Larry

The man.

The legend.

The machine.

The slap bass.

African Easterly

Before there was the label of “afrobeat” and well in advance of the market for “world music,” you may as well have filed this stuff under ‘Funk.” Given the number of cover version of “Soul Makossa” recorded by American acts in the year following the song’s arrival on U.S. shores, why the hell not?

In the course of searching for some discog info while doing vinyl rips of some early Manu Dibango LPs, I come across the following from Robert Christgau, re Dibango’s Makossa Man album:

"Hate to say this, but what makes Dibango's African dances so much catchier than those of the competition is that he's from a French part of the continent, which means he relates to the Caribbean -- all of it -- rather than to rock. Let's face it, rock's catchiest beats have always come from the Caribbean. Not that ‘catchiest’ is the only superlative I care about."

Cute, but I’m inclined to wave off the Franco-West Indies assertion. If anything, it could be argued that the former colonial territories of Spain and Portugal exerted a more pervasive influence. But in extending “the Dean” of American rock scribes all due courtesy, I guess one could make the Franco-Caribbean connection by way of a soukous kinship. Maybe. If anything, most Western listeners are more likely to hear obvious influences of James Brown, Junior Walker, et al.. Most Americans were introduced to Dibango’s music with “Soul Makossa,” and again with the Atlantic LP of the same name that quickly followed; the latter of which included a couple of tunes that the artists had recorded four year earlier. If anything, there’s plenty of moments when you might be struck by the canny parallel between what Dibango was up to – in terms of electrified rhythmic Afro-Cuban hybridity, and the expansiveness of a groove – and what Carlos Santana and his crew were doing at the exact same time.

And I suppose there’s a lot could be said about the extent of the Santana influence; about he his band inspired countless musicians – be they black, brown, beige or white – during the years of the late 1960s and early 1960s. If anything, there was a timeliness about it all, as if Carlos & crew had come along at exactly the right cultural moment. Mainly because the appearance of those first several Santana albums coincided with the years that the Chicano (Civil Rights) Movement reached peak activity and achieved its highest public recognition. Perhaps something similar could be said of Dibango’s premier on the international stage, corresponding as it did with a brief period when political hopes an urbanizing, post-colonial northern Africa were brightly optimistic.*

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
* A personal for-instance: I recall that in the early 1970s, some elementary-school world history textbooks in the U.S. adopted a chapter or two about Africa's emergence on the geo-political stage (particularly focusing on Nigeria, which had – admittedly – at the time only recently emerged from the Biafran War). By the end of the decade, this trend would undergo a reversal – with Africa being once again returned to the margins in most textbooks, if not dropped altogether.

Some of those 'kick-yourself obvious super intros' Phil's on about:

Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow. Funkadelic.

“My Cadillac and My Pinkie Ring: a Diagnoses of The Rapture of Objects in The Form of a Funkadelic Review By Ralph Dorey on Friday 13th of January 2012 in Holloway”


The Funk is physical, of this we can have no doubt. We hold this truth to be self evident, as to say “beyond representation”. The Kingdom of Heaven is Within. We need only look at the Funk to encounter its corporeal being, it requires trust and not the writing of a church.

Side One: Cock Block

“what time is this?” – George Clinton

Let us look at the body of Funk as wheeled in on the gurney. Dead on arrival but twitching (because to be truly physical, to loose one’s head and become animal, one must also become meat. To free one’s mind one must loose one’s head. The Funk is a corpse of transcendence, if the soul were to move not up to heaven but down to the crotch, down to the earth and death sex of soil-systems). The title track opens this monster, opens with the dying rays of Hendrix’s unification of church and state through the banner of stars and delivers a survey of land flattened (Holy Compression), describing space through the pan from left and right and left and right. Upon the flat landscape Funkadelic build a pyramid from a thousand parts. Thousands of pieces, thousands of instances, but only a handful of types, the [it ain’t a stab it’s a slab] of bass, organ and drum chopped tight with the (all men are) equaliser and staccato like a brick or a bar of pig lead. The funk is a flat square, existing only in two dimensions. Tight. Distortion is the sound of restraint, the head against the ceiling just as Funk is the music of repression, the repression of the self, of the head, just the body in the world (buried alive). A wriggle against the belt, the hand against the mountain, the impossibility of breaching the bounds made into a sublime act like an abstract fuck. Over and over and always now on the Plateau. Like a piston, Up For The Down Stroke.

There is no time in this song, no progression. A short while later Public Enemy would push this architecture beyond its last grasp at spacial orthodoxy. The Bomb Squad build samples like sedimentary rock free from human intervention and transcription. All time and space is now and in every moment, understanding that both history and architecture are perfected in the formation of coal (the black planet). Layers and layers pile down on now, hit all the buttons and hit record and repeat till the full black stratified mass fills all space and time. My Uzi weighs a ton.

