figure it out as an adult.

Thinking about the constant stylistic shifting that goes on in the album’s instrumentation, I guess the duo’s sample-happy approach brings us to another feminist awakening: everything is connected. Beck gets a lot of credit, via Odelay, for helping set to tone for popular music’s comfort with hybridity the 90s (of course borrowing from The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, bringing on The Dust Brothers as producers). I won’t dispute that. But I’d like to add this album (along with Pavement’s Wowee Zowee and Björk’s Post) into the discussion. If mention wants to be made of the group’s gender, ethnicity, and their relationship with hip hop, so much the better.

Cibo Matto’s use of quotation and musical association was crucial to defining the era, but also bespoke the duo’s attitudes toward femaleness. Because connectedness doesn’t just apply to how they built tracks, but also in how they wrote lyrics. Once again, everything is connected. In “Sugar Water,” black cats crossing one’s path is cosmically linked to a woman in the moon singing to the Earth. Extrapolating further, everything is connected and everything is informative. The personal is not only political, but educational.

And finally, I really enjoy the album’s weirdness. I say this not as a way to other the Japanese American women responsible for its creation or to announce my whiteness alongside it. Literally, the album is packed with memorable, weird, sometimes shouted non sequitors that serve as the songs’ hooks. For example, in “Beef Jerky,” the chorus is “Who cares? I don’t care? A horse’s ass is better than your’s.” In “Know Your Chicken” the bridge is “spare the rod and spoil the chick before you go and shit a brick.” And of course, “Birthday Cake” contains the much-quoted line “extra sugar, extra salt, extra oil and the MSG — shut up so we can eat, too bad no bon appétit!” I like to think moments like this suggest the possibilities to rupture, critique, and find humor in living life female.

And sometimes songs don’t end. A song like “Beef Jerky” concludes with the elliptical phrase “let’s eat carrots together until . . .” Indeed, life doesn’t end. It simply builds on itself, layer by layer, line by line, sample by sample. I can’t wait to discover what I find in this record when I’m 35.

Un saludo cordial a todos los lectores de los oídos vírgenes, gracias por sus comentarios y visitas.

Si buscas un disco no monótono, que no se pueda encasillar en un género, que utilice variedad de instrumentos, que sea fresco e irreverente, y sobre todo novedoso, entonces el Odelay del prolijo Beck es lo que estas buscando, el quinto disco de este artista (segundo en una disquera grande) para este disco utilizó todo lo que cayese en sus manos guitarras, sintetizadores, trompetas, saxofones, etc; y se valió de diversos géneros como el pop (Devils Haircut), blues (Hotwax), country (Lord Only Knows), psicodelia (Readymade), rock (Minus), jazz (The New Pollution), funk (Sissyneck), hip-hop (High 5 (Rock the Catskills)), electrónica (Derelict), convirtiéndolo en un rompecabezas musical, haciendo la escucha de este disco un actividad sumamente divertida.

El Odelay es sin duda el disco más aclamado de Beck, eso se debe a que el artista jugó y probó todo lo que estaba a su alcance, un clásico pos claro que si.

TRACK LIST
1. “Devils Haircut” – 3:14
2. “Hotwax” – 3:49
3. “Lord Only Knows” – 4:14
4. “The New Pollution” – 3:39
5. “Derelict” – 4:12
6. “Novacane” – 4:37
7. “Jack-Ass” – 4:11
8. “Where It’s At” – 5:30
9. “Minus” – 2:32
10. “Sissyneck” – 3:52
11. “Readymade” – 2:37
12. “High 5 (Rock the Catskills)” – 4:10
13. “Ramshackle” – 5:46

VIDEOS
Devils Haircut
The New Pollution
Jack-Ass
Where It’s At

DESCARGA
PASS: oidosvirgenes
Hasta la próxima entrega

David “Beck” Hansen has long been one of my favorite musicians. I discovered him when Guero came out and its lead single, “E-pro”, was blasting from the radio. Then I went back and dug through his past releases (I now own most of them). And each one has its own very particular power for me. Which is why it’s such a drag for me to have conversations regarding him which, regardless of the musical content of his work, seem to focus on a few preconceived notions about Beck as an artist. Here I shall rant about the worst two of these and why I wish people would stop talking about them.

