IGGY POP, The Hummingbird, Birmingham
Melody Maker, winter 1988
By Simon Reynolds
I bring a whole lotta baggage to my first live Iggy. This month I've found myself listening to the first Stooges album more than any contemporary record. I don't go along with the idea that musics are all inevitably outmoded by technical or critical advances: there are some statements, charged with the aura of a moment, that transcend the limits imposed by their era. So at the close of 1988, it doesn't feel strange to be razed still by Asheton's wah wah flames, or recognize an eternal eloquence in Iggy's dumb poetry. "She wants somethin'/But I'm/Not right/Nooooo/And it's always this way". But even more than anthems of disaffection like "Not Right" and "Real Cool Time", it's the morose mire of "Ann" that drags me under again and again, "Ann" with its vision of love as narcosis, love as capitulation: "You took my arm/And you broke my will… I floated in your swimming pools/I felt so weak/I felt so blue."
So my head is spinning in a confusion of anticipation and resignation as I prepare to set eyes on one of the six or seven people I've really worshipped in my life. "Now I'm ready to close my eyes/Now I'm ready to close my mind." But can Iggy do it for me, lay me low, finish me off? Not really. Where the Iggy of '69 can still incapacitate and galvanise me like almost no one else, 88's Iggy is sabotaged by his own influence. It's the Iggy-without-whom factor. On the one hand, rock has caught up with him, did so a long time back in fact, and the dullards have banalised a lot of what The Stooges proposed, turning the the "world's forgotten boy/seeking only to destroy" posture into an orthodoxy: a certain American idea of "punk", whether exemplified by Pussy Galore or Guns N'Roses. On the other hand, more extreme aspects of The Stooges have been raised several powers by Loop, World Domination Enterprises, Sonic Youth, Young Gods even.
Iggy can't be blamed for wanting to capitalize on all this stature and indebtedness. I just wish the legend was better served than by this revue.
His band are stonyfaced artisans, either clichés (a baldie in shades on rhythm guitar, a lead guitarist in a big black hat) or nonentities. All they're capable of is a precision-chiselled mayhem. It's reliably raucous, but never heavy. A "good time", which is to say, not that greaet. Not as undignified as I'd feared, but far from the sensual inferno I'd half-hoped for.
"1969" gets typical treatment: the original's ominous sense of the USA as one giant powderkeg is lost in the revved-up proficiency. "TV Eye" is similarly too uptempo, slammed out rather than strung-out, and the original's sublime climax--where the riff suddenly congeals and Iggy subsides into strangled moans and electrifying sucking sounds--is left out altogether. "High On You" is prefaced by a speech disowning his drug-taking past: the song's aerobic intensity showcases the new Iggy, who's into being alert, who can't afford to get wasted, burn up or pass out. Iggy the survivor, who leaves the stage in one piece, ready to fight another day. Fair enough, but because of this, the music can't be allowed to brood or malinger, let alone self-destruct, but is all at the same relentless go-for-it, hell-for-leather pace.
Iggy-as-spectacle is great. As a star, he cuts a more peculiar figure than ever, a beanpole halfpint with not an inch to pinch on his twitching and flailing body. But, while he acts and looks like the 16 year old brat, he also seems conscious of now having an avuncular/forefather role, making invocatory gestures to the audience, desperate to involve and incite. He knows that "kids" are still caged by the same impasses, still bored out of their skulls. But he's torn between advocating getting smart (he taps the side of his head) and proposing a willful regression into infantilism and idiocy (he picks his nose, sniffs his cock, sucks his thumb and sticks his microscopic arse at the audience). And how can rock'n'roll grow old?
"I wish I could reach out and fuck you all." Iggy Pop doesn't get quite that far (beyond being a show). The encores, "1970", "I Wanna Be Your Dog", "Gotta Right", get closest, the music finally getting ragged and approaching flashover, and like everyone else I have no choice but to raise adoring arms. Best of all, though, is when the music's over but Iggy keeps writhing on, with the spastic grace that says "I'm an idiot, so love me". He's still trying to leap out of his skin, still wants to be out of this world and have unimaginably total congress with it, penetrate to the core. You could do a lot worse than pay a respectful visit to Iggy Pop's sweating, strutting archive of himself.
THE STOOGES, The Stooges and Funhouse
Melody Maker, 1994
by Simon Reynolds
Funhouse is, no contest, the greatest rock'n'roll album of all time. And its prequel, The Stooges, is the tremor before the full quake.
From the 1969 debut, "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "No Fun" are the justly famous anthems, but if anything "Real Cool Time" and "Not Right" are even more incendiary. Ron Asheton's wah-wah tongues-of-flame, Dave Alexander's sidling stealth-bass, Scott Asheton's seething drums, all conjure up an organic, monstrous, marauding prescence. The Stooges never break loose, thrash or flail--what so many idiots today confuse with intensity--but instead hold all their deadly energy in reserve, brood and simmer.