Side Two: Science Fiction

“head ache in my heart, heart ache in my head” – Eddie Hazel

The doctor leans over us, the dead and headless and strokes us with his words of comfort and the placebo of muzak. Drifting off we find we’re in the yard behind the church and down by the riverside. Sitting and leaning against a washed out marker. Shoulders to the stone we remark at how its shape now matches that of our torso and likewise the empty space above mirrors the absence of our own skull. The gravestone is too short though, to keep our back flat to it we should sit lower, out seat touching the submerged root of flat stone which carries down beneath the surface and supports the vertical weight above. Reaching up the doctor pulls on the hanging branches of Willow and Yew. The church tree and the river tree, the painkiller and the heart medicine. 

Post-op: Freed of legs and stump-sunk to the belt we awake. Spine aligned to the stone and groin in the soil. A nothing above the nothing below and a horizon in between with a torso plugging the sky to the earth. Nearby the Willow sways a million repeated arcs of whale finger bones over the water like the infinite delay of the echo box through which pumps the snare. Repetition is to have one time at all times stacked up. The Yew just bends, denying the stability of form with a stretch while it in turn is denied the release of a break by layers of compression.

“from every head and ass” – George Clinton

Cross posted on The Institute for Spectralogical Audio Research

Proper Bo

His Card Was Posted Late (1)

Continued

Before Darth, Before Drones, Before Dreams From My Father, Before Death And Birth Certificates

Je Suis Le Grande Zombie

A riot is the language of the unheard.

- Martin Luther King

Must be the devil must be the devil mus is mus is mus is

mus is be the devil, 

cain be Rockefeller

 caint be him, no lawd

aint be Dupont, no lawd, cain be, no lawd

- Amiri Baraka 'Dope'

Top Ten Lessons For Surviving a Zombie Attack

1. Organize before they rise!

Max Brooks Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From The Living Dead

 

I always thought of the zombies as being about revolution, one generation consuming the next.

- George A. Romero

Economics 101

One of the most curious notions entertained nowadays about the music of James Brown is that somehow the direction it took in the 1970's into an increasingly spartan, etiolated, minimalist groove was somehow a quirk of the Godfather Of Soul's character - that it was a reflection of Brown's obsessive, puritanical personality, and offered no reflection on the world around it. For the Rare Groove aficionados of the 1990's who excavated deep and wide into his back catalogue, the archaeological process was enacted to salvage all those deliciously funky tics and riffs so they could be recycled any number of times in an increasingly diverse array of subcultural styles. What Brown actually had to say on those records was deemed irrelevant, or, at best, nothing more than a worthy series of exhortations to stay clean and do something useful.

Which is weird, because Brown was probably the most forensically meticulous documenter of the economic mores of his time, and his music was nothing other than the sound of relentless, concerted economic pressure. Brown famously ran his career like a corporation, and for all the opportunities this gave him for petty tyranny, it also informed him how the system worked. His music could only sound the way it did, because Brown realised that for African-Americans, there was no way out; the only realistic strategy of coping was the stoical maintenance of self-respect, an endless, boundless struggle to maintain your equilibrium against the bewilderingly pernicious social and economic forces that were ranged against you.

The JB's sound was nothing more than the sound of stagflation - the aural manifestation of an economy entering the vicious circle of its own demise.

Ever Pick Your Feet In Poughkeepsie?

Freak Out

Oliver Nelson was a musical giant who was unfortunate to live in an era of supergiants. Most famous for the classic cool jazz of "Stolen Moments" his music was all over the 1970's as incidental compostions for TV shows such as The Six Million Dollar Man, Columbo and Ironside, as well as arrangements for films such as Last Tango In Paris and records by the likes of James Brown, Nancy Wilson and The Temptations.



Nelson's life was largely one of incident-free dedication, being both a consummate professional and an educator who spent a great deal of his time in the practical teaching of music. He was one of the quiet but ceaselessly active backroom technicians who keep the cogs of the music industry turning, while drawing little attention to themselves and creating opportunities for others.



His last record before his tragic death of a heart attack in 1975 was "Skull Session", that took a wild new direction that was deeper out and farther in than even Miles Davis's fusion work. Its brain-frying stereo-panning synths anticipate the sci-fi gonzo rock of his fellow Los Angeleans Chrome. It's fascinating to speculate how Nelson's music could have evolved over the rest of the decade, perhaps succeeding in a true fusion of jazz, funk and rock that seemed to evade everybody else who tried it.

Flowers Won't Grow, Bells Won't Be Ringing

 

"The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego -- what I have been calling the waning of affect. But it means the end of much more -- the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction). As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling."

