This is the first year where I’m putting the Summer Songs series on hold – too much else going on – but that doesn’t mean my summer listening has disappeared or anything. The thing is though…in any given summer, my heaviest rotation songs are almost never from that actual summer and 2012 (so far) is no different. Here’s the top rundown:
Lianna La Havas’s song is actually from this summer and while I’m not sure what it means to be trapped inside a secondhand guitar, she has such a lovely verve in her voice, I suppose it wouldn’t be the worst place to be trapped (so long as she’s keeping you company).
The Lily Allen remix is something I heard at Devil’s Pie last night.1 Love the interpolation of “I’m Your Puppet” on here. I don’t know how this missed my radar the first time through but I’ve been playing it so heavily in the car, I’m making up for lost time.
Cloud Control’s “Just For Now” – I am not ashamed to say – is something I heard whilst watching Magic Mike the other week and for whatever reason, I’ve been on a real “acoustic guitar folk rock” tip of late and this totally hit my sweet spot. Whether or not the song intends to have a double-meaning, I associate the phrase “Just For Now” with an excuse to leave soon vs. what the song seems to be about, which is the promise of “I will return”, after, presumably, these lads go on some existential journey of self-discovery, and most likely, a car/Abercrombie ad.
I discovered this Ronny Lapine single through, of all places, a Swedish record site even though the 12″ was cut in Burbank, mere miles from me in L.A. It’s a great piece of modern soul but it took me repeated listenings to figure out that this probably isn’t a love song…it’s about the Christian afterlife. Seriously, this is like blue-eyed gospel yacht rock. That’s a good thing, in this case.2
As for Brother Jack McDuff, I revisited this classic soul jazz tune after wracking my brain to remember what the hell Action Bronson sampled for “Shiraz” and felt like an idiot when I remembered, duh, it’s McDuff.3 I cannot get enough of this sound/style though it’s been a long time since I really sat with jazz of this era. I need to get back there.
And last (and possibly least):
Pet peeve but I cannot find a good quality – 256/320 – version of this. Just to make matters worse, this is the second Ronson remix so trying to search for this version is already tricky enough and to boot: Wale appears on some versions of this and just trust: he’s not value-added on this tune. ↩
First off, I like how both flips really laser in on the big horns on the song; whereas most uses of “Blind Alley” have typically focused on the opening bars, they’re looking at other key moments in the tune for inspiration.
TBird’s is more like a straight loop in that regard though I do like his use of a high-pass filter (or is it a low-pass, I always get the two confused?) to tinker with the sound.
2 Mello touches on some of the same parts but his is a longer, more aggressive production, featuring a chop-fest that atomizes key bits of the vocals in interesting ways. There’s a certain unpredictable swing to it, as if he recorded this live, improvising which bits he wanted to loop and chop, all on the fly. I like how he keeps that “foghorn” deep brass blaring constantly in the background.
Both of these are a bit rougher around the edges, with some slurry, off-beat qualities. I’m digging on Palos bringing back the intro bars that we know so well but playing off them with some beat-doubling and a slow, elongated chord progression. Meanwhile, Mighty Narrow also revisits the intro bars but seems mostly focused on cutting up parts of the vocals to throw back on. A short but sweet track.
Mighty Narrow decided he needed a second crack, this time with a more subtle and refined flip. He reworks a different part of the main break, still keeps those horns and vocal snippets heavy in the mix, including an actual use of the chorus (which many others have avoided).
This has been one of my favorite entries so far; Bujalski grooves the track the f— out here; this swings hard ,especially with its use of some of the vocal screams (that sound reminiscent of the Jackson 5 in a way I hadn’t noticed before). Plus the incorporation of BDK’s “awww shit”? Awwww yeah.
One of the best reasons for seeking out original vinyl copies of old dance-instruction records has to be that they almost always have some kind of handwritten annotation on them, and when you’re far enough down the record-nerd rabbit hole to be buying old dance-instruction records, the realization that the heaviest track on the album—the facemelting breakbeat apocalypse with the acid-pitted wah-wah and the bass and the whatnot and the so on and the so forth—has been labeled in meticulous, teacherly ballpoint “CONNIE’S WALK-ON MUSIC” or “JAZZ ROUTINE—MS. KRAMER’S CLASS” is a realization that provides some necessary perspective, I think.
