Crooning on Venus: Sidenotes

Crooning on Venus, Pt. 3

Mouth music: Biased former Chicago scenester edition. Can't believe Robert didn't leap to mind sooner. Tsk.

Crooning on Venus, Pt. 2

A handful of perennial personal favorites continuing on the "mouth music" yarn what Simon started...




A while back, I paid the early XTC material a revisit for the first time in many years. Came to reappreciate the energy of their early years. Had punk not came along and helped level the field, Partridge would have an unlikely candidate for a frontman, mainly on account of the quirkiness of his songwriting. But what really grabbed my ears was how Partridge hilariously careened all over the place as a vocalist -- impulsively bellowing, barking, yelping, and generally twisting sustained parpings and phonemes every which way.

The above ursonatal excurison come from the Mr. Patridge side project, which is mostly Partridge dicking about in the studio, reconfiguring the various tracks from songs off the Drums and Wires LP, crafting them into other things. And get this, someone actually thought this one had lyrics; or at least felt it deserved transcribing.




Old favorite of mine, mainly for its haunting sparsity.

An early session from Hooker. Lore has it that producers didn't know what to do with Hooker at first, how to place a band around him, due to his sometimes disjointed rhythms. Here the rhythm belatedly enters when you hear Hooker tap it out with his foot, in what sound like a dusty, empty, forgotten space. And then there's the vocal. In which language breaks down completely, proves inadequate for the expressive task at hand. And then, faintly heard as the session abruptly fades out at the end, the sound of Hooker letting out a casual laugh. The whole thing having just been a toss-off, a warm-up exercise, or an off-handed demonstration of a song that could go on for ages.




A totemic favorite, I gather, of writer and music scribe David Toop, who’s written very elegantly about the recording and sonics of There’s a Riot Goin’ On. The portrait he painted was one of Stone entering his long period of decline -- beginning to unravel, coke-addled, paranoid and reputedly keeping a gun within arm’s reach during the sessions. And -- during the session’s more “quiet” numbers -- leaning forward over the keyboard as he sang, singing in a lower register than usual, his mouth intimately close to the mic, with the engineers pushing the slider high enough to send the vocal track squarely into the red. The results giveing Stone’s vocal a strong physicality -- leaving the listener with a sense of every vowel, syllable and word being shaped within the cavity of the singer’s mouth, of the curl of the tongue, the tightening of the larynx, the lips stretching across teeth.






To the degree that Leon Thomas is remembered, it’s mostly to the degree that he provided vocals on a couple of Pharoah Sanders sessions in the late ‘60s, not so much for the series of LPs he released on the Flying Dutchman labels in the years that immediately followed. Most distinctive trademark: dispensing with traditional “scat” singing and replacing it a peculiar combination of throat singing and yodeling.

And perhaps stretching the 'mouth music' criteria a bit...






Like a lot of early modern compsoers, Leoš Janáček incorporated elements of folk melodies into many of his works. Except he took it one step further, aiming to craft musical passages modeled on the patterns and prosody of the Czech language as spoken in the streets and markets, in the course of passing conversation or storytelling. As uneven as her output might be, at her finer moments Iva Bittova takes a page from Janáček and ventures further down that path.

And I suppose the above turned out as a proper round robin pan-genre edition. Assurance that I didn’t plan it that way, but there you have it.

Crooning on Venus, Pt. 1

It’s that season again, the one when the Decades Blogs network (as well as their friends and readers) hold a pan-bloggal musical shootout. With Phil and Simon taking the lead, we each nominate our candidates for most almighty Riffage, Drummige, Intros, etc.. Except this year, a fair number of the usual participants in the network have largely drifted away, taken to the shadows, or gone silent. Meaning there has been, as yet, no call for this year’s musical theme.

But over at the Blissblog, Simon has spent the past few weeks offering examples of what he’s calling “mouth music.” He tells me this is totally of his impulse and initiative, but by no means a solo effort. Obvious candidates like Meredith Monk and Joan L Barbara fell earlier in the series (32 and counting!), with a broad array of other artists following in later posts.

Natch, a lot of songs or artist leap to mind. But for the first in a short series, I’ll begin with a few things that I’ve posted in the past...