The Stooges is awesome, but even the best songs sound like sketches for 1970's Funhouse, when the band break loose from John Cale's slightly dessicated production and rock out. Right from the start, with "Down On The Streets", it's also clear that the band have learned how to play, and leapt from the stilted Troggs-like stomp of "No Fun" to a punk-funk jive'n'roll so supple, serpentile and swinging you just gotta dance. Funhouse is proto-punk and proto-metal, but it's also, in some weird unanalysable way, jazz, even when Steve McKay isn't blowing freeform sax.
"Loose" raises penetration to a sort of existensial principle. Iggy boasts "I stuck it deep inside/cuz I'm loose"; he's unleashed, a smart bomb gone truant. "TV Eye" kickstarts with possibly the most apocalyptic riff ever, then descends to another plane of prime-evil, the song uncoiling like a cobra as Iggy lets rip a cyclone-sucking snarl and gutteral, winded gasps. Side One mirrors the male sexual dynamic (arousal, penetration, climax), with "Dirt" as post-coital aftermath: a marrow-chilling dirge-beat over which Asheton downpours silvered chords as harrowing and cleansing as "Gimme Shelter". Iggy's a glowing ember of his former inferno, belch-crooning Sinatra-style his philosophy of education-through-abjection: "I've been dirt, but I don't care, cos I'm learning".
The songs on Funhouse aren't fast, but they sound full-tilt, all out, like a body trying to surge through a viscous, resistant medium. Which is exactly what Iggy is: Everykid struggling to cut loose from his suffocating enviroment, and, like Marlon Brando's biker in The Wild One, "just go". It doesn't matter where. In The Stooges, a certain kind of male energy finds its ultimate form of expression. Long before he started using military imagery on Raw Power, Iggy Pop was all about ballistics--about ignition, blast off and explosive impact. Iggy was on the warrior male trip, with all its attendant dangers of lapsing from Romanticism into fascism. The stance is midway between Nietzche and Beavis & Butthead: 'I'm bored/let's burn', teen deliquency conflagrates
into a war against the world, combat rock without enemies or objectives. Iggy wanted to become pure intransitive speed, go out in a blaze of abstract glory, burn alive. And sometimes burn-out, as in the downered-out entropy of "We Will Fall" (with its mantra-chants and raga drones, like ten seconds from the Doors' "The End" looped for eternity), or the lagoon of lassitude that's "Ann" (where Iggy's drowning in his lover's eyes).
I could unfurl the rollcall of the illustrious indebted--the Pistols,
Birthday Party, Radio Birdman, Black Flag, Young Gods, Loop/Spacemen 3,
even Nirvana--but The Stooges don't merit your respect as a monument in our collective heritage, they warrant full immersion. This is a NOW thing--it's 1969/1970 and Iggy & co are liver than you or I'll ever be.
THE STOOGES
The Stooges (Deluxe Edition)
Fun House (Deluxe Edition)
(Rhino/Elektra)
Uncut, 2005
by Simon Reynolds
There’s no point in revisiting The Stooges’ first two albums as monuments in rock’s heritage landscape. This music demands to be taken purely as a now-thing: a dynamo coiled with electric essence, something you can use to recharge your existence today, tomorrow, forever. So let’s bypass history and context as much as possible and instead get under the skin of the Stooges music. Let’s skip the facts and aim for truth--what this sound feels like as a drama of energy.
Which means talking about cocks. You hear an awful lot about “rockism” these days, but The Stooges aren’t just rockist, they’re cockist. Like their obvious forebears, The Stones and The Doors, the Stooges surge and swing with a particular phallic energy. Iggy spells it out in later songs like “Penetration” and “Cock In My Pocket”, but you catch the drift early on, with the debut’s “Real Cool Time” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, anthems of penile delinquency. Side One of Fun House is actually structured to mirror the male sexual trajectory, from the predatorial gaze of “Down On the Streets” (Iggy the man-missile cruising for action), through penetration and orgasm (“Loose” and “TV Eye,” the latter climaxing with Iggy’s holler “now ram it”) to the tingling, tristesse-tinged afterglow of “Dirt”. Throughout Iggy wields it like a weapon, but the “it” is less a prong of gristle between his legs than his whole being, engorged with will and burning with lack. One side of The Stooges music incarnates the dream of being perpetually on fire. But there’s a contradictory impulse too, a quest for absolute satiation, the grail of Norman Mailer’s “Apocalyptic Orgasm,” the bliss-blast that will snuff the flames of desire and achieve a deathly serenity.