“This Album Is Not Like Odelay And Therefore Blows”

A great album. Like several other Beck albums.

Yeah, alright, we get it, you really liked Beck’s ’96 breakthrough album, Odelay. And nobody’s going to say that it wasn’t the incredible album that you claim it is. Tracks like “Devil’s Haircut” and “Where It’s At” became instantly iconic, and the whole album rolls together with the Dust Brothers’ production into one very cohesive and successful artistic statement. The problem here is that ever since critics fell in love with Odelay, they could not shut up about the fact that Beck has changed his style with each successive album. Then when Guero came out in 2005, they complained because with the return of the Dust Brothers’ production, it was apparently too much like his prior work.

While for some artists, varying it up between albums marks artistic progress, Beck is constantly accused of having lost his way in some sense after that album’s release. As a result, the critics haven’t given several of his albums their full due, including 1999’s party-fueled Midnite Vultures and 2008’s haunting, meditative Modern Guilt. Come on, guys. Let’s be adult here. Beck really hasn’t made a single record that would not be considered a huge breakthrough for another act (including ‘98’s Mutations, even though it may not be my personal favorite).

The Onion’s A.V. Club said it best: “It’s as if creativity were a mountaintop that, once scaled, prevents any further ascent.”

“Beck Is A Scientologist Hurr Hurr”

Weird, yes. But does it play guitar on Beck's latest record?

Yes, fine, Beck is a believer in the religion that the Internet loves to hate, Scientology. Yes, some of the doctrines of that religion are pretty out-there and possibly even bizarre. That’s his right, and really, guys, it doesn’t have anything to do with his music, so don’t let it affect how you listen to and professionally review his albums. What bothers me more, personally, is when they throw in a ‘witty’ remark to reference his faith for a laugh. It strikes me, personally, as unprofessional and childish. Leaving aside my personal disdain for the whole harassing-Scientology-is-funny thing, the fact is that his personal beliefs just do not apply when you are discussing the album unless there is specific occasion for it due to the music.

Oh yeah, then there is this guy, writing for Stylus Magazine. Don’t really even need to say what I think about that.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Sorry for being overbearing. I get intense sometimes… To make up for it, here’s the video for what is almost certainly the best track off ‘08’s Modern Guilt, “Gamma Ray”:

-Owen

World Cafe on XPN is playing Irish music (and music by Irish artists) today in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.  David Dye played “Cypress Avenue” by Van Morrison (see “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” a few posts down) and said that Van Morrison is the best-known Irish musician in the world, better-known, even, than U2.  

I love Van Morrison.  His influence upon and contribution to popular music can’t be overstated but is often under-appreciated nonetheless.  That said, there’s really just no way that he’s better-known than U2.  This isn’t a comment on the artistry or talent of Van or U2, but it’s just quite frankly the case the U2 is better-known on a global scale, and recognized more immediately by the balance of people born, say, after 1970.  In parts of the world where English isn’t a first language, I’d bet U2’s fame-edge is even greater across most age-groups.  It’s just the case that they’ve been in the spotlight for 30 years, and have either been called or actually been “the biggest band in the world” for much of their history.  Van is brilliant, but his fame, as it were, doesn’t add up the same way, and  I think any claim to contrary is probably hipster wish fulfillment.   Maybe Van should be more famous than U2, and even though modern music as we know it wouldn’t exist without him, he’s not more famous.  Just to be clear, I’m not defining fame as some kind of worth-barometer or even as measure of true success.  I’m just saying.

So, that said, I just so happened to download Them’s cover of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” a few days ago.  Van is freaking out of this world. I admit that even though I’ve known about his genius for a long time, I’d never actually heard this track.  That also means that I spent the last 13 years not knowing that the  spacey arrangement loop in Beck’s “Jack Ass” is a direct sample from Them’s version of “Baby Blue.”  Yes, I thought iTunes cued the wrong song for a second.  I was 16 when Odelay came out and I played the crap out of that record…”I remember the way that you smiled when the gravity shackles were wild…” just a great track…one of my favorites maybe even of the 90s. But now I have to think about how awesome it would have been to hear that space-jam for the first time in 1969.  Them’s whole arrangement of “Baby Blue” is righteous. Their cover is (gasp!) better than Dylan’s original.  