A vocal showcasing from Sumac’s 1950 LP Voice of the Xtabay. Back when Diamanda Galas hit the scene in the 1980s, I always thought she took more than a few effects from Yma Sumac; if not from this particular song. Sumac and Galas were both vocalists of unusual power and range. Neither of them seemed to know of an appropriate genre of music in which to put their talents to work without going a staid and conventional route. Not being able to create an entirely new genre, and simply made due with twists on existant ones -- be it lounge “exotica” or semi-operatic goth.






The vocals don't come in until late on the first piece, and the beginning warm-up on the second is among my favorite of Youtube stumbling-upons. For these, I refer back to some of my earlier comments about Wyatt.






A number of my favorite works from the early phase of Robert Ashley’s career was threaded on the theme of mutterings and howlings that fall outside the realm of intelligibility, if not beyond the lingual entirely.

More next time.

Una Mas

Or, perhaps: "Abraxalyptic Interlude, Bonus Beat Edition"...

Not sure why I bothered, but here’s an offhanded post I banged out & posted for the pretty-much-moribund ‘70s blog. Blahblahblah armchair-ethnomusicological glossolalic overthinkage, when (don't mind if I do) dancing is the much more appropriate response. Toward the end of which I draw some parallels between the music of Manu Dibango and the then-contemporaneous Afro-Caribbean fusion of Carlos Santana & his crew, mentioning how – once upon a time – the latter served as an inspiring force for a variety of “musicians...be they black, brown, beige or white.”

By which I primarily had in mind the “Chicano rock” upsurge of the late 1960-early ‘70s, however peripheral and fleeting it may have been. But above is a selection of some favorites, all of the same vintage. The question of direct influence might be tenuous or – given the geographic distance between the acts in question – nonexistent. Whatever the case, the idea of artists scattered across the globe striking up in such a similar groove at roughly the same time is enough to make you wonder what common influence set it into motion. So atop we begin with an oft-noted crew of stateside Latinos who managed to make it high into the pop charts with their (much-improved) cover of a Gerard Wilson tune. And in descending order from there: A group of African expats gigging in London, a fly-by-night outfit from Nicaragua, and a sibling act hailing from the Bahamas.

'I find your lack of faith disturbing...'

A heads-up: Another lengthy spiel of my blahblahblah-ing over at the '70s blog, once again on the topic of film.. Started out as bit of a response (by way of elaboration) to Mark 'K-punk' Fisher's wildly unpopular piece in the Guardian from a few months ago.

My interest in the topic isn't with the emergence of filmmakers like Lucas (or Spielberg, et al), but rather with the backlash I talk about – the massive shift or reversal in critical and popular tastes. One could reduce this to a general preference for "escapism" in entertainment or whatever, but there's more to it in this context. That context being the film market of the first half of the 1970s, when "social relevance" was to be be expected with many films. And a good many movies of that period reflected – whether directly or indirectly – many of the shared phobias of the time – reflecting either the economic bottoming-out that was occurring at the time, urban decay and crime, or Watergate-era paranoia, and the like. Dark films, "downer" films. But despite all that, there were some areas that were still off-limits – certain things that people didn't want to be reminded of or confronted with, specific aspects of American society or recent history that many avoided examining. Vietnam being chiefly among those things. Still, the violence of Vietnam (and of the social turbulence it caused domestically) trickled down into the popular culture, manifesting itself in oblique ways.

And not just violence. The social malaise and various cognitive dissonances of the era filtered through in some form or another, as well. It's worth returning to the Pauline Kael piece I cited in the piece, which is worth quoting at length. Entitled "After Innocence," the article was a long-form review of the film 1973 The Last American Hero. In an early part of the essay, Kael wrote:

"The Vietnamization of American movies is nearly complete. ...The Vietnam War has barely been mentioned on the screen, but you could feel it in Bonnie and Clyde and Bullitt and Joe, in Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy and The Last Picture Show, in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and The Candidate and Carnal Knowledge and The French Connection and The Godfather. It was in good movies and bad, flops and hits, especially in hits – the convictionless atmosphere, the absence of shared values, the brutalities taken for granted, the glorification of loser-heroes. It was in the harshness of the attitudes, the abrasiveness that made you wince – until, after years of it, you stopped wincing. It had become normal."