Side one of The Stooges starts with unrest and restlessness (“1969” contrasts “war across the USA” with the boredom of Iggy as suburban Everykid faced by “another year of nothin’ to do”) but ends with the nirvana trance of “We Will Fall.” Oft-maligned as John Cale-damaged raga-wank, its ten minutes of “Venus In Furs” drones and Buddhist chanting is soporific, true, but that’s the point: Iggy links love with surrender (“I won’t fight… I’ll be weak”), conflates happiness and sleep, and equates sleep with death. Usually Ron Asheton’s wah-wah guitar ejaculates napalm, but on “We Will Fall” it glistens wetly, inky-black ripples in a viscous, slow-motion whirlpool. The same narcotic shimmer reappears on “Ann”, an equally under-celebrated ballad that starts where “End of The Night” by The Doors left off. In a Quaalude-foggy Sinatra-croon, Iggy sings again of love as a detumescence of the spirit: “you took my arm and you broke my will”. Entranced, he’s floating in the amniotic “swimming pools” of his lover’s eyes: “I felt so weak, I felt so blue”. But at the chorus, Iggy’s agonized, somehow humiliated “I looooove you” is unexpectedly completed with the war-cry “RIGHT NOW!!!!”. Amorous lassitude abruptly shifts to aggressive lust; Asheton’s limpid guitar instantly hardens into a rampaging riff. An evil humming rises up from the depths of the mix, and it’s a shock to realize that it’s actually Iggy, a low moan-drone of gaseous malevolence that seems to emanate not from his mouth but from every pore in his body.
The debut, great as it is, feels a little leashed in its energy initially. Towards the end, though, with “Not Right” and “Little Doll,” The Stooges loosen up rhythmically, Scott Asheton’s drums resembling The Troggs-as-free-jazz, Dave Alexander’s bass sidling like a rattlesnake about to strike. It’s as though the band gradually find their groove in preparation for Fun House. If The Stooges is a teenager--randy-fit-to-explode, but still awkward-- there’s a cocksure swagger to Fun House, as though the music’s got conquests under its belt now.
The taut on-the-beat drums of “Down on the Street” stomp, as Lester Bangs put it, like a gang clicking its heels on the sidewalk. They’re on the prowl for sweet young thang. Iggy hits the ignition on “Loose” with war-whoops and the warning “LOOK OUT!!,” then gloats “I stuck it/Deep inside”. Later in the song, this chorus sounds closer to “I’m stoopid/Deep inside”--a pretty-vacant boast, perhaps, referencing the Stooges’ ideal of the O-Mind, a paradoxical state of hyper-alert oblivion reached through drugs and noise. “TV Eye” is The Stooges’ “Whole Lotta Love”. Structurally the songs are almost identical, with a bulldozing prime-evil riff giving way to an eerie ambient-abstract mid-section (where Percy shrieks, Iggy emits subhuman gnashings and whooshing gusts of flamethrower breath). In both songs, there’s a pause of appalled silence before the riff magically re-erects and goes on the warpath once more. Led Zeppelin always came across as overlords, though (which is why they’re heavy metal), whereas the Stooges were obviously underdogs (and therefore punk). You can’t really imagine Zep doing a song like “Dirt,” on which Iggy preaches spiritual education through abasement (“oooh I been hurt… oooh I been dirt/But I don’t care/Cos I’m learning/Inside”), while Asheton rains down silverflicker guitar from the same pained-but-ecstastic place as the intro to “Gimme Shelter”.
Zep were also hippie-boys, but Fun House the album and “Funhouse” the song turn Sixties dreams of generational unity and pleasure-as-insurrection inside out. “We’ve been separated, baby, far too long… Living in division/In the shifting sands,” intones Iggy, beckoning the “baby girls” and “baby boys” into the funhouse. But this “come together” anthem is closer to National Lampoon’s Lemmings than Woodstock, liberation through regression rather than higher states. “Funhouse” is an orgy of debased sound, an electric mudbath mixing primal soup and primal scream (the acrid honk of Steve Mackay’s sax). On this and the preceding “1970”, Iggy keeps screaming “I feel all right” but he doesn’t sound it; he seems wracked by the pleasure grind. The final “LA Blues” reaches the howling void at the heart of hedonism. It’s a spasm of writhing feedback, freeform sax, and Iggy throat-noise, a glimpse ahead to Metal Machine Music and “Radio Ethiopia,” as well as 1000 long-hair retro-bands in the late Eighties lamely leaning guitars against amps and exiting the stage to a wall of screech.
I almost forgot: each of these glorious-sounding reissues comes with a bonus CD (“Deluxe” isn’t exactly a Stooges word, is it?) of alternate takes. The Fun House disc sifts the “cream” from that absurd, fan-fleecing seven-CD Fun House sessions box, but The Stooges disc is all hitherto unreleased, the peach being an “Ann” twice as long as the album version. Everything is worth hearing if only to note just how tight the Stooges were, how honed their on-the-surface sloppy frenzy actually was (in other words, the takes don’t vary that much). In the end, though, they’re superfluous because without exception the definitive version is the one that made the final cut.