Namely, it’s a good reminder that these records were tools. They were records for people to dance to. And not in the way we usually mean when we say that; not “commercial records put together in particular ways with the intention of encouraging people to dance.” No, these were dance records in the most literal sense imaginable: records for people who were getting paid to teach other people how to dance and who needed music that—before it was anything like interesting, or creative, or personable—was conducive to them doing their job.
And I guess these records are mostly still considered tools, esteemed both by producer-type dudes who see the sampleability in their strong and anonymous rhythms and by non-producer-type dudes who listen to them and think, man, some producer-type dude could totally sample that.
Within this sensibility, the fact that these records almost never actually get sampled for anything is secondary to the fact that they totally could be. This obsession with potential is the faith of the sample nerd (broadly defined, anyone whose entrée into collecting old records was driven to some significant extent by newer records that had sampled them [c’est moi]), and it has spiraled outward to become surprisingly influential; the listening habits and buying habits of people who came up chasing records that were in any way akin to those sampled in the rap records of the late eighties and early nineties have been the secret mover behind at least one whole generation of the record-dude ecosystem.
It makes sense that out of this matrix would emerge the reissue of Ronn Forella…Moves!: a modern subculture rooted in the theoretically sampleable indirectly midwifing an old dance-instruction record that is only theoretically danceable.
As you’d expect from a dance-class record—especially one called Moves!—every cut has a lot of movement. But listening to it, the music here doesn’t seem to move the way a body moves, or would move; rather, it moves the way thoughts move. It’s progressive, moving endlessly, incrementally, in ways that only make sense intuitively. Throughout its restless shifting, it becomes less and less possible to imagine what a human, physical expression of this music could even look like. Granted, these limitations of conception might be ones that I’m projecting onto the work as one who is much more of a listener than a dancer, but considering the mindset that both gave rise to this reissue and by which it is most likely to be received, I think that’s all right. That this record ultimately seems too subtle, too interior to drive the kind of action it was originally meant for might sound like a big deal, but in our little corner of the world, it ends up being not all that problematic.
Because if Moves!’s interior quality complicates any convincing evocation of outward physicality, it’s the same thing that makes it a more compelling listen. There’s a couple of clunkers on here (“Hippo Mancy” and “Wild & Wonderful,” both of which I might have tried to sell myself on as “hectic chase-theme funk!” back when I was younger and more charitable, but which today I can only hear as proggy jogs to nowhere but some of this stuff goes far.[1. “Wild & Wonderful” also appears on the presumably more affordable Darryl Retter record from 1990{!}, but under a different name and with a thicker mix.]
The current beneath “Memories of Georgia” is of lyrical guitar and Fender Rhodes, pushing each other through constant and subtle variations. They buoy and corral a wet, effected second guitar that forever rides the thin edge of turning into something mean, keeps threatening to razor out of its tenuous Ernie Isley-esque sense of control and just beast out into the void. This guitar seems to occupy a different sonic plane than its governors, and the two parties’ tense transactions across this space highlight one more thing that keeps Moves! off the marley floor: It’s really kind of a headphone record. Up close, there’s a distance in the sound, a dimension of the recording that flattens when you play this thing out loud.
After a frankly banging drum and bass intro that comes with much of what you undoubtedly came to get, “Mithra Plane 2” edges into slow tremolo soak, waterlogging its high palisades of dark guitar and leaving the sound haunted and leaning. The guitar toughens up a minute in, but never shakes that mournfulness. The break roars back in towards the end, angrier than before, piked and prodded out of the way and into the red by overheated keyboard distortion. There’s a brief return to the theme, then all vanishes in flange.
“Sculptures” begins inside a glass globe, brittle and wintry. Guitar, triangle, electric piano, and martial tambourine twinkle hermetically, their wary glow the very view of a snowstorm seen through a slit window next to a carrel in a dark corner of a distant floor of some blocky, dolmen-like university library. Not unpleasantly, you are sealed within and the squalling world is sealed without. But after about a minute and a half, something cracks and all the peace gets sucked out through the fissure. Faster than you can believe, the music recedes into the whitening distance on a scramble of worried guitar. You cannot follow, but nor can you stay.