Listen to both tracks in the order you were meant to.  Perhaps “meant to” assumes too much 40 years after the fact.  Who’s to define the order in which we discover our favorite tracks and albums?  I think only our parent’s record collections, our friends with older brothers, the kids in the back of the bus, and the heartbreak-y pop zeitgeist of being an adolescent.  My God, if I were 16 now I’d be playing “Grapevine Fires” and crying to the video.  I kind of want to now.  It’s like “Karma Police” for this year’s sophomore creative writing class.  I’m not being ironic, by the way.  I love it.

ella tiene un cigarrillo en cada brazo
ella tiene manías de las caries blancas
ella tiene un carburador atado a la luna
ojos rosas mirando a la comida de las eras

ella esta sola en la nueva contaminación

ella tiene un mano en la rueda del dolor
ella puede hablar a los extraños destrozafrases
ella puede dormir en una ciénaga abrasadora
echando los problemas a las brasas

ella está sola en la nueva contaminación…
…

ella tiene un paraiso camuflado
como un latigo mandandome escalofríos
ella es el bote en el océano de mi desnudez
remontando en el rio delos borrachos

ella está sola en la nueva contaminación

This is a much more mature and coherent effort from the Beck-meister. With the hit-making Dust Brothers in tow, he delivers a killer album.

OK, that’s what I thought I’d be saying before I chucked this CD on for some re-listening this morning. It is odd how our memory plays tricks on us.

This album certainly does have several of Beck’s “go to” tracks. New Pollution and Devils Haircut are stand out tunes built around great beats and quite unusual but effective samples. Where It’s At has great vocoder action and a cool and catchy chorus. Sissyneck nails an unexpected country-funk feel.

The remainder isn’t quite as consistent or compelling as I had remembered. He certainly has curtailed his indulgences of the previous release (although Minus is decidely unlistenable), and most tracks deliver some interesting or exciting moments (such as the ‘chorus’ on High 5 (Rock the Catskills). But, overall it isn’t as spectacular as I had assumed.

The ‘highs’ of this album justify its existence in my collection.  I am intrigued to see if it ends up being the best of the Beck opuses on my shelf.

File under: Expectations outflanking reality

he estado por ahí con los mismos viejos zapatos
con los cordones sueltos atando el nudo en mi mente
si creiste que estabas haciendo tu camino
hacia donde los puzzles y los paganos van
lo pondré todo junto: es una extraña invitación

cuando me despierte alguien barrerá mis huesos perezosos
y subiremos en lo mejor de la tarde
recuerdo como ella sonreía
cuando las cadenas de la gravedad eran salvajes
y algo quedaba cuando pienso que todo está empezando

Give it up Turn it Loose/Sex Machine/Sunny by James Brown with the JBs – by the way, that’s Bootsy Collins on bass.

..so why am I rehashing James Brown?  This hasn’t been the first James Brown post or the first time I have posted Sunny for that matter but I want to make a point that I don’t think I have made here yet.  Few can deny Brown had one of the funkiest bands EVER but what really irks me is that in the day and age of sampling and remixes, his songs are practically off limits now.  Not that he wasn’t sampled a ton in the early days of hip hop but what is sad is that in the modern days of lawyers and music rights, artists are no longer given the creative liberty to reinvent works like they were in the 80s.  Take DJ Premier’s production of the Gang Starr song Manifest(below) which is based on  James Brown’s Bring it Up.  Anyone familiar with the Brown song would recorgnize the sample but it’s so skilfully reinterpreted that it bears no resemblance to the original.  Gang Starr simple could not do that in this day and age no matter how much he changed the original tempo, arrangement, feel, etc.

It’s easy to blame greedy record label execs for this but I actually think the culprit is a combination of advances in technology and lazy DJs.  In the early days of hip hop, the samplers and drum machines available to producers(early MPCs, SP-12s) only had a few seconds of memory to sample to.  This meant that anything requiring a longer sample would require a person to own two copies of the sampled material and have the skill to loop it perfectly live in time with the drum machine to record…and drum machines are NOT forgiving.  In short few had the skill to pull off longer samples.