INTERVIEW WITH RON ASHETON
SR: The Stooges sold spectacularly small amounts compared to the MegaBands of their day. But it’s hard to imagine Blood, Sweat & Tears, say, being able to reform and tour the world, like The Stooges have done. Do you feel vindicated?
RA: I don’t feel a revenge, I just feel grateful. My brother Scott and I always hoped the band would get it together again. We weren’t commercially successful at the time, but I guess over the years other groups would mention us an influence, and people would pick up on that, and it just built. I turned on a “classic rock” radio station recently and the voiceover said, “next we’ll be playing Led Zeppelin and Stooges”. It wasn’t like that back in the day! With reforming, I’m really just enjoying hanging with my friends. It’s great touring now, because it’s like a family vacation. We’re not scrambling looking for women or a party. We go sightseeing, check out the aquarium in Lisbon!
lthough Sixties garage bands like Count Five may have the prior claim, The Stooges are generally regarded as the dawn of punk rock. Historians often talk about how you guys hated “love beads” and flower power. Were you really anti-hippie or did you participate a bit in the Summer of Love?
Some of it was kinda corny. But we didn’t have any great animosity towards hippies. We certainly had a lot of sex with hippie women! And we listened to the San Francisco bands. It could get a little too earthy and pious. But there was a great divide in America and we were on the same side as the hippies. You don’t shit on an ally! The difference was, some hippies were so anti-war they were anti-soldiers, calling them baby-killers. We hated the Vietnam war but we supported the soldiers. We said, ‘they’re your age and our age; they’re us’.
Indeed Detroit rock has this cult of the military, from MC5 and their whole White Panther/ “guitar army” shtick to the running thread of ballistic imagery in Iggy’s lyrics.
I wrote a song with Deniz Tek of Radio Birdman called “Rock’n’Roll Soldiers”. I always felt that being in a band was a military operation. You get your transport to the area and you carry out the mission. I’m like the medic on our tour, I’ve got all the vitamins, the sinutis pills, the anti-diarrhoea medicine! When we play London this year I’m looking forward to visiting the Imperial War Museum. I used to go there all the time when we lived there, recording Raw Power. There’s all these things that aren’t on display that you can only see on appointment--like Herman Goering’s uniform. I’d put my name down but never managed to see them. Maybe this time.
Saturday, July 11, 2020
Sunday, June 28, 2020
thinking about music
A dialogue between me and Ezequiel Fanego of Caja Negra (my publisher in Argentina) for the Chilean music webzine Grieta Mag, on the subject of the role of writing about music. (Spanish language version here.).
Grieta editor Laura Estévez kicks things off with the initial question:
How to think music?
Yesterday for example I was listening to this chopped and screwed hip hop mixtape. You know, chopped and crewed is a technique of remixing hip hop music which developed in the Houston scene in the early 1990s and it consists in marely dramatically reducing the pitch of the original compositions to give them an hypnotic, heavy sound. It´s supposed to recreate the experience of being under the influence of the purple drank, a street narcotic made from the prescription opiod Codeine that treats mild pain and acts as a cough suppressant. One doesn’t has to use purple drank to fully understand it effects because the music itself slows your brain down, you enter in a purple hazed environment and your perfection is complete transfigured. So you can write about this music as if you very transfigured by it.
Another idea about musical writing that influenced as a lot as publisher was this notion that Simon shared with us, I think it was in an interview he did with Pablo Schanton when we published Después del rock. It´s that musical writing can not only reflect the aural experience but also to catalyze it, to intensify the listening experience. It happens to me a lot that I read one of Simon´s pieces, or David Toop´s or Kodwo Eshun´s, and I desperately need to listen to the music again because I know that the record won’t be the same. I will even hear thinks that I didn’t knew they were there!! So writing can also chance your experience of music by injecting those alien perfections that Simon mentioned before into your mind
It’s harder
to create and maintain a hub of vibe and intellectual synergy in the internet
age, when people aren’t meeting in person so much. But perhaps the current
crisis and the enforced isolation of people is speeding up the process by which
we find inventive ways to create virtual communities of ideas.
The original dialogue was done about six weeks, when crisis meant covid-19 and lockdown - before the other crisis blew up in this country. Subsequent to that, Ezequiel added a final comment, which went straight to Spanish. You can probably work out what he's saying.
Ezequiel:
Mientras terminamos con esta conversación llegan las noticias del brutal asesinato de George Floyd a manos de la policía de Minneapolis. Casualmente me entero que Big Floyd, como lo llamaban sus amigos, era parte de la Screwed Up Click, la familia musical de Dj Screw. No puedo dejar de pensar en sus últimas palabras, “I can´t breath” y en la relación que hay entre la respiración, la poesía y el ritmo. Y en cómo la música puede ser de alguna manera un ejercicio para respirar con los otros, crear comunidad, habitar los barrios y las calles de un modo estrictamente no-policial. No sé si será cierto, pero hay algo de poético en eso que cuentan de que ayer Anonymous hackeo las radios policiales de Minneapolis para que suene ininterrumpidamente “Fuck the police”.
