Category Archives: Music

MACK THE KNIFE – ELLA IN BERLIN

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MACK THE KNIFE: ELLA IN BERLIN
Ella Fitzgerald
1960

I was not aware this album had a reputation when I snagged it out of the discount bin at Strictly Discs – I liked the idea of having some Ella on vinyl and it was cheap. I knew “Mack the Knife,” “Summertime,” “Too Darn Hot,” “How High The Moon.” I still have the $7.99 sticker on my record sleeve. I’d really only listened to the Cole Porter and George Gershwin songbook albums, and while I thought Ella was an undeniable singer, I can’t pretend I really knew her well.

The first side of this album fit into my prior understanding of Ella. It’s largely midtempo, with “The Lady is a Tramp” kicking into higher gear in the second half. There’s some humor, especially on “Lorelei” and “The Lady is a Tramp,” songs that get to show her bright, fun side. The ballad “The Man I Love” is gorgeous, plaintive, intense. “Summertime” is a song she’s always owned, but here she’s able to give it a more playful heat than her classic recording with Louis Armstrong, the full string and brass section giving it a little too much ornamentation. Her Berlin rendition is more seductive, deeper until it’s higher, and the Paul Smith Quartet is light on their feet in adding improvised little flourishes rather than full breaks.

It’s side two that set my brain on fire, though. From the very beginning of “Too Darn Hot,” games with the audience start happening. She’s playing with the tempo and tone to have the kind of fun she’d never be allowed in the studio with a full orchestration. By the time she hits the first “Kinsey Report,” the band’s hot and they’re not interested in buttoning up again, hitting the interludes between songs with games that make her laugh. She starts growling, moaning, joking. They deliver the last song Ella knows on the set, “Lorelei,” with a relatively straight face, but it’s still hotter than the first side.

This album is most recognized for the next recording, the titular “Mack the Knife.” Ella opens the song by admitting she’s never sung it before and doesn’t really know the words. She changes the first line and never gets perfectly back on track. You can hear her laugh on “Sunday morning.” But then you hit “Oh, what’s the next chorus?” and she doesn’t ever even try to come back. It’s delightful to hear her simultaneously not know the song, make up something that fits the meter, and make it sound absolutely gorgeous. She jokes, “Oh, and now Ella! And her fella! We’re making a wreck! What a wreck! Of Mack the Knife!” before hitting an unbelievable scat sequence. She’s turned the song into a cat toy, batting it around and always keeping the joke on the ridiculousness of knowing the music this damn well and not having the words.

But, honestly, that doesn’t hold a candle to what she does next to “How High The Moon.” She actually jokes that the words may be wrong, but she gets through all of them before the band kicks into hyperdrive. I’d never heard scatting like she does on “How High The Moon.” The band follows her into entirely different songs (“Tisket-A-Tasket,” “Heat Wave,” , including the part where she effectively just starts buzzing. I didn’t know at the time that this was just what her version of “How High The Moon” had sounded like for a decade, had been recorded that way before, down to “the words may be wrong” – I’m as goggle-eyed as the audience even now. I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert on scat or jazz more broadly – what I know is I heard this and I felt it was the most perfect recording of music I’ve heard then or since. Music is where you find it, and, for me, the iconic Ella live album will always be the one I happened to pluck from the discount bin.

KEY TRACKS: “Summertime,” “Too Darn Hot,” “Mack the Knife,” “How High The Moon”
CATALOG CHOICE: Ella Fitzgerald Live at Mr. Kelly’s, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook
NEXT STOP: ‘Nuff Said!, Nina Simone
AFTER THAT: Odetta Sings Dylan

ANTI

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ANTI
Rihanna
2016

2016 is both the year the Rihanna superculture goes supernova and the last time she released new music. Riding the success of a cancelled 2015 album and Anti, Rihanna appears on Drake’s Views, Kanye’s The Life of Pablo, Future’s Hndrxx, Kendrick’s DAMN, and launches the Fenty Beauty company – that last one marks her transition from musician into billionaire (derogatory.)  She’s released three total songs since the official launch in 2018, two of them for the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack and performed the Super Bowl Halftime Show and at the Oscars. That’s the only music she’s performed in that time – no surprise appearances, no concerts, no festivals.

