A Timeless Wavelength

Mouse and the Traps – A Public Execution

All musicians are constantly being influenced by the music they hear.  The boundaries between “ripoff” and “tribute,” and between “tribute” and “unconscious influence,” aren’t very clear, as George Harrison could have attested.  Sometimes it’s not even obvious who is ripping off whom.

Case in point:  You all know that Robert Allen Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota changed his name to Bob Dylan and tried to become the next Woody Guthrie.  As part of this transformation he ditched his Midwestern accent and affected a vaguely Texan one.  He then built a career on songs in the style of the folk music and blues of the American South.

Meanwhile, Ronnie “Mouse” Weiss was growing up in Tyler, Texas.  He had a Texas accent because that’s the way everybody he knew talked.  He played bluesy, folksy music because that’s what he heard around him.  In the mid-1960s his band Mouse and the Traps scored a minor hit with “A Public Execution.”  Everyone said, “This guy’s a total Dylan ripoff!  Just listen to him!”

Now, there are too many similarities, and Dylan was by then too well-known, for anyone to claim that Mouse wasn’t influenced by Dylan.  The imitation was probably even deliberate.  But is it fair to claim that Mouse was a Dylan ripoff? More likely, this guy heard some Midwesterner trying to copy the music and accents he grew up with, and said, “I’m the real thing.  I can do Dylan better than Dylan can.”  He never did go on to achieve Dylan’s mass appeal, but he did manage to record some catchy songs in the process.

It reminds me of a band I once saw in a touristy “blues bar” in Memphis, Tennessee.  I noticed all the songs they were playing were blues songs that had become hits only when they were covered by white rock bands.  They seemed to be staying closer to the style of the rock covers than the blues originals, too.  Here were a group of black blues musicians in Memphis, Tennessee, trying to sound like British art school students from the Sixties trying to sound like black blues musicians in Memphis, Tennessee.  Except I’ll bet nobody ever called them Rolling Stones ripoffs.

So let’s just enjoy Mouse and the Traps.  No matter who they sound like.

Lightnin’ Rod – Sport

Anyone who thinks that rap music hasn’t grown more musically sophisticated over the years would do well to listen to any contemporary hip-hop track, and then revisit Lightnin’ Rod’s legendary 1973 album Hustlers’ Convention. I’m not saying it’s a bad album; I quite like it.  But this album is to hip-hop as the Apple II is to personal computing:  important for being the first to gain widespread recognition, and fondly remembered by its fans, but nowhere near as advanced as what would come later.

This track, the album’s opener, is a representative sample.  Its stock bassline and ’70s Blaxploitation guitar riffs (provided by Kool and the Gang, no less) are nothing special, but it’s in the lyrical delivery that this album really stands out by utterly failing to stand out.  This song, and every other song on the album, more or less adheres to the lyrical meter of anapestic heptameter.  This is the same meter used in Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” a poem that I will never again be able to read without hearing wokka-chikka-wokka in the background.   The hip-hop hits of the ’80s didn’t use this exact same rhythm, but they tended to have a fairly rigid pattern of their own, one that could easily incorporate lines rhyming “hands in the air, y’all” with “just don’t care, y’all”.  Now compare that to the present day, when every rapper is expected to have his own distinctive “flow” and most rap songs are impossible to describe in terms of a single metrical style.

What’s fascinating to me is that the wide metrical gulf that separates Lightnin’ Rod from, say, Chamillionaire is contrasted with a stark lack of diversity in other areas.  Rap music, regardless of era or style, tends to have the same basic drumbeat, in 4/4 time, with bass on 1, snare on 2, and a slight variation of the same on 3 and 4.  I am not aware of any rap song that has ever been set to waltz time or 5/4 swing; I would love to be proven wrong.  And while it has become popular in recent years to incorporate “R&B breaks” or little pieces of melody (these days unfortunately usually provided by that detestable machine, the vocoder), most rap vocals are strictly rhythmical and so have no melodic or harmonic components to speak of.  Yet we have barely scratched the surface of what can be accomplished within this seemingly rigid musical framework.

This post was mainly an excuse to use the phrase “anapestic heptameter.”  It’s what NLP researchers and Amazon.com call a “statistically improbable phrase.”

Andre Williams – The Monkey Speaks His Mind

Here’s a song by an Alabama bluesman that turns a popular argument against Darwinian evolution on its head and uses it as a starting point for a lesson in the political philosophy of John Locke.  (Sentences like that are the reason I started blogging again.)