Grieta editor Laura Estévez kicks things off with the initial question:
How to think music?
Simon Reynolds:
The first thought I had in response to this question is another question: do we need public thinking about music? What function does it serve? Especially at the present moment, but generally as well – it would seem to be an inessential activity. I have long thought the relief of human suffering, whether physical or mental, is the highest calling, and that belief has a new sharpness in the current crisis. Writing about music would seem to occupy a fairly low status on the hierarchy of human needs.
The first thought I had in response to this question is another question: do we need public thinking about music? What function does it serve? Especially at the present moment, but generally as well – it would seem to be an inessential activity. I have long thought the relief of human suffering, whether physical or mental, is the highest calling, and that belief has a new sharpness in the current crisis. Writing about music would seem to occupy a fairly low status on the hierarchy of human needs.
Then again, you might say that the inessentials are what
actually gives life flavor and elevates it beyond the grind of everyday
survival and getting by. These things
are luxuries, but ones we feel we can’t live without.
But even then, many
people – perhaps most people on the planet – enjoy music in a fairly
thoughtless way. And are no worse off for it, at least in terms of enjoyment.
Patterned sound provides an unreflective pleasure that might affect them
intensely, but it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with a larger
significance – it’s on the same plane perhaps as food, or sports, or clothes,
which are all things that people feel passionate about. But they don’t look for criticism or theory
to make sense of it. What are they missing? Is there a surplus value that can
be created through public thinking about music that deepens the experience of
it, or helps to sustain a community around the music - a community of disagreement as much as
consensus?
The second thought I had stirred by this question is to do
with how much of the pleasure of music –
what makes a piece of music “good” or what makes it work – actually
bypasses thought. The challenge for me
as a critic from very early on was to do with wanting to register in prose all
these thoughtless elements – the insistence of rhythm, the sensuality of sound, in a sense the
violence of music as it floods your body. These elements are where the power of
music largely lies, as opposed to the cultures around music or the expressed
intent of the artists. But they’re very hard to verbalise, and accordingly,
have largely been written around, in a circuitous dance of avoidance, by music
critics.
This aspiration comes across in my writing more for a native
English speaker, where the prosody of the language, the kind of tricks I use
(“cheap tricks” like alliteration, subtler ones like assonance, rhythmic
effects and cadence) are things I do instinctively and viscerally – and
likewise affect English speakers in a largely unconscious way. Some of that
necessarily gets lost in translation, as it’s do with the musical properties of
the English language; if you reading the original text as a second language,
you can’t access the playfulness or “dance of words’ that is going on. But this kind of instinctively deployed
word-magic, this musication of language itself – this is actually me “thinking
music” – allowing the music into my thought, rather than describing it
from a distance.
What about scholarly music critics who know about keys and
structures? Technical musical language can describe these intensities in a very
narrow sense, like a diagram of an electrical circuit, but it doesn’t convey what an electric shock feels
like. When critics use that kind of
specialist terminology, the main effect
for the layperson reader is an aura of authority: you feel “this person knows
what they’re talking about”, and that might give you confidence in their
pronouncements. But you don’t understand what they’re offering as “proofs”.
Indeed a synesthetic metaphor or a ripe piece of imagery that someone like me
might come up with is probably more effective as a way of conveying to
listeners – who like me don’t know the technical terms - what they might experience when they listen
to the music.
I am interested in the huge gulf between how musicians think
about music and how critics and fans who lack musical training think about
it. At least 90 percent of what the
musician is concerned with is what I call “nonsignifying craft” – how to structure
a piece of music in terms of intros, outros, bridges, key changes; how to technically achieve
certain sounds; how to construct feel or groove. Composition, arrangement,
engineering, production – this effort results in about 90 percent of our
pleasure and sensation in music. We are caught up in the way tension builds and
releases, the surprising twists, the
juxtaposition of textures across a vertical organization of sound. And yet it’s
something that’s very hard to write about in anything but the vaguest terms
when it comes to a specific song or track.
Critics tend to approach music as if is primarily about communication –
the transmission of a lyrical statement, or of an emotional state. But much of
the pleasure and excitement of listening to music is about structure – the
structuring of an emotion, a construction that moves through time and is built
in four dimensions rather than just three.
And it’s about sensations. Again,
it’s very hard to think this stuff and put it into words. But it’s the pressure
of those sensations and movements against the mind that produces the most
interesting thinking about music for me.
My final thought on “thinking music” is that it’s not
something you can be prescriptive about. As a writer, you are trying to get
people to think the way you do about something.