I note all this because the supposed conceit behind Anti was to release an album she could perform as she aged out of her 20s. She looked back at songs from the start of her career as America’s Aphrodite and felt they had been burned out, that she wanted songs that would be “timeless,” an idea she modeled after “FourFiveSeconds” with Paul McCartney. That self-awareness and intention indicate an artist working to manage her own career, taking creative control, refusing to just go through the motions. I think in touring Anti, it’s possible she found that it wasn’t the form of the music itself that burned her out.

There are genres Rihanna’s never attempted before or since on Anti. Most of the album still reflects her current general sound, shaped by PartyNextDoor, Kanye collaborators Jeff Bhasker and James Fauntleroy, and trap producers like Hit-Boi, Boy-1da, and Mustard. But there’s also the Tame Impala cover of “Same Ol’ Mistakes,” the doo-wop love song “Love On The Brain,” the sliding dub of “Consideration.” While there is a clear decision to get off autopilot, this album does sound like “Bitch Better Have My Money” and “American Oxygen,” the singles from the first version of her eighth album.

Rihanna at the 2016 VMAs, winning the Video Vanguard award.

Some of these experiments work better than others. The ballad “Never Ending” gives her acoustic backing and positions her as a more mid-00s singer-songwriter, a song that uses strong harmonies to place her voice in a unique setting. It’s a more natural use of her voice than “Love On The Brain,” which sounds better in isolation than any placement next to proper doo-wop. But it’s also a bit of a facade – while Rihanna is credited as a writer on every song except “Same Ol’ Mistakes,” once you see the credits, you recognize “Never Ending” as a Dido song adjusted for Rihanna’s voice. It’s still lovely, and it’s a thoughtful way she could take a post-pop career.

This album wouldn’t be here without the Rihanna fastball pop, though. The first eight tracks (and bonus track “Sex With Me”) are as great as anything she’s done. “Needed Me” takes a chopped up Mustard beat and trades in venomous relationship control. There’s a killer quality to a lot of Anti, an understanding that Rihanna can convincingly take the dominant role in every relationship she describes. It’s maybe never more fun than in “Desperado,” a song which wields a nasty bass line under what actually might be one of the more “meet me in the middle” heartbreak songs on the album. Even a mealy-mouthed Drake verse can’t spoil “Work,” the album’s massive single, where Rihanna lets the vocalization hit the album’s most playful.

It feels so funny to be writing this and separating the names Drake, Mustard, Kendrick, Kanye, and Rihanna without drawing a battle map. Mustard had spent four years going through a contentious divorce and producing a couple songs a year before producing “Not Like Us.” When Rihanna was still making music, these men were all on top of the world. They were collaborating, and their collaborators were all collaborating behind the scenes, too. I know there are a million reasons 2016 feels a world away, but remember when the corniest thing about Drake was his interactions with Rihanna and Nicki Minaj? When Kanye’s big controversy was the dumbass “Famous” video? Knowing what we know now, maybe Rihanna didn’t just get burned out by the music itself. 

KEY TRACKS: “Kiss It Better,” “Desperado,” “Needed Me,” “Sex With Me”
CATALOG CHOICE: Good Girl Gone Bad, “Rude Boy”
NEXT STOP: Ctrl, SZA
AFTER THAT: Take Me Apart, Kelela

REIGN IN BLOOD

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REIGN IN BLOOD
Slayer
1986

Any amount of distraction or sonic interference is enough to frankly destroy Reign in Blood. Slayer’s breakthrough album does not function as background music. Rick Rubin’s mix works when you’re locked in, but any amount of distraction drowns out every 220 bpm riff with Lombardo’s blast beat drums and Araya’s shouted vocal. It becomes noise. All the texture will drop away. When I started relistening to write this, I thought, “Oh, this isn’t very good anymore.” Then I put the laptop away for a minute and could hear it again.

I don’t actually like Rubin’s mix, but I’ve lived my whole life in its aftermath. Reign in Blood is credited as being the crossover moment between thrash and death metal, signaling the point at which metalheads could retreat into a deeper subculture while Metallica gravitated away toward more melodic hard rock. I’m not a person who cares too much about subgenres, to be honest – I follow them only to the extent the artists themselves discuss them, and music is usually more interesting at the borders anyway. What I can recognize is that this album was still deeply influential on the death metal and screamo I could never get into in high school, where drums and vocals drowned out the melodic instruments.