One common objection to the scientific doctrine that humans and other primates share a common ancestor is that it somehow reduces humans to the status of “mere” animals.  Of course, there are a number of problems with this argument.  For one, it incorrectly presupposes that, because two things descended from or were caused by a prior thing, they must be identical with that thing, and with each other.  For another, it exhibits the “wishful thinking” fallacy, which holds that just because the implications of a fact-claim are undesirable, it must therefore be false.  These arguments and counter-arguments are all very interesting, but they leave an important question unanswered:  if people are upset at the thought that they might be related to monkeys, how do you think the monkeys feel?

Andre Williams, who grew up in the housing projects of Bessemer, Alabama, moved to Detroit, and went on to write songs for the likes of Stevie Wonder and Ike & Tina, finally tackles this important question.  In “The Monkey Speaks His Mind,” we hear a monkey protesting the theory of evolution on the grounds that it is degrading to monkeys. Line by line, the monkey explodes the myth of human moral superiority:  “No monkey ever deserted his wife/ Starved his babies and ruined her life.”

A subsequent verse addresses the issue of property rights:

And another thing you’ll never see

A monkey build a fence around a coconut tree

And let the coconuts go to waste

Forbidding all other monkeys to come and taste

Now if I put a fence around a coconut tree

Starvation would force you to steal from me

This is as good a summary I’ve found for what Robert Nozick calls the “Lockean Proviso,” the restriction placed by John Locke on his labor theory of property as expounded in the Second Treatise on Government. For Locke, property rights stem from the basic right of self-ownership, which extends to ownership over the fruits of one’s labor.  When people transform previously unowned resources through their labor, the resulting product becomes their property — provided that they leave “enough and as good in common” for others to use.  In the example given by our simian friend, through the building of a fence around a coconut tree one violates Locke’s restriction by not leaving enough of the natural resources available to others.  (I am of course here referring to the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, though the other John Locke might have more direct experience with coconut trees.)

Locke’s basic views on property rights have greatly influenced the modern libertarian movement, though curiously the actual Lockean Proviso seems to have fallen out of favor.  Murray Rothbard had some sort of counter-argument to it which I am at present too lazy to look up.  Rothbard’s own views of property rights would seem to indicate that someone who merely built a fence around a coconut tree would own the fence but not the tree, since his labor was applied only to the fence itself and the land on which it stood.  This is all well and good, except if the fence is there I still can’t get to the tree, whether I have a “right” to it or not.  There’s an interesting debate over whether the claimants to an enclosure have the obligation to provide an easement to any who wish to gain access to the unowned resources that are enclosed.

Then there are those who go in the other direction and wish to keep the Proviso intact, particularly in regards to land.  The followers of Henry George view land as a finite resource over which no one individual has any more natural claim than another.  If an individual decides to appropriate land for his private use, he must compensate the rest of society through the payment of “ground rents,” or a tax on the unimproved land value.  George believed that ground rent was the only truly just form of taxation, since unlike taxes on trade or income it did not punish productivity.  He felt that the land value tax alone was sufficient to fund the necessary functions of government, and thus his followers became known as “Single Taxers.”  (Not to be confused with the “Flat Tax” or “Fair Tax” plans currently advocated by certain talk radio blowhards.)  Today the Georgists form a tiny, eccentric minority within the greater libertarian movement.  They claim that thinkers as diverse as Thomas Paine, Winston Churchill, William F. Buckley, and Mumia Abu-Jamal have advocated the single-tax position, though I question how much of George’s overall political philosophy any one of them might have agreed with.

So there you have it.  Three hundred years of John Locke’s political legacy summed up in a blues song about a monkey.  Maybe that makes up for his rival Thomas Hobbes getting to have a cartoon tiger named after him.

Neil Young – Cortez the Killer

Rock music has long been a voice for social change, but socially conscious musicians don’t usually hire fact checkers.  “Cortez the Killer,” Neil Young’s epic critique of colonialism, demonstrates the downside of this deficiency.  If all you had to go on was this song, you’d come away with an undeservedly favorable picture of the Aztec empire.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s a great song, one of my favorites in Young’s lengthy catalogue.  And the basic message isn’t a bad one. The Aztecs certainly didn’t deserve their fate at the hands of los conquistadores. But that’s no reason to paint them as a Utopian society where “hate was just a legend, and war was never known” until the Spanish showed up.  In fact, the Aztecs and their various neighbors had been in an almost constant state of warfare for nearly a century by the time Cortés arrived.  The song makes only a brief mention of ritual sacrifice, without specifying that it was human sacrifice, or indicating the sheer scale of the practice.  To hear Neil Young tell it, you’d think the Spanish had invaded Smurf Village.  The whole thing reads like something that would have been written by a high school student — which, quite possibly, it was:  the young Young is said to have penned the lyrics during a high school history class.