But as a reader, what I am looking for is thoughts I could never have
had myself. So often the most excitingly disorienting thing is when I encounter
a new writer whose mind moves in a completely different way. I think, “how on
Earth did you think of that?. Where do those images – that particular sensual
response to sound – spring from?” To the extent, that I’ve managed to get
people to think the way I do about music and use a similar kind of language in
their writing – it’s
self-defeating. You don’t want to read
something and think “I could have thought that”. You want to be startled by
completely alien perceptions.
Ezequiel Fanego:
First, I would say that as
publishers we were always interested not precisely in thinking music but
thinking through music. Music can be a life changing experience: a record or a
song can change the way you feel about politics, friendship, your own life,
etc. And not only through the lyrics but also through the perceptual world that
it triggered. So we like when the writing doesn’t impose it´s own concepts to
the music, but when it´s rather affected by it, and express how it was enriched
or impoverished by the aural experience. Music has its way of thinking, it´s
has it´s own concepts expressed as perceptual configurations. And if you let it
affect you it become your own perceptual reality, and you may accept that or
refuse it.
Yesterday for example I was listening to this chopped and screwed hip hop mixtape. You know, chopped and crewed is a technique of remixing hip hop music which developed in the Houston scene in the early 1990s and it consists in marely dramatically reducing the pitch of the original compositions to give them an hypnotic, heavy sound. It´s supposed to recreate the experience of being under the influence of the purple drank, a street narcotic made from the prescription opiod Codeine that treats mild pain and acts as a cough suppressant. One doesn’t has to use purple drank to fully understand it effects because the music itself slows your brain down, you enter in a purple hazed environment and your perfection is complete transfigured. So you can write about this music as if you very transfigured by it.
Another idea about musical writing that influenced as a lot as publisher was this notion that Simon shared with us, I think it was in an interview he did with Pablo Schanton when we published Después del rock. It´s that musical writing can not only reflect the aural experience but also to catalyze it, to intensify the listening experience. It happens to me a lot that I read one of Simon´s pieces, or David Toop´s or Kodwo Eshun´s, and I desperately need to listen to the music again because I know that the record won’t be the same. I will even hear thinks that I didn’t knew they were there!! So writing can also chance your experience of music by injecting those alien perfections that Simon mentioned before into your mind
Simon Reynolds:
I am intrigued by the idea that there are people for whom
listening to music is unaccompanied by thought – because it’s so foreign to me.
But there was a time when I just listened to music in a completely unreflective
way, totally without preconceptions, or a desire to understand, purely swept up
by its flooding sensations. When I was a child, hearing my parents’s records –
the soundtracks to musicals like West Side Story, Frank Sinatra’s Songs For
Swinging Lovers, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Holst’s The Planets. Or hearing
things on the radio, the Beatles, Bowie’s “A Space Oddity”, one hit wonders
like Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”. One of the
reasons I was drawn to glam as the subject of my last book was that it was
among the first music I could remember, from a time when I still had a primal
response to pop – particularly the
really kids-oriented teenage rampage stuff . I have a kind of primal scene with
T.Rex on TV, a memory that I referred to in the intro to my first book Blissed
Out and then again in the introduction to Glam book. A sort of personal
creation-myth based on the audio-visual impact of hearing and seeing Marc
Bolan, a mixture of excitement and astonishment mingled with disturbance and
even fear. An encounter with the pop sublime.
But then as teenager I got into punk and very soon after
discovered the music press, and all that changed for me – listening to music
became inextricable from thinking about it. At its wildest, the writing about
the music could be as exhilarating as the music. But the two were so
intertwined that you couldn’t separate them – they propelled each other
forward. Since that time – 1979 onwards – the listening to music has almost
always been generative of ideas and images. Only in states of great
intoxication have I returned to that primal, thoughtless, purely sensual
response that I had as a child.
So yes from the age of 16 or so I was a trainee critic,
already forming sentences and judgements in my head, for years before I became
one. I don’t know any other way to be. I think it intensifies my enjoyment of
music; I’ve never felt that criticism or theory is something that makes you
have a colder, detached relationship with music (or with anything – film,
books, TV), it actually takes you deeper, it heightens everything. But I would
admit that there’s a way in which being a writer-thinker has given me a warped
relationship with music. I’m locked into
this search for newness, in part because of the sonic rush of the new, but also
because it generates new ideas. I’m always looking for, and I’m hooked on, the
way music can spur fresh arrangements of words in your mind, tropes and images
that don’t feel stale. And this will push me on, because at a certain point,
even a supremely fertile and fast-moving genre like, say, jungle in the 90s,
will eventually slow down and fall into settled patterns. As a commentator,
I’ll start repeating myself and that’s a sensation I don’t like - the feeling
of self-predictability, a sluggishness in the troping mechanism of the mind.
The genre might still be producing quality material, but I’ll be ready to move
on, as a writer even more so than as a listener.
I happened to get into music seriously during postpunk,
which was a high fever time for both the music and the discourse around it.