Every time I return to the source and give it my full attention, I can understand why. In a decade where the average metal song was between five and ten minutes long, Slayer doubled the tempo and still put twice as many musical ideas into two and a half minutes. The drum part is so forward in the mix because it creates continuity between all the very dramatic changes in riff and melody. Stop paying attention and it creates the effect of a twenty six minute song – keep your eye on the ball and the nine tracks become twenty.

The fact that some members of Slayer and Rick Rubin have turned out to be reactionary chuds over the years is only surprising to those in denial. While reading “Angel of Death’s” lyrics and controversy section on Wikipedia should be enough to convince you that they’re earnest about just depicting an evil man and not endorsing Joseph Mengele, it’s also revealing that they don’t really have anything to say about him. Throughout the album and its (excellent) cover art, the satanic imagery, the descriptions of brutal ways to die, the absolutely braindead “Criminally Insane” lyrics – this is trolling, meant to create a cumulative effect. It’s theater, grand guignol building toward an epic finale.

Everything builds to that tenth song, “Raining Blood,” which overwhelms the rest of the album in terms of groove, brilliant riff songwriting, portentous storytelling. The opening rain effect and tom drum with the siren guitar – I mean, this is just the coolest shit in the world. The solos are the album’s most discordant and insane, and they fly over the album’s chunkiest straight-ahead speed. The two ways to listen to the album, for me, are in its entirety, front to back, or just to listen to that last song.

KEY TRACKS: “Piece by Piece,” “Jesus Saves,” “Criminally Insane” “Raining Blood”
NEXT STOP: Arise, Sepultura
AFTER THAT: Dead Rituals, Swamp Witch

ROOM25

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ROOM25
Noname
2018

Fandom is hard in the online era, man. Noname is someone I so badly want to root for, who does so much cool shit, who also thinks J Cole is corny and who is vocal about injustice in America, whose raps are so funny and so thoughtful ninety percent of the time. Her Noname Book Club is a genuinely really cool project! That ten percent where she gives Jay Electronica a supremely antisemitic Black Isrealite verse on Sundial, though. Noname is a gaze into the mirror of being perpetually annoying online, and while I’m not sure I’d like her half as much if I didn’t follow her on Twitter before she deleted, I also know I wouldn’t sigh as hard at the fact that I love this album.

Room25 is the debut album, and it came from a place of transition into real adulthood. She’d moved from Chicago to L.A. – she’d started having sex – she needed to pay rent. That sense of obligation maybe helps birth its tossed-off introduction, a 1:35 song fragment that feels like it started halfway through. “Self” is maybe the best the album ever gets, though – the freeflow pleasure she has on “Mister money man, Mister every day he got me/Mister weather me down, Mister me love, Mister Miyagi,” is one of the greatest rap moments of the last decade. It has that same sticky teeth feeling of the best beats by The Neptunes, the best Big Willie Style hooks, the best playground songs.

But, then again, maybe the best moment is “Blaxploitation,” which combines jokes about bad feminism and exhaustion with trying to have good politics and darker outrage about the state of the world. In terms of the album’s mission statement, “Prayer Song” and “Montego Bae” are maybe the most representative combinations of sex and politics, some lines phenomenal (“If you wanna help me to put me inside the cuffs/Put the cigarette in my back/Keep the hospitals overrun-run-run-run, Chicken Little/How my city gonna run off shits and giggles?”) and others corny (“America the great, this grateful dead and life for me/Apple pie on Sunday morning, obesity and heart disease”.)

Not being able to put my finger down is kind of the appeal of Room25. At its best, it’s one of the absolute great rap albums of the 2010s and an all-time great rap debut. There’s nothing quite like it and I’m not sure you could regulate it on purpose. That 10%, though.