- Fredric Jameson

Soul is now a rare term of appraisal in music discourse. When discussed as a genre, it is usually as nostalgic totem, the distance travelled from Ray Charles to contemporary R'n'B, but nominally regarded as a sound of the 60s and 70s. The great labels Stax, Motown, Philadelphia etc. have long vanished into corporate takeovers, along with the local identities that defined them. Ways of life, classes and struggles that soul once inspired have formed different shapes in recent decades. Traces of gospel in Afro-American pop have all but vanished, and even the pastiches of 'neo-soul' are largely secular. Performance arts schools have overtaken the church in nurturing talent. Unlike the soul music that emerged from churches, the locus of success relies more on lyrics or production styles. Not the voice that vocalists distinguished with their cry of "please!", as they extended emotion outside the boundaries of song. Marvin Gaye was particularly distinguished in this, among other things. As an artist who bridged the era from doo-wop to MTV, his career rose, innovated and died with the genre itself. His 70s work was somewhat emblematic in its struggle with war, urban decline, sexuality, family, faith and personal expression. When the 'death of the author' rubbed against a new 'permissiveness' (creative or otherwise), he was also symptomatic of a time when the 'me generation' tentatively lumbered from the social ruptures of the 60s to the face-lifted restorations of the 80s.

As with most of Gaye's 70s work, What's Going On synthesised all the strands of post-war Afro-American music - blues, jazz, gospel, doo-wop, soul and funk (he would later make disco his own: a No. 1 hit about his fear of dancing). As a song cycle, it begins with greetings to a party and ends with a prayer. The ongoing crises of Viet Nam and economic insecurity loom large, where faith struggles with apprehensions of impending apocalypse. It plays as an extended hymn, to western society as much as God, a plea to "find peace sublime" by spiritual or secular means. The album is also a document of his struggle for autonomy in Motown's production line (he always sounded just a little too mature for 'the sound of young America'), shortly before the label abandoned Detroit ahead of heavy industry. Such assertions of "the individual brush stroke" were common in the early 70s, with many black performers attempting to transcend industrial limits. As with society in general, hard-won 'permissiveness' wasn't without its pratfalls. Without road maps, the 'dizziness of freedom' could result in unaccountable indulgence or crippling anxieties, as much as it could lead to innovations in social relations or modes of expression. It could also lead to a loneliness that the culture wouldn't absorb, a disquiet that ego, faith, or indeed 'soul' may be unable to compensate.

Deciding not to repeat What's Going On's success by recycling its subject matter, Gaye moved from The Waste Land to Eliot's dictum of: "Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you get to brass tacks." Let's Get It On was a manifesto of sorts, but not as clear-cut as the liner notes suggested. Gaye was plagued by sexual neurosis, reputedly a result of his harsh fundamentalist upringing. Compared to the previous album, God is barely mentioned. This is a hymn to the body, where faith in its pleasures nevertheless remain open to question. The desperate fear of rejection is of course a common motif in soul ("please!"), but the album still aims to seduce. Along with soul, Gaye foregrounds his roots in doo-wop, arguably the prettiest of post-war pop genres, that seductive crossroads between blues, gospel, soul, rock'n'roll and the Great American Songbook crooners that Gaye longed to join (he eventually did, posthumously). Yet as with his other songs of the period, background harmonies were provided by Gaye himself. Without the camraderie of doo-wop's backing singers, it leaves his serenades sounding all the more anxious: Scared that if I close my eyes/When I get ready to wake up/I might find you gone. Desire on the verge of splintering into duality and doubt, widening the gulf between serenader and his object of seduction, but paradoxically creating more intimacy with the listener. This is also the case with its more cavernous and fragmented follow-up I Want You. For all of Let's Get It On's erotic charge as the 'luurve' album par excellence, there's an overwhelming sense of absence to it.

After its sequence of sexual and romantic longing, Let's Get It On ends on a note of sadness and regret. 'Just To Keep You Satisfied' dispenses with the funk and doo-wop; and harks back to the more desolate work of Frank Sinatra, particularly his post-Ava Gardner song cycles of the 50s. The song had several versions, originally written for second-tier Motown acts like The Originals, but here Gaye edited out the percussion and rewrote its promise of devotion into a meditation on separation and loss. The bittersweet irony is that his departing wife Anna (Berry Gordy's sister) co-wrote the original song. Appropriate to this act of erasure and reappraisal, the album closes on a far more ambivalent note than its opening anthem:

  
Now it's too late to live and love and it's too late baby
It's too late for you and me, much too late for you to cry
Ohhh it's much too late
Well, all we can do is, we can both try to be happy...