Kael goes on at length discussing what she saw as a prevalence of cynicism and defeatism in American films of the time, saying a little later in the essay:

"Though it was exhilarating to see the old mock innocence cleared away, a depressive uncertainty has settled over the movies. They're seldom enjoyable at a simple level, and that might be one of the reasons older people no longer go,... Almost three-fourths (73 percent) of the movie audience is under twenty-nine; it's an audience of people who grew up on television and began going out to theaters when they became restless and started dating. ...But while they're going out to the movies, they want something different, and this demand – in the decade of Vietnam – has created a fertile chaos,...

"American movies didn't 'grow up'; they did a flip-over from their prolonged age of innocence to this age of corruption. When Vietnam finished off the American hero as righter of wrongs, the movie industry embraced corruption greedily; formula movies could be energized with an infusion of brutality, cynicism, and Naked Apism, which could all be explained by Vietnam and called realism.

"Outrage isn't the aim of our most violent films, outrage isn't expected. When movie after movie tells audiences that they should be against themselves, it's hardly surprising that people go out of theaters drained, numbly convinced that, with so much savagery and cruelty everywhere, nothing can be done. The movies have shown us the injustice of American actions throughout history, and if we have always been rotten, the effect is not to make us feel we have the power to change but, rather, to rub our noses in it and make us accept it. In this climate, Watergate seems the most natural thing that could happen. If one were to believe recent movies, it was never any different in this country: Vietnam and Watergate were not simply where we got to but where we always were."

Kael's remarks echo sentiments similar to those expressed by Lucas in the quotes I used for the piece; and they are, admittedly, representative of a good many films of the "New Hollywood" period in the early 1970s. And in some ways, I can see some basis for the critical backlash that I described in the piece, which I can remember from my early teens. I can imagine audiences fatiguing under the weight of heavy and increasingly "self-important" epics, or formulating – in light of Coppola and Cimino letting their projects spiral off-budget and out of control – that some of the culture's cinematic storytellers had succumb to hubris and over-indulgence. Or of longing for something else, something equally as epic in the way of "light" entertainment.




But judging by not only the scope but the intensity of the backlash, one has to wonder if there was more to it than just that. Especially in light of the points made by Kael. One wonders if the fate of Heaven's Gate wasn't more a matter of bad timing more than anything else. If objections to the film had as much to do with content more than anything else. It is, after all, a frontier tale involving xenophobia, class tensions and economic injustice, severe social Darwinism writ large and monied interests running roughshod over all things civic and humane, all of it culminating – in the film's final reels – cataclysmic brutality. And thus, contained some commentary on certain aspects of American history (if not on certain characteristics of the society as a whole) that were bound to meet with an unreceptive audience in 1980.*

Why? Because it's perhaps worth bearing in mind that the years of 1975-1977 saw the release of the three runaway blockbuster films that most played a part in reshaping the film industry and public taste – Jaws, Saturday Night Fever, and Star Wars. In the middle of that stretch, something else took place – the 1976 American Bicentennial. The occasion was of the Bicentennial proved to be one of reaffirmation – a collective rehabbing of political faith and patriotic sentiment in the wake of the cynicism and disillusionment wrought by Watergate. Add to this that Heaven's Gate came out in the year that a majority of American voters cast their lot with Ronald Reagan, embracing his rhetoric of "making America great again" and the like. As Lucas said in that one quote I included: What kids or people were missing – what they probably needed while not knowing they needed it – were fairy tales.

So: Cimino's Heaven's Gate – the sprawling four-hour, $44-million dollar epic whose massive failure at the box office, by most accepted accounts, marked the official end of the short-lived New Hollywood era. Aside from its taxing length and numerous flaws, the film perhaps is ultimately guilty of being out of step with changing public attitudes.

Case in point: What critically acclaimed films came out in 1976? Network, Taxi Driver, and All the President's Men. What overwhelmingly out-grossed them all and won Best Picture at the Oscars that year? Rocky.