If this rumor is true, it gives me a whole new respect for this song, and for Neil Young.  Everybody with any creative ambition at all wrote some terrible poetry in high school, and most of us would be horrified at the thought of any of that teenage doggerel gaining a wider audience.  But Neil Young took this adolescent verse, with all its flaws, and turned it into a truly moving song beloved by millions.  It’s a perfect example of Brian Eno’s observation that artistic beauty often comes from garbage.

Dr. John – Croker Courtbouillon

Those for whom the name “Dr. John” is synonymous with New Orleans R&B and funk (for example, his album In the Right Place) would be shocked to listen to his first album, Gris-Gris, released under the name “Dr. John the Night Tripper.”  While there are some funky and bluesy elements to this album, it is a far cry from Crescent City funk.  This is a genre all its own, a distinctly Louisianan form of psychedelia.

In the late 1960s, musical and spiritual exploration went hand-in-hand, and the desire to push the boundaries of popular music often coincided with the pursuit of less mainstream religions.  George Harrison came back from India with a newfound enthusiasm for Hinduism, and suddenly Beatles albums were filled with sitar and tabla.  The Doors were inspired to incorporate psychedelic elements into their music by the peyote-fueled rituals of the Native American Church.  And bands like The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin dabbled in the quasi-Satanic mysticism of Aleister Crowley.

It should therefore come as no surprise that a musician from Louisiana, with its traditions of voodoo and spiritualism, would want to jump on the psychedelic bandwagon.  The young Mac Rebbenack devoured Robert Tallant’s books of Louisiana folklore, adopted the stage name “Dr. John” from a legendary voodoo healer, and set out to stake a place for Afro-Carribbean spirituality in the popular music of the Sixties.

The album Gris-Gris is like a soundtrack to these books of folklore.  Its first track, “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya,” references Saxon, Dreyer and Tallant’s Gumbo Ya-Ya:  Folk Tales of Louisiana, and “Danse Kalinda Ba Doom” draws its lyrics from that book’s pages.  “I Walk on Guilded Splinters” similarly adapts a song found in Tallant’s Voodoo in New Orleans. But “Croker Courtbouillon” is perhaps the strangest and creepiest song on this album.  It starts off with a 6/8 swing ornamented with harpsichord and flute, but quickly devolves into a chaotic mass of guitar, percussion and animal noises halfway between voodoo chant and free jazz.    It’s what Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” would have sounded like if Syd Barrett had grown up in the Louisiana swamps.

If anyone still reads this thing, you’re probably thinking, “Ha!  Just over a week into the new year and he’s already stopped posting.  I knew it wouldn’t last.”  Well, for your information, I moved recently, and have yet to establish internet access at the new house.  My network access has been sporadic at best.  Rest assured, when I get reliable broadband access back I will make some catch-up posts to make up for this hiatus.  Plus, if I can iron out the technical difficulties, I plan on adding vinyl rips to the playlist.  Yes, some of the more interesting tracks in my collection are on that most revered of analog media, and this town has a number of options for purchasing eclectic wax.  So I’m going to start ripping from vinyl and posting my findings here.  Stay tuned.

The Future – 4jg

Before Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh formed The Human League and started writing songs for Swiffer commercials, they were known as The Future, and wrote Kraftwerk-inspired songs that helped usher in the era of synth pop.  One of these early songs was “4jg,” an instrumental ode to dystopian science fiction writer J. G. Ballard.  Ware and Marsh were not the only Ballard fans in the burgeoning synth and industrial movements; it seems everyone from Daniel Miller to Gary Numan were influenced by Ballard’s disturbing fiction.

I’ve recently begun making my way through a collection of Ballard’s short stories, and it’s like reading a season of The Twilight Zone. So far I’ve read stories about genetically engineered singing plants, people becoming stuck in time loops, and a mega-city so vast and dense its inhabitants don’t believe anything outside the city exists.  And I’ve barely scratched the surface.  I haven’t even gotten to his famous novel Crash, about a world where automobile accidents have become the latest form of sexual fetish.  But so far I’m fairly impressed by what I’ve read, and anxious to read more.

The Decemberists – The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid

Last September I caught The Decemberists on tour in support of their new album The Hazards of Love. I found it to be easily the best live show I’d seen in years.  And much of the reason for this is that the show was a throwback to a time when rock bands weren’t afraid to be entertaining.

The album in question was a concept album, and a rather convoluted one at that.  It seems to be set in some vague “olden times” somewhere between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century.  Its story is structured like a classic myth or fairy tale, though the actual plot is almost impossible to unravel.  It seems to have something to do with a mortal man who’s adopted by a fairy queen and can turn into a fawn and falls in love with a mortal woman and gets her pregnant (hopefully while he’s still in human form) and then she gets kidnapped by a rake who is haunted by the ghosts of his murdered children and… you know, it’s probably best not even to try to sort it out.