As instrument technology advanced, so did sample times and eventually in the 90s the technology advanced to the point to where you could sample several seconds of music at once – like a riff or an entire section – certainly something a little more recognizeable to the average listener than a one second drum fill.  At that time, the popularity of sample based music was making it one of the most profitable music genres and with it came many “producers” who didn’t have the foundation or skill of the earliest rap pioneers who were taught to make more with less.  The culmination of this was probably the Puff Daddy song Come with Me that featured an entire Led Zeppelin song sampled in it’s entirety with little changed.  Any credibility the creative license early hip hop producers took was used up by that point and licensing samples became a money maker for record labels around the world as a way to make money off records that sometimes weren’t event in production or making money from radio play anymore.  Note this was also at the same time that Record companies were finding ways to reinvent their assets by “reissuing’ older material.  As a result, licensing samples became so expensive and time consuming that it was simply not a profitable way for artists to make music anymore.

Outside of the hip hop community, there were guys like the Dust Brothers doing electronic albums with samples that culminated in their collaboration with Beck on Odelay.  I read an interview with Beck fairly recently and he said he would love to make another Odelay type of album but he said he simply couldn’t clear the samples in this day and age that it took to make an album like  Odelay.

The response to this in the artistic community seems to be centered around one of three work arounds for sample based artists.  One is to find even more obscure samples of a rare quantity that hopefully no one would be able to identify to sue for it’s use.  The second is to chop samples into smaller clips(like in the early days) and reconstruct new beats/melodies with the resulting samples.  Finally, I am noticing more people who play the instruments and then sample themselves – this is especially easy with music programs like Abelton.  Now we have people like The Books and Madlib who are making sample based music relevant again…but don’t expect to hear the tight grooves of James Brown making it into you favorite singles anymore.

Manifest by Gang Starr

Mass Appeal by Gangstarr – this is just to show what a bad ass DJ Premier is.  Take note that this is entire song is only four elements – the simple drum beat(probably on an MPC drum sequencer), one sample, Gang Starr’s rap, and some scratching fills by Premier.  That’s amazing!

hay algo mal porque mi mente se está marchitando
y mire donde mire veo la espera de la muerte
la temperatura cae en el oasis podrido
robando besos de las caras leprosas

las cabezas cuelgan de los arboles de los basureros
enjuague bucal, maquina de discos, gasolina
los cristales están apuntando a los bolsillos del hombre pobre
ojos sonrientes rasgando sus órbitas

tengo el corte de pelo del diablo en mi cabeza

maquinas de amor en la simpática entrepierna
descuenta orgias en el autobús abandonado
haciendo autoestop con la nariz sangrando
viniendo a la ciudad con las maletas azules

tengo el corte de pelo del diablo en mi cabeza

hay algo mal porque mi mente está marchitandose
el gheto desintegrandose
el rock and roll sabe lo que estoy diciendo
y mire donde mire hay un demonio esperando

tengo el corte de pelo del diablo en mi cabeza

So I have decided that every Wednesday I will post a little review of whichever album has been occupying my Now Playing screen the most. Don’t expect too much in-depth analysis. I like to listen to music, not put it under a microscope.

This week’s musical obsession happens to be:

Beck – Odelay

I never said I was only going to cover new music…

Anyways, I have listened to Modern Guilt and Sea Change but I was never a huge fan of Beck. He was a solid artist, but I just couldn’t really get into it. I found Odelay laying around in my house Monday, recognized the artist, and popped it in. I subsequently fell in love with it. (Apparently my dad had good taste in music at one point…)

The entire album is great, but here are my favorites.

Highlights

It opens with Devil’s Haircut which is one of my favorite songs on the album. It’s a great opener, I love the beat and Beck does a great job with the vocals (as usual).

Next track is another favorite of mine, Hotwax. I’m not going to try to describe it’s awesomeness, because not even I can fully comprehend it.

New Pollution is most excellent. I love the intro to the song. Also it’s an easy song to sing along with. Yea, I’m a car singer. Guilty pleasure.

Novacane is solid.

Probably one of the most commonly heard songs on the album, Where It’s At, is a fun song. Yes fun, that’s the word I will use.

Ramshackle is great. Perfect way to end an energetic album like Odelay.