All autumnal thump and inner space and window-unit chill, “Crystals” is simply the perfect realization of a certain sound. It is the track that makes it hardest for me to not talk like my nineteen-year-old self: Dude, it’s so ill—it’s got huge drums, warm bass, and everything else is just wet, wet, wet, dude…it’s like “Those Shoes” crossed with “Nautilus”…plus it’s got two breaks! Dude! Because like all perfect things, it tends to thwart analysis. Whatever cogent thoughts I have about it are indistinguishable from the visceral response that I, as a mostly former but still kinda unregenerate sample-culture dude, have to the sheer sound of it, to both the actuality of that sound and the possibility of it. When you’ve spent enough years steeped in the pursuit of a certain sonic aesthetic, even if those years are now long past, to be confronted with a flawless example of it is to realize that the thought is the sound and the sound is the thought; when everything in the music lines up just right, on some level what you’re listening to is the working of your own mind. And getting any kind of critical toehold on that can be a little like trying to outrun your reflection.
So, I know what I said back at the beginning, but what something like Moves! really requires is not perspective but an abandonment of perspective. In the end it serves no purpose to try to classify or quantify where this music fits into any broader continuum or its place in culture or why this reissue exists in the marketplace or whether the new vinyl is worth fifty cents per minute. You either believe in this kind of thing or you don’t. Point: How can a faceless, ahistorical, record like this one, a record whose intended utility is mostly unsuccessful and whose potential utility is mostly inconsequential, how can a record like this even matter in 2012? Counterpoint: Dude, it’s so ill, though!
Every subculture has its shibboleths, and while mine probably don’t matter to you any more than yours matter to me, the fact is that every record that works on its intended the way that Ronn Forella…Moves! works serves as a kind of little temple, each one representing Our Thing in perfect microcosm: An energizing place, but a limited one—not a place to spend your entire life; but for as long as you’re inside, and as long as you’re of the faith, the limitations can all fall away, and it becomes possible in moments to believe that everything you need is in here with you.
(Editor’s Note: When James and I originally were batting around ideas for stuff for him to review, he told me I should just try sending him whatever, without him knowing ahead of time, and then having to find a way to review it. It was a challenge of sort, a way for a writer to tackle something they weren’t already planning on writing about. I had recently gotten in a copy of Aretha Frankin’s Knew You Were Waiting, which looks at her ’80s output1 For many fans of Aretha’s earlier, iconic ’60s material, they never seemed to gel that well with her ’80s and I was curious how James might tackle a catalog that I didn’t presume he was inherently a fan of. He did not disappoint. This is a long essay and it’s really more than just a meditation on Her Lady of Soul. I’m privileged to run it. -O.W.) Continue reading MY ARETHA
I’d call it the “most-maligned” part of her career but that’d actually be her mid/late-’70s disco-era material. ↩
Wow, I can’t believe I haven’t written one of these in ages (not that I haven’t been obsessed by other songs, I just haven’t bothered to highlight them).
I first heard this while perusing a seller’s list of 7″s and was instantly smitten. Let me count the ways:
1) I love ballads where the rhythm tracks have a slight edge to them, especially a bouncy little chink or twang to the guitar. 1 See also: Robert Parker’s “I Caught You in a Lie.”
2) I love the songwriting, how the background chorus of “only when you’re lonely” is a punchline that accents Maxwell’s singing, e.g. “call me on the phone/only when you’re lonely/want me for you own/only when you’re only…” It’s executed so perfectly on here.
3) The way Maxwell curves her notes. This is melisma done right – just the right amount to make the notes a touch more interesting but without slathering it on. Like the way she takes the word “found” and manages to make it sound like it’s three syllables.
Some songs, I wait them out, until the price is right. This one? I snapped it up at premium without a single moment of regret. So. Good.
Not being self-hating, seriously, that’s how I’ve heard guitarist refer to that sound: chink. ↩
My frequent readers may ask themselves, “what does this have to do with music?”
Answer: nothing.
If that bothers you, feel free to skip this. Likewise, if you’re anti-swine, I totally respect that too but you may also want to skip this post. For the rest of you, read on.
I was trying to work on a longer version of this story but “recent developments” (DCMA alert!) have short-circuited that, at least for the time being.