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*  I'll admit that it was only recently I only got around to viewing Heaven's Gate. I avoided it for years. Partly because I was never all that amazed by The Deer Hunter; the other reason being that if I figured if there was anything to the initial criticism...well, am I gonna get that four hours of my life back? Verdict: I very flawed film in more ways than I care to count; masterfully executed in some parts, with its fair share of mishandled or wasted potential in various scenes and stretches. But taking the good with the bad, one has to admire the ambition. Falling quite short of the Overlooked and Unfairly Maligned Masterpiece that recent advocates have claimed, but utterly unlike the mess its original critics claimed. In fact, doubling back to read some of those original reviews, the descriptions often strike me as so wildly inaccurate that I, at times, find myself wondering: Dude, are we even talking about the same movie?

This Place Really Used to be Something...

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that that was the decade in which I grew up, so on some level I hold it in semi-nostalgic esteem. But I think it mostly has to do with the character of American films during that decade, particularly in the first half of the decade. Yes, they have the reputation for being a bit bleak and "depressing." Granted, a good many of them were -- it seemed to be an underlying mood (or malaise) of the time. But mainly I like the character-driven drama in a lot of those films, which I suppose comes down to a variety of Raymond Carver-esque "dirty realism." Whatever the case, it was (albeit briefly) an interesting and distinctive era in American cinema, with there not having been much like it issuing out of Hollywood before or since.

So, I posted a piece over at the '70s blog for the first in ages. It's a lengthy appraisal of one of my favorite films of that time, one that (I feel) has unjustly received short shrift over the years -- Bob Rafelson's 1972 film The King of Marvin Gardens.

No Wallflowering Allowed

Naturally a person can't throw all caution to the wind in such instances, but still...

Last Stop on the Groove Line

For this, the 34th anniversary of the opening of Studio 54, I toss up an off-the-cuff bit at the '70s blog.

Despite how it might come across in the piece, I didn't hate the song in question. It was a good tune to get stoopit to back in the day, and I guess it still if if you're inclined to do that sort of thing.

I can recall disco's gradual saturation of the mainstream in the years following the release of Saturday Night Fever; and I remember the backlash that eventually (inevitably) followed a few years later -- the increasing popularity of the "Disco Sucks" decrees, etc. But disco didn't exactly suck, not as such, not at the beginning. It just got more and more bland and formulaic as the years wore on and it became further and further removed from its funk and Latin roots. There was more and more of it hogging the airwaves, and the quality of it was getting annoyingly weaker as the cultural glut was reaching critical mass. Even if you didn't mind the music so much in the first place, that type of scenario was bound to breed resentment. And even if you didn't mind it so much in the first place, there was a good chance that you'd been waiting & ready to see it finally make its exit from the cultural landscape.

So the backlash that kicked in around 1979 was inevitable, in many respects. From the beginning, much of the anti-disco sentiment came from the blue-collar heartland. It's perhaps for that reason that the backlash has often been portrayed as hinging on racism and homophobia. Personally, I've often thought that's too limited and simplistic a reading of the situation. If anything, there was a big streak of anti-cosmopolitanism about the whole thing. New York was already the target of public derision at the time, with public attitudes in a portion of the American population falling firmly behind the feds' "drop dead" decision in refusing to bail the city out of its fiscal bankruptcy. And the scene at Studio 54 became something of a effigy for that animus. The country was in a major economic slump, so really -- who gave a fuck about what all the "beautiful people" were doing as they partied beyond the velvet ropes?*

Of course dance music didn't disappear after 1979, but it definitely changed course, perhaps following another arc of the backlash -- a musical one. The straightforward 4/4 thumpity-thump of disco became anathema in the years that followed. There was also, as the decade progressed, a tendency to steer things toward a very pared-down, almost metronymically minimal, beat -- a skeletal remnant of what had previously constituted "funk." Bass was likewise minimalized, and polyrhythms were out. And that style became pervasive across the spectrum -- from the top of the pop charts down to most anything produced by the likes of Bill Laswell -- throughout the early and middle 1980s. There were pockets of resistance to the trend, of course -- electrofunk (and it Southern cousin, the "Miami bass" sound), latin freestyle, and D.C. go-go. All of which helped stave off some of the malaise some listeners experienced in the face of the the new austerity plan. I expect it's why house and techno came about at the time -- as distinct locale-specific responses to a hunger, rushing in to fill a void.