Final Thoughts

Time to listen to the other 12 (?) albums he has. Eventually. Someday.

Skiva nummer sextio är ingen mindre än Becks klassiker Odelay.

60. Beck – Odelay

61. Beck – Mutations

Odelay kom ut 1996 och den gjorde Beck STOR. Han visade att han inte var nån one hit wonder, han kunde uppenbarligen klämma ur sig mer än Loser. Jag såg honom i Roskilde och han var hur cool som helst, och musiken var helt rätt. Då. Idag, tolv år senare, känns den inte riktigt lika rätt. Men den funkar förvånansvärt bra ändå. Jag var inställd på att det skulle kännas helt ultra-beige, men flera av låtarna svänger så man trillar av stolen. Det var ett roligt återseende. Den andra skivan, Mutations, fick jag i julklapp av min syster. Den är inte lika dansant som Odelay och inte lika cool, om man uttrycker sig så. Den är betydligt mer nedtonad, lite folk/country-stil, vilket inte fel, men den saknar riktigt starka låtar. Den jag tycker bäst om är Tropicalia, som sticker ut lite från det övriga materialet på så vis att den låter som nåt som skulle kunna vara med på Odelay.

62. Badly Drawn Boy – The Hour of Bewilderbeast

Ja, mina kunskaper i alfabetet har uppenbarligen sina brister. Den här har helt enkelt hamnat fel. Han var väl ganska stor ett tag, Badly Drawn Boy. Jag vet inte vad han blev av sen. Den här skivan är iallafall väldigt bra. Han har en enorm bredd. Ena stunden lyssnar man på en nedtonad och avskalad liten fin kärlekssång, och så kommer nästa låt och plötsligt rockar han som en galning. Därefter kommer en konstig instrumental liten trudelutt. I normala fall brukar jag ha lite svårt för såna här breda skivor, jag gillar exempelvis inte The Beatles vita skiva särskilt mycket, men den här tycker jag om. En riktigt stark skiva.

Smakprov från de tre skivorna finnes här.

Molti di voi conosceranno già l’estro postmoderno di Beck Hansen, probabilmente la ragione principale per cui lo abbiamo amato sin dal suo esordio.
Agli inizi degli anni novanta ci ha stupito con uno stile tutto suo, riconoscibile dopo pochi secondi – “Questo è Beck!” – .
Proprio quando il massimo della commistione ci sembrava potesse essere quella fra due o tre stili, lui ci ha sorpreso con la ricchezza della sua partitura.
La musica elettronica spesso a fare da sfondo o da legante in quelle variazioni che spesso aprivano la strada a quei repentini cambi di atmosfera, anche due o tre in mezzo minuto. Ballate rock, funk, rock duro, musica dance, rap, country, blues, che si incontrano nello stesso album.
Uno di quegli album è Odelay (1996) ed Euterpe mi ha costretto a comprarlo, così come nel 1999 mi ha imposto di scaricare Loser da Napster.
Se si scorre la sua discografia ci si accorge che di solito alterna album ritmati ad altri un po’ più riflessivi.
Sea change è uno di quelli più interiori, più “normali”.
Di quegli album che si reggono sulle melodie, sugli stati d’animo che evoca, sugli accordi impensati. Immaginare un disco così è ancor più complicato che giocare con la sua fantasia e impressionarci per gli accostamenti azzardati.
Qui si mette in gioco con la storia della musica.
Il risultato è che più lo ascolto e più lo apprezzo.
Trovare difetti a questo album è questione ardua.
Provateci un po’ voi. Per me è un capolavoro.

di marco dewey

Here’s a list of 10 albums I’m currently digging on, along with a little blurb on each one.

Electric Ladyland

Watched the Classic Albums documentary on this one, and I am plenty excited to soak it in!

Lemonade

Has worked closely with Jack Johnson, combining his nice feel with quality rap.

Med sud í eyrum vid spilum endalaust

Amazingly musical and expressive stuff that a good friend of mine got me into. I’ve listened through a little and it really takes you through some emotions.

Esperanza

I’m pumped about the debut of this rising jazz phenom singer/bass player. Her sound is excellent, and she injects a little R&B into the standards mix.