Here’s the very very very condensed version though, just to bring folks up to speed.
Years ago, Biz Markie claimed that he owned a 12″ copy of “Mardi Gras” by Bob James, but a version without the bells, thus leaving the breakbeat open. Here’s the regular version of the song:
So yeah, imagine that opening break, but without the bells. That’s what Biz claimed he had.
Now…in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t exactly a big deal. Alt. mixes of recordings exist in the gazillions and let’s also be real about this: it’s all about the bells. Taking the bells away is like eating a cheesesteak…without the steak. I mean, that cheese whiz might be pretty tasty too but you’re missing the main ingredient.
But the reason why this claim ended up snowballing into something much bigger than just “the bells” is that no one could verify Biz’s boast. There are, of course, obscure records out there, of which maybe a literal handful exist. But the fact that no other person on the planet could produce a copy of “Mardi Gras” without the bells lead many to assume that Biz was just pulling our legs.1
And from there, the myth grew. First it grew to Bigfoot proportions, which is to say: most disbelieved but then random people started to pop up, claiming to have heard/seen this mystery 12″ and that only fueled the myth further. For example, there’ve been two cases where people have taped Biz at a party, playing his version…but off of Serato:
Well, that is “Mardi Gras” without the bells, at least for the first four bars. But it’s not exactly iron-clad proof either. We don’t see the record, for example. Of course, I’m not sure how you’d create a bell-less version that easily though some speculated it was actually ?uestlove on the drums there, recreating the break and then mixing it in with the actual “Mardi Gras.” Yeah, the conspiracy theories on this are impressive.
Also, supposedly, there’s some European 7″ version of the song with drums that be panned to the side, thus isolating them from the bells. (Notably, I don’t believe this version has ever been posted online, which then calls into question whether this “pannable” version actually exists or not).
At this point, the mystery has fled Bigfoot land and entered Birther territory, because there are those who are so convinced this single does not exist that no matter what kind of proof is produced, they’d still call bullsh– on it. I mean, if Bob James appeared in a video, holding the record in his hand and played it on a turntable, they’d still claim it wasn’t real. I’m not saying the “Mardi Gras” Birthers are wrong but I do think that there’s some ridiculous lengths that folks have gone to shoot down the remote possibility that a there’s a bell-less version of the song by claiming that any engineer or dude with ProTools could create a bell-less version.2
So this brings us to the video that Thes One shot.3 Thes got a CTI reel of “Mardi Gras” that featured a version of the song with certain tracks taken out. For those of you who saw/heard the video, the first eight bars are bell-less, then the bells come back in, but there are other parts of the song where there’s clearly a track or two that have been pulled out of the masters. What Thes found was NOT a multi-track tape (in which case, you could create any version of “Mardi Gras” you wanted). It was a version that CTI produced, possibly for t.v. library use (though the accompanying documentation wasn’t clear on this). Why they would produce a bell-less version? I have no idea. But I think the reel is legit, regardless. It exists. It’s not a fake.
BUT – and this is important – none of this really settles the Biz debate. And I was being tongue-in-cheek when I said “vindicated” but really, just because a bell-less reel exists doesn’t mean it actually has anything to do with the 12″ version that Biz claims to have (least of all because Biz’s version is four bell-less bars and the reel is eight). But it was, for a minute, a pretty funny new chapter to the story.
Not so funny: someone complained to Youtube under DCMA rules and the video had to come down. Sort of. If you still want to listen to it, well, there’s this. 4
So there’s the short story. Does the Biz 12″ exist? Personally, I don’t think it does. But I also think that’s besides the story. The story here is the story behind the single not the actually single itself. And if you don’t collect records, if you’ve never been caught up with a debate around something completely esoteric yet still obsessively engaging then much of this won’t make sense or matter to you. But if that’s the case, then I feel sorry for you because there is such pleasure in the mystery, in the debate around whether Holy Grails are real or not. Finding them is besides the point.
It’s the journey.
It didn’t help that the odds of CTI pressing up a 12″ of “Mardi Gras” also seemed highly improbable. It’s not outside the realm of technological history, but it would have also made this 12″ one of the first actual 12″ singles released by a modestly sized label. ↩
Oh word? Then do it. Show us how easy it is to fake a bell-less version. ↩