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*  Add to all this that Jimmy Carter's chief political strategist Hamilton Jordan was alleged in many media reports to have engaged in questionable behavior at Studio 54 -- from snorting cocaine to engaging in sexual trysts with other clubgoers. A federal inquest failed to substantiate the accusations; but whether true or unfounded, the rumors played right into a lot of public cynicism at the time.

Save It for the Exit Interview

Can't help but be amused by the fact that when I first stumbled across this clip some 3+ years ago I didn't make the connex that it must've been an Andy Samberg audition tape.

Please Stand By (An Inventory of Effects)

Note: I wrote the below for the outboard 1970s-themed venue. It took a while to write,   wrestling with the thing over the span of many weeks -- a good bit of which involved  pruning and closing off various tangents and trying to get the thing down to a semi-reasonable length. Given all that, and the fact that working on the thing meant a lack of posting here, I decided to do what I otherwise wouldn't, and reprint the piece here.

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1.

Here we have the American artist Chris Burden, looking like a professional and presenting himself to the world. The above photos come from his 1971 performance art piece I Became a Secret Hippy. It was one of Burden's earliest works, executed about the time he was completing his graduate studies at the University of California, Irvine. For the piece, Burden stripped naked and laid down on the floor while a friend hammered a star-shaped stud into his chest. He then sat in a chair while another friend shaved his head with electric shears. Burden then donned the suit of an FBI agent and presented himself to the event's few attendees.

The real-world incidents that inspired I Became a Secret Hippy are so obvious that they don't warrant an explanation. In that respect, it was far from being a subtle work. But considering that it was done at the time that Burden was leaving the cloistered confines of academia and making his transition into the world of professional artmaking, no doubt its ritualistic, rite-of-passage mimicry held some ironic personal meaning for the artist.


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2.

By many accounts, the early Seventies were considered turbulent years -- a time of political, social, and economic upheaval. Most Americans had entered the 1960s with an optimistic vision of the future that awaited them. But a decade later, it all looked uncertain and many people were getting anxious and doubtful, not daring to guess what might happen next. A common, knee-jerk opinion on the street had it that the world was going to hell. "Shootin' rockets to the moon / Kids growing up too soon… Ball of confusion!"

Soldiers returning home after numerous tours of Vietnam reputedly experienced something akin to culture shock, finding things at home much different from when they'd departed. The rapid pace of technological change, and the societal shifts that resulted, had some in the pop-sociology realm talking of "future shock."

So when people read that somewhere a young man had someone shoot him with a rifle and then called the whole thing art, a number of people were shocked, but probably not all that surprised. This is what passes for art these days. The way things were heading, why not?


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3.

The incident in question -- the one that would become Burden's notorious "greatest hit" -- was Shoot, which followed I Became a Secret Hippy by a mere three weeks. On the evening of November 19, 1971, Burden and a few associates and a small number of attendees met in a low-rent art space in Santa Ana. It was, by most accounts, a pretty modest and casual affair, up to the point when -- at an "Okay, let's do this" moment in the evening -- Burden positioned himself against one of the gallery walls. A friend then raised a .22-calibre rifle, took aim at Burden, and fired a single shot.

The plan was a have a handful of spectators witness a William Tell-styled act of trust, with the designated shooter aiming at the wall just to the left of Burden's shoulder. At the most, Burden later claimed, the rifle slug was only supposed to graze him. But due to poor marksmanship the bullet instead hit Burden in the bicep of his left arm. Not having anticipating such an outcome, no one had thought to bring a first-aid kit, so a bandage had to be improvised.


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4.

Before we go any further, a brief overview might be in order...

Selected Works, 1971 - 1976

Chris crams himself into a small metal locker for five days.
Chris gets shot.
Chris lies in a bed for 22 days.
Chris lies down under a tarp in traffic along a busy boulevard.
Chris nearly immolates himself.
Chris dangles naked tied by a rope around his ankles.
Chris crawls over broken glass.
Chris pushes live electrical wires into his bare chest.
Chris has people use him as a human pin cushion.
Chris runs the risk of immolating himself again.
Chris gets crucified to a Volkswagen.
Chris nearly drowns himself.
Chris gets kicked down two flights of stairs.
Chris nearly sets himself on fire. (Yes, again.)
Chris lies on a shelf, just out of sight, for 22 days.
Chris lies, unmoving, under a sheet of glass for 45 hours straight.
Chris bicycles through Death Valley.