FutureSex/LoveSounds

Okay, I’m giving in! Honestly, he’s got some excellent work out, and I’m looking forward to this one.

The Greatest

This singer-songwriter has a very earthy, raw folk sound. I think I’ll like her writing style.

Home Grown! The Beginners Guide To Understanding The Roots (Volume One)

One of the listens I’m most excited about! They’re coming to town soon, so I’ll need to do some catching up. From what I’ve heard, they’re highly eclectic, ranging from funk/soul to harder hip-hop/rap.

Albertine

Revisited this today for the first time in a few weeks. The melodies flow so naturally, and the lyrics hit deeply. I’m also a big fan of some of these drum grooves.

The Bright Sadness

I’ve only gotten one crack at this, but I’m looking forward to investigating further. The quality of Charlie’s songs is usually very strong, and I’ve heard from a friend that this particular band has some excellent players.

Native Sense: The New Duets

Had to put another jazz album in this mix, and I’ve been meaning to listen to this one for a while. It’s a set of duets with the legendary pianist Chick Corea and vibraphonist Gary Burton. One of my favorite Chick Corea tunes, Love Castle, is the 2nd track on here…yesssss.

Knock yourself out at www.graphjam.com.  more later, pets.

Beck, c’est le Nicolas Cage de la musique.

J’ai déjà vu une entrevue avec Cage où il expliquait qu’il aimait bien alterner entre gros films d’actions bourrés d’effets spéciaux (national treasure, ghost rider, con air) et films plus deep (adaptation, bringing out the dead, matchstick men). Quelqu’un m’a fait remarqué aujourdhui que Beck applique le même principe en musique. Un album folk relax, un album groovy flamboyant.

Et quand j’ai vu que le réalisateur de l’album est Danger Mouse, jai cru qu’on était rendu au film à effets spéciaux. Je m’attendait à un beck plutôt groovy et upbeat mais je me suis vite rendu compte que c’était beaucoup plus sombre comme ambiance. C’est probablement pour ça que j’ai pas accroché… Ca reste bien fait mais je me garderai cet album pour les jours plus tristes de cet automne, ca fit vraiment pas avec ma sélection musicale d’été.

[Interscope - 08/07/08]

While I don’t think every album Beck has made is consistently great, I have always applauded him for the great songs he writes, and his love of working with innovative producers to give each album such a unique fit and finish. Odelay was probably his most consistently enjoyable album: though it encompassed a wide variety of styles and song structures, the delightful cut-n-paste samples from The Dust Brothers gave everything a slightly cronky, slightly wonky, very much alluring feel. 2005’s Guero was, in part, a return to that style – after all, Beck was working with the Dust Brothers once again – but, for me, most of the second half of the album melded into one homogenous lump, leaving the album sounding very front-loaded. While Earthquake Weather and Missing were two of my favourite, and most inventive, songs of that year, tracks like Scarecrow and Go It Alone were fairly anonymous.

All these years of waiting for the next consistently great Beck album have made me very excited about his forthcoming album, entitled Modern Guilt. Not only does it see him beginning a new contractual agreement with XL Recordings (who are no strangers to reinvigorating artists), but it also sees him teaming up with producer-superhero Danger Mouse, who has been in a most industrious temper this year, manning the production desks for albums by The Black Keys, Martina Topley Bird, and The Shortwave Set, in addition to finding time to release his own Gnarls Barkley sophomore album, The Odd Couple. He’s a cracking producer, often using vintage synths and keyboards to give tracks a retro soul feel, or just weaving his magic sparkle dust over good songs, to transform them into great ones.

The first track to be aired from Modern Guilt is called Chemtrails (it’s in the box.net widget on the right-hand side, once again), and it’s just over four minutes of swirling psychedelia and mysticism, complete with gurgling and whirring synths, plinky pianos, and cavernous drums. It doesn’t sound like much else from Beck, but it does sound brilliant. The vocals are equally doused in a mist of reverb, making them difficult to decipher, but Beck sounds like he’s in his starry-eyed observer mode, which is definitely an interesting change from the cutting sarcasm evident on his recent albums.

I must say, it’s somewhat reminiscent of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, and, if this represents only a part of the reinvention of Beck’s sound, I’m predicting that the rest of the album could be stunning.