That is a potent drug to taste when you are so impressionable and susceptible –
16, 17, 18 – and seething with idealism and impatience. The combined effect of
the rapid mutation of postpunk music, and the way writers at the NME in
particular, but also Sounds and Melody Maker,
tried not just to keep up with all the changes but to make things go
even faster - the combination of that is
what I’ve called the quickening. That’s an old-fashioned word that no
one uses nowadays (“quick” used to mean “living” as in “the quick and the
dead”). But the quickening feels
like the right word to describe the effect of that combined sonic and literary
stimulus on a young mind: it’s a power surge of cultural electricity, a
galvanic rush.
I’ve been chasing that feeling for the rest of my life. If you happen to get into music during one of
these !UP! phases, you might get locked into a bipolar rhythm, like I did. A
period of sustained acceleration is followed by a crash, a terrible slowing
down, the scene gets torpid and disparate. That’s what happened in the
mid-Eighties, what I call the Bad Music Era. Then things picked up again and
became insanely exciting. That bipolar rhythm of rush and crash - ultra-intense excitement and emotional
over-investment, followed by disappointment and despair – can actually be
unhealthy, if you happen to have manic-depressive tendencies, as did my poor
friend and comrade Mark Fisher. But for someone like me who is naturally
stolid, the combination of the music and the writing (by others, by myself) has
worked as a jolt, shocking me alive again and again.
Ezequiel Fanego:
There is a
crucial aspect that we have not mentioned yet and that is as fundamental as the
intimate experience that your body or mind can have of a piece of music. I mean
the social, relational aspect. When I think of the impact that music had in my
life I can hardly reduce it to a private listening experience. Of course, like
all of us, I have had several epiphanic moments in which the discovery of
some track or some artist resulted in an expansion of the doors of
my perception: the revelation of some aesthetic possibilities totally
unthinkable so far. But above all music always involved, at the same time as a
sensitive experience, an access to a world of cultural exchanges, the
possibility of making new friends, embarking on new projects, enriching your
networks.
During my
teenage years I used to go to a park near my house where a book and record fair
took place. When I started going I was looking mostly for hardcore bands,
things like Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, D.O.A., etc. Soon,
just as a result of the exchange with the record sellers or local friends, my
musical horizon expanded considerably: I discovered dub, garage, postpunk. For
some reason music mobilizes that curiosity (one always needs more) and also the
need to share with others our discoveries. It may have to do with that
ineffitable aspect of music: the emotions they generate are sometimes so
difficult to understand, so irrational, that we need to share them with others
to somehow verify that there is something objective in that experience. We soom
become preachers of our musical passions.
Which brings
me to Simon's first reflection about the need of public thinking about music.
Do we need this public thinking to give social meaning to our most intimate
emotions? I remember when music download blogs started to emerge in the early
2000s. At full speed there were countless blogs about the most diverse,
super-documented micro-scenes, from where you could download the most esoteric
records around the world. Faced with this overload of information andi nevitable
one wondered about what drives this cyberculture heroes to take the effort to
upload all those records with their corresponding covers and brief historical
reviews. There was probably something to do with reputation, but most of those
blogs were anonymous, besides that only a few achieved some kind of notoriety.
So the right answer seemed to be that they took that effort simply because of the
need to share the music that passionate them, to cultivate a determinate
subculture. Of course, one could say the same about literature, film or even
sports. But I think music's tendency to generate such an urge to share your
personal experience and to built an identity around a certain cultural
consumption is somehow superior to any other form of art.
Simon Reynolds:
Yes
Ezequiel is right, there is much more to music and to thinking about music than
just this individualized experience of rapture or the rush of ideas in one’s
head. It’s not just this solipsistic drug-like thing. Simply to write about
music at all presupposes people reading it, the existence of some kind of
audience – and not just as a recipient of the ideas, but as an audience that
critically engages with them, building on them or disagreeing with them. Even
the loneliest blogger is engaged in an act of communication that relies to some
degree on the notion of a community out
there.
One of the
attractions of the British music press as a place to work was the idea that if
I managed to get into it, I would find people I could talk to – that I would be
entering a space of argument and shared enthusiasm. And also of antagonism – an
environment that to some extent was fueled by the sparks that came from
friction, the clash of ideas. The music press worked as a space in which competition (all these young
egos looking to make their mark and distinguish themselves in some way, to
define their own path) and collaboration were finely balanced.
If I look back
at the times when I’ve been happiest in my working life, it’s been periods when
I was part of a team engaged in a collective project. In my early twenties, my
friends and I operated our own magazine, Monitor. We were ex-students living on
unemployment benefit but the magazine was very much like creating a job for
ourselves, a purpose. There was a tremendous collective energy of us all
pulling together to finish an issue and then get it out into the world. And a
ferment of ideas between us - an article
by one would spark a reply or an expansion from another in the next issue.