Chris does a bunch of other things during these years, but it's the more violent and alarming and supposedly masochistic things he does that everyone talks about. Thereby making him a bit infamous in the process, saddling him a reputation as the "Evel Knievel of the art world" that he grew to resent.


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5.

Chris Burden didn't consider himself a "performance artist," nor did he ever aspire to be one. He'd originally set out to be a sculptor. In the latter years of his studies, he became preoccupied with the task of creating interactive sculptures -- works that invited the audience to become a part of the piece, that were meant to be engaged and manipulated by the viewer. But he quickly became frustrated and deemed many of his works to be unsuccessful, because each time the audience balked at the invitation, choosing instead to maintain the role of distant and passive spectators.

To remedy this impasse, Burden decided to physically make himself a part of the "sculpture," if not the primary component of the work itself. He did this for his senior thesis project, which involved cramming himself into a 2' x 2' x 3' steel locker for the duration of five days. As word of the Burden's project circulated around campus, the curiosity factor brought a steady flow of visitors. People sat outside the locker, inquiring into his well-being and asking him why he was doing what he was doing. A few people sat for extended periods and -- perhaps confused by the dynamic -- treated him like a Father Confessor and divulged all sorts of personal details about themselves. During the final day of the piece, university administration were debating whether to have the locker cut open, fearing for their own liability in connection with Burden's project.

So, problem solved. But noted for future reference: How to calculate for the vagaries of interpersonal psychology? ¹


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6.

Performance art was, of course, something of a big deal in the artworld of the 1970s, and Chris Burden was regarded as one of its leading and most controversial pioneers. But performance art wasn't such an entirely new thing. It'd first been kicked around by the Futurists and the Dadaists in the early part of the century, then gone dormant for many years before being reanimated in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily by way of the "happenings" staged by John Cage and his disciples in the Fluxus movement.

If there was any recent historical precedence for the type of work Chris Burden was executing in the early '70s, it was probably Yoko Ono's 1962 Cut Piece, which involved the artist sitting silently on a stage and inviting the audience to cut of here clothing piece by piece with a pair of communal scissors. On the three occasions that Ono staged Cut Piece during the mid-1960s, the audience obliged her each time, in the end leaving the artist sitting on stage wearing little more than scraps and tatters.

Cut Piece is an often-cited work in its own right. Critics often speak of how the piece addresses gender dynamics and how these dynamics play out in terms of social power and status. But in a broader context, one could argue that it ultimately points to an interrogation of the codes of conduct in a supposedly polite society, one which eventually (or hopefully) leads to a critique of the nature of socialization itself. ²


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7.

On the morning of January 5, 1973, Chris Burden walked out onto a beach near the runways of LAX and fired several shots from a revolver at a 747 as it flew overheard. Burden later explained that the piece was about "impotence," since he knew in advance that the bullets would fall short of their target. Impotence in this case meaning bold but futile gestures, the inadequacy of human agency in the face of the grander scheme of things.

Still, unsurprising to learn that the FBI showed up on his doorstep with some questions about the incident a few days afterwards.

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You're on Top of the World

And here's to an unguilty pleasure.

One of the other contributors to the outboard venue(s) all but commanded me to write something on the topic a while back, and I only recently got around to obliging. And since this is me we're talking about, of course I couldn't keep it short.

A highly subjective take on the matter, I'll admit; but there you have it.

Apathy for the Devil

More outboard riffage. This time a ballooning trio of posts spanning three decades, skipping across a few cultish excursions into "pop satire" and lots of rubbernecking along the road to nowhere. With the Residents, Shockabilly, and Destroy All Monsters driving the tour bus...

::   Part 1 ::   Part 2 ::   Part 3

I suppose there's a number of tropes that tie this tryptic together which I chose not to go into...a simmering anger that provides a thematic undertow yet never voices itself directly (all that deflecting and effacement via pomo irony & whatnot). Stuff that always struck me like it's trying to summon and expel ghosts with the same hand. All of it with a very definite bleakness and desolation undergirding, no matter how "busy" it might've sometimes sounded on the surface.