Their separation would form the basis for an entire double album in 1978. Here My Dear was a flop upon release, but its reputation has improved considerably. Made to raise money quickly (for alimony and child support), at a time when Gaye was already living beyond his means, it was intended as a "lazy, bad" album to appease both his ex-wife and Motown. With declared despondency, its stream-of-consciousness vocals and fragmented collage of moods sound strangely compelling and immediate today. It's an album of disillusion, where passion is not so much an open question as avoidable error. The ugly, perplexed emotions that divorce brings - not least its awkward sense of alienation - are arguably more au courant with our contemporary mores than the frank expressions of desire of his earlier albums (which now seem more suitable for solitary listening). The bitter humour and references to financial quarrels were also ahead of their time - few soul singers of the time would foreground money as a component of emotional heartbreak. After further disputes with Motown, another divorce and exile, the 80s brought radio-friendly success with In Our Lifetime and Midnight Love. Even with greater polish and sales, his haunted duality and anomie remained.

Baby, your life and mine is grooving on the danger

Revelation's prophecy is nearly fulfilled

We are blessed to experience a changing world

So let's love before our fate is sealed

The implications of Gaye's classically tragic fate could be the subject of a whole other chapter. After his death, soul (as genre, as affect) would fade. As with many musical genres, it survived by retreating into subculture. Something to be curated (specialist radio and nightclubs), borrowed (a badge of 'taste' for white and/or British performers, a source for samples), or rented out to other merchandise (fashion, film, advertising). There are still soul survivors of the 60s and 70s who carry on regardless. Yet despite any continued commercial appeal they may have, they are as marginal to 21st century pop as those delta blues legends revived in the 60s. It's difficult to speculate which musical path Gaye would have taken had he lived; especially when we consider how Afro-American pop has changed in the past thirty years, not least market expectations of its performers. Popular culture - and the economic circumstances informing it - now communicates in a different emotional register.

The all-consuming success of Motown baby Michael Jackson - the commercial, sexual and racial disturbance that he (dis)embodied, the face of neoliberalism - effectively put the brakes on emotional (and textural) 'authenticity' in Afro-American pop. Jackson and the dominance of video (not least MTV's racism) resulted in widespread compromises of image and attitude that still reveberate. 'Realness' was reserved for the downsized alienation of hip hop, a genre so austere it even forsakes the comfort of song.  The 'real' became acknowledgement of socioeconomic pressures, not emotion or 'soul'. That in turn influenced the timbre and temperament of R'n'B, and any number of 'urban' genres (Joe Carducci's reactionary warning that repressing live 'heat' would "come back to haunt black music" may yet prove correct). It was as though production methods became a way to establish boundaries on desire. Lyric-wise, collective and emotional aspirations congealed into an emphasis on individual wealth and fame. Mention of marriage or work became increasingly rare in pop, and 'urban' charts are dominated by hymns to callow status. Vulnerability is defeated by impervious declarations of strength, yearning by the paranoid maintenance of impregnable ego. Songs of love finally surrendered to songs about fucking. And God? He's just another celebrity to thank at the MTV Awards.

Thank You For The Party, But I Could Never Stay

One of the greatest bands of the 70s (and 60s), with one of the greatest singles to ever hit number 1. The lyrics were once considered cryptic, but they derived from a common experience, like many in London are having right now. After a show-stealing performance at Woodstock, and superstardom assured, Sly was nevertheless dragged back to earth; face to face with 'himself' as dictated by the powers that be. An ugly encounter with the LAPD on the way to the studio directly led to these lyrics:

Looking at the devil

Grinning at his gun

Fingers start shaking

I begin to run

Bullets start chasing

I begin to stop

We begin wrestling

I was on the top

Stiff in all the collar

They slugged me in the face

Chit-chat-chit a-trying

They stuffed me into place

Legend has it that Sly came under pressure from Black Panther acquaintances to write more militant material. Yet it was his own raw experience of 'Amerika' informing this masterpiece (and the bitter, paranoid unravelling of There's A Riot Goin' On). As the gospel train ground to a halt, paranoia, disillusion or bewilderment were the order of the day. Early 70s Afro-American pop reclaimed - and modernised - the blues with a series of bleak classics, from 'Backstabbers' to Back To The World. Unlike blues tributes of white contemporaries, the above lacked much affection for the past, or indeed faith in the future. However, as with 70s American cinema, there was only so much despair mass audiences could take. The disco inferno arrived to dominate the mainstream, with many a soul or funk star attempting to jump the bandwagon (while Sly jumped off). The glittering, smiley face of disco would be caught unawares by the shock of Reaganomics, AIDS and the stark, alienated appeal of hip hop - the postindustrial blues. When he stopped taking things higher, Sly was a pioneering architect of low end theory; where Everybody Is A Star with an eye towards the gutter.