Musically, the album is all over the place, with baroque instrumentation interspersed with chunky, distorted ’70s hard rock guitar.  The heroine and the fairy queen are voiced, respectively, by guest vocalists Becky Stark and Shara Worden, both of whom accompanied the Decemberists on this tour.  While the stage show did not feature a full theatrical production as originally planned, just seeing the stage packed with musicians and vocalists was stunning enough — especially since many of them did not confine themselves to a single instrument. During “The Rake’s Song,” for instance, almost every member of the band was pounding away at drums or other percussion instruments in union, producing a wonderfully garish cacophony.  Other tracks were only a flute solo away from being a lost Jethro Tull hit.  The track featured here gives a pretty good glimpse of the grandeur of this album, featuring harpsichord, electric guitar, and an operatic dialogue between Worden and lead singer Colin Meloy.

The reason this live show was so spectacular was because it flew in the face of the “back to basics” ethos that has dominated rock music for the past thirty years.  It seems like every few years has spawned another musical movement that preached simplicity and shied away from grandstanding or virtuosity.  From punk to New Wave to grunge, complexity and showmanship were the enemies.  But by now the “back to basics” movement has become hegemonic in its own right, and it’s quite refreshing to see a small army of musicians in fancy suits wailing away on accordion and bouzouki to the tune of an epic rock opera.

Gurf Morlix – Dan Blocker

I’ve been busy today assembling flat-pack furniture and moving stuff into a new house.  I’m exhausted.  I could easily use this as an excuse not to blog.  But I swore I’d post every day, and I still have 30 minutes left in January 4.

At times like this, you feel like just phoning it in.  So I decided to post a song that sounds like it was just phoned in.  Gurf Morlix (he claims the name came to him in a dream) wrote this song whose lyrics consist almost entirely of the names of the cast of Bonanza. Yet somehow it manages to be clever.  And I’m warning you now:  it will get stuck in your head.

Gossip – Love Long Distance

The most recognizable thing about the band Gossip is its lead singer Beth Ditto, one of many musicians more famous for the controversy surrounding her than for her actual music.  In Ditto’s case, the controversy involves her habit of appearing onstage partially nude.  Hardly shocking in this day and age, except for the fact that Ditto is unapologetically fat and unshaven.  Onstage nudity may be passé, but proudly displaying a body that doesn’t conform to the norm is still troubling to some people.  The fact that Ditto is a lesbian of the non-lipstick variety doesn’t help her mainstream acceptance either.

I had heard about Ditto through various media reports, either praising her for her promotion of positive body image or making fun of her for being a fat hairy dyke.  But it seems like every article I read referred to her as a “punk rock singer.”  Eventually I wanted to hear something of the music behind the controversy, so I listened to some tracks by her band Gossip.  Imagine my surprise when I found that Gossip is not a punk band at all.  Gossip is disco.

All the elements are there:  the four-on-the-floor drumbeat, the alternating-octaves basslines, the scratchy guitar.  Even Ditto’s vocal stylings recall the dance hits of the 1970s.  Yet it seems one thing people have a harder time accepting than Ditto’s body image is the fact that they like a disco group.

Few genres have had worse image problems than disco.  Rock musicians couldn’t like it because it was too danceable; funk musicians had to hate it because its mechanical drumbeat wasn’t danceable enough.  Straight people were told it was too gay; white people were told it was too black.  It was hated in the late ’70s for being too popular, hated in the ’80s for not being popular anymore, and ridiculed in the ’90s for supposedly “making a comeback” that never really happened.  And of course there was that famous incident where an idiot rock DJ started a riot by dynamiting a pile of disco records.

But for all the hatred, is there anything really wrong with disco? It certainly had a lot more character than any of the dozens of variants of techno or electronica that replaced it in the dance clubs.  It had better musicians and more impressive vocalists than most of the rock and pop genres of the past thirty years or so.  Even mainstream rock bands had disco hits, though they couldn’t call them by name:  Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” and Kiss’s Dynasty album were disco through and through, even if they mostly stuck to rock instrumentation.  There’s no real reason why disco shouldn’t be taken as seriously as glam, punk, or hip hop, all genres which had their moments of ridiculousness, yet which are still considered legitimate musical influences.

Yet for some reason, people keep right on hating disco.  And disco refuses to go away.

If musical genres were people, disco would be a fat, hairy lesbian who didn’t care if people made fun of her.