KEY TRACKS: “Self,” “Prayer Song,” “Montego Bae”
CATALOG CHOICE: Telefone, “Song 32,” “Song 33”
NEXT STOP: Everything’s Fine, Jean Grae and Quelle Chris
AFTER THAT: Ho, Why Is You Here?, Flo Milli

RUBBER SOUL

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RUBBER SOUL
The Beatles
1965

Every kind of Beatles fan is annoying. Sgt. Pepper’s fans are annoying and can’t fathom thinking “She’s Leaving Home” repetitive and saccharine. Fans of McCartney’s solo work are annoying in that they’ll do everything in their power to avoid talking about “Eleanor Rigby” again so they’ll fill your feed with “Monkberry Moon Delight” and “Temporary Secretary.” Fans of the early years will pretend that the covers of “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” aren’t fucking awful. Hearing “Imagine” in a public space is grounds for tribunal against whoever put it on the playlist.

I’m all of these fans. I’ve been all of these fans all my life. When The Beatles would come up when I was in high school, eyes would turn to me. I was neurotic about them – they meant a lot to me. I’d stay up on school nights reading the Wikipedia page on every track from The White Album. I’d teach myself to sing every word of Please Please Me and Abbey Road. I wrote an entire scene for my dramatic show choir in Beatles song titles. I’d send lyrics to girls I’d never be brave enough to ask out. I was, to put it kindly, insufferable to the point of meriting euthanasia.

The album that’s always been right toward the top of my list is Rubber Soul, the first album they made without already having tour gigs lined up. The willingness to imagine music that might be hard to recreate live sets them on their pop art odyssey throughout the rest of the decade. This is the first of their albums where I’d argue the arrangements and harmonies occupy such a full sonic range that they feel swaddling. The quilted maximalism sounds so different from the jangly rock band they’d been in the studio for the three years prior, an arms race kicked off by The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and amped up by Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys.

The Beatles members (from left) John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and George Harrison on the terrace of the Hotel Duomo. Milan, 24 June 1965.

Many of Paul’s best basslines can be found on Rubber Soul, from his forward melodic contribution to “Michelle” to the perfect harmonic underpinning of “Nowhere Man.” Ringo’s drumming is as keyed in and unshowy as he always manages to be. In general, the album offers few of the showier instrumental interludes of their cited highlights – there’s no “Taxman” or “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” guitar solo, no “The End” or “A Day in the Life” drum fill extravaganza. Rubber Soul is led by its vocal harmonies, dominated by the interplay between voices.

I’d argue that’s largely because the majority of the lyrics continue in Help!’s trajectory, getting more and more anecdotal and folksy, touching on more mature themes than the silly love songs they came up singing. I’m not going to pretend that these lyrics are especially intricate – the storytelling on “Girl” or “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” are major steps forward for The Beatles’ discography, but this is the year after Nina Simone has released “Mississippi Goddam,” the year Bob Dylan launches stratospheric between Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home, the year Otis Redding releases the original version of “Respect.” But there are some evocative images that match the musicality – “Nowhere Man” is evocative and sad without identifying a clear subject, and its soaring guitar part captures that ennui. “I’m Looking Through You” identifies the nothing that it takes for people to grow apart more directly, turning this complex feeling into a lovely pop song. 

Rubber Soul is the firing gun for album oriented rock. Rubber Soul is begot by listening to Bob Dylan and The Byrds, and incorporating that folk approach begets The Velvet Underground and Pet Sounds and Aftermath, which beget Queen and Led Zeppelin, which etc. etc. I’d argue album oriented rock simultaneously represents many of the most important advancements in recording equipment, pop cultural taste for artful arrangement, and the replacement of jazz as America’s dominant musical form, and I’d also argue it’s a morose trap for white scolds of all ages.

There is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I know I’ve grown out of rockism as The One Way. This album’s given me gifts beyond my taste. “In My Life” is not a complex sentiment – just a beautiful, sincere, evocative one. “I know I’ll often stop and think about them/In my life, I love you more.” A kindness that seems so admirable – to love and honor the people you’ve loved and lost, the people you’ve been and outgrown (even if they were insufferable,) while still choosing the future.

KEY TRACKS: “You Won’t See Me,” “Nowhere Man,” “In My Life”
CATALOG CHOICE: Abbey Road
NEXT STOP: Bringing It All Back Home, Bob Dylan
AFTER THAT: Odessey and Oracle, The Zombies

COLTER WALL

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COLTER WALL
Colter Wall
2017

If I can point to any moment that walked me back to country and folk music this past several years, it was the first time I heard Colter Wall’s “Thirteen Silver Dollars.” The confidence of writing this humorous, self-effacing little anecdote as your lead single for your debut album, with the remove and referential pop culture of a Stephen King short story – it reinvigorated my feeling that telling little stories was something I hungered to find again.