Then a few
years later, I had the experience of working at Melody Maker, one of the weekly
music papers, and being involved in giving it a new direction, a reborn sense
of intellectual energy, an escalating excitement about underground bands and
emerging directions in music. In those
days, before email, writers had to physically bring in their copy to the office
and so there was a hub of socializing and face-to-face discussion – drinking
and thinking aloud. This institutional
vibe is something I have seen gradually disappear from magazines during the
Nineties as the writers increasingly
sent in their work remotely and never met each other or the magazine staff.
After around 2000, you might go into a music magazine office and it would be
like a ghost ship in there – a few editorial staff, often no music or music
playing very quietly.
And then the
third time I had that feeling of being part of a community of thinking about
music – with that balance of frictional competition versus reciprocal influence
– was the early days of the blogs. Not the music download blogs that Ezequiel
referred to, but the circuit that included K-punk, Woebot, and many others.
Once again there was that feeling of a common purpose, even if undefined – that
electric sensation I referred to before as the quickening. Which I
realized is actually an old fashioned term for the moment when the mother can
first feel the unborn baby moving. But
that makes it even better because it describes the way that the music scene,
which is always a combination of musical creativity and the critical discourse
around music, can go through these phases of entropy, when everything feels
disparate and scattered – a terrible sluggishness that can feel like a kind of
death. And then suddenly it all lurches into vibrant life again. Things start
moving. And this quickening is a collective feeling as much something in your
own nervous system.
As an
individual writer you can have a feeling like that – of surge and focus - on
your own, when you launch into a large project like a book or some kind of
really energizing thinkpiece or feature that involves a lot of research and
discovery. But it’s much more fun if
there are a bunch of you engaged in a shared mobilization of energy,
synchronized to the same accelerated and propulsive rhythm.
So one thing
I still look out for hopefully with music magazines is when they seem to be a
hub of energy – a publication becomes an
attractor for a bunch of lively and peculiar minds, and they all inspire each
other in that collaborative-competitive way. Publishers can work in the same
way, as we see for instance with Repeater in the UK, which in fact was an
attempt to build on the energy of the blog scene in the first decade of the 21st
Century and siphon it into larger, long-lasting projects.
I don’t see
it very often with magazines in recent times – probably one of the last ones,
in terms of music, was Tiny Mix Tapes,
which has now gone into some kind of indefinite hibernation, but definitely had
a collective identity for a long while.
The original dialogue was done about six weeks, when crisis meant covid-19 and lockdown - before the other crisis blew up in this country. Subsequent to that, Ezequiel added a final comment, which went straight to Spanish. You can probably work out what he's saying.
Ezequiel:
Mientras terminamos con esta conversación llegan las noticias del brutal asesinato de George Floyd a manos de la policía de Minneapolis. Casualmente me entero que Big Floyd, como lo llamaban sus amigos, era parte de la Screwed Up Click, la familia musical de Dj Screw. No puedo dejar de pensar en sus últimas palabras, “I can´t breath” y en la relación que hay entre la respiración, la poesía y el ritmo. Y en cómo la música puede ser de alguna manera un ejercicio para respirar con los otros, crear comunidad, habitar los barrios y las calles de un modo estrictamente no-policial. No sé si será cierto, pero hay algo de poético en eso que cuentan de que ayer Anonymous hackeo las radios policiales de Minneapolis para que suene ininterrumpidamente “Fuck the police”.
Sunday, June 21, 2020
Brazilian Nao Wave and Postpunk
Nao Wave: Brazilian Post Punk 1982-1988
(Man Recordings)
The Sexual Life of the Savages: Underground Post-Punk from Sao Paulo
(Soul Jazz)
Village Voice, 2005
by Simon Reynolds
Village Voice, 2005
by Simon Reynolds
Postpunk's seam has gotten severely depleted these last few years.
So it makes sense that genre-mining bands and arcana-excavating archivists are
now moving into the non-Anglophone world. The smart hipster money would surely
have been on Germany Belgium Holland Brazil Sao Paulo
Nao Wave kicks off
with Agenttss' "Agenttss." Released in 1982, it's a historic
single not just for its mélange of then-modish but still thrilling elements
(flanged guitar, synth-bloops) but for being Brazil
Inevitably, what captivates the Anglo-American ear is the exotic Brazilian tinge that creeps in every so often, whether intentional or not, as with Chance's sultry "Samba Do Morro" (another track on both comps) and Black Future's "Eu Sou O Rio", whose bassline doesn't so much walk disco-style as sashay carnival-style. Approaching the end of its 1982-88 time-span, Nao Wave sags somewhat (theUK
Inevitably, what captivates the Anglo-American ear is the exotic Brazilian tinge that creeps in every so often, whether intentional or not, as with Chance's sultry "Samba Do Morro" (another track on both comps) and Black Future's "Eu Sou O Rio", whose bassline doesn't so much walk disco-style as sashay carnival-style. Approaching the end of its 1982-88 time-span, Nao Wave sags somewhat (the
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