But, really, it’s that damn voice. When I played him for Austin for the first time and told him Wall was only 22 when this album was recorded, he called me a liar, belting, “That man is divorced!” It’s a pretty gorgeous raspy vocal tone, deep and soulful, low and smooth. It’s allowed Wall to have incredibly successful covers of classics from “Big Iron” to “Diamond Joe” to “Do Re Mi”, but I’m not sure he’s ever used its ache as beautifully as on this self-titled album.

“Codeine Dream” and “Me and Big Dave” have this fantastic melancholy to them – his voice just sounds exhausted, and he understands the way to use the guitar to harmonize that baritone just right. These are haunted songs that see death and desolation around those who still draw breath. Then there’s the righteous fury of “Kate McCannon,” a gunslinger ballad that draws the line directly to Marty Robbins, with that undeniable percussive buildup and sinister guitar lick. That’s probably the “best” song of the album, this wonderfully poetic story told with musical brilliance. 

He doesn’t let the fun songs slack, either. “Thirteen Silver Dollars” ends with that jaunty tone, but “Motorcycle,” “You Look To Yours,” “Fraulein,” these are delightful without becoming the syrup of modern pop country. He’s turned toward that a little more on his last couple albums, falling in love with some studio tricks and his band. While you’d never pretend this album is a one man operation or a low-budget production, it certainly lacks the gloss that Nashville money can bring. I’ve enjoyed the journey into popularity of Colter Wall (the lead single of his next album, “Plain to See Plainsman,” is easily one of his best songs,) and hope I get to hear him play live someday soon. But it’s a lightning bolt moment to hear this guy’s voice for the first time and know this young songwriter is already fully formed.

KEY TRACKS: “Thirteen Silver Dollars,” “Me and Big Dave,” “Kate McCannon,” “You Look To Yours”
CATALOG CHOICE: Songs of the Plains, Imaginary Appalachia, “Big Iron”
NEXT STOP: Purgatory, Tyler Childers
AFTER THAT: A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, Sturgill Simpson

SOUND OF SILVER

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SOUND OF SILVER
LCD Soundsystem
2007

I first found LCD Soundsystem in early 2011, when I bought This Is Happening on iTunes. I’m perpetually haunted by this decision, as “All I Want” is the first song that plays every time I plug my phone into my car. If I’d started with Sound of Silver, I’d surely instead be haunted by “All My Friends,” a song that anchored me during some of my deepest collegiate depression. The break-up of LCD Soundsystem, documented in the not-very-good-documentary-but-there’s-a-much-better-concert-film-in-the-special-features Shut Up And Play The Hits, was the first time a band I’d found as an adult and imagined a much larger future for, was supposed to be ending. Of course, they haven’t actually ended, their new music is still pretty good, and James Murphy’s constant posturing has aged into making him deeply uncool. He’s come full circle, I guess.

LCD Soundsystem’s albums were laser targeted at my “Talking Heads are underrated” resentments and my burgeoning affection for the epic build of Bruce Springsteen and Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot”. “All My Friends” and “Dancing in the Dark” make so much sense together Hot Chip mashed them up. It’s soaring arena rock made with new wave synths and anchored by Murphy’s sing-talk baritone.

Sound of Silver used to sound like the future to me. It’s such a fascinating blend of indie rock trends, electronic dance pop, and irony-drenched lyrics. “Time To Get Away” and “North American Scum” are so fun to shout along to precisely because the idea of singing them has already been tossed aside. It’s cynical and playful at the same time. I didn’t understand that this was already a dead end, that the last great rock bands seeming to revel in disposability and excess signaled death rather than bravado. The danciest songs on this album play like worn-out versions of late-70s Eno collaborations with Byrne and Bowie, revived by the necromancy of `funk guitar, incredible polyrhythms, and synth stings. They’re fun, they’re funny, they’re acrid.

What makes the album not curdle over is the more sincere grief of the less ironic music. “Someone Great” and “All My Friends” are really heartfelt power pop. The former is more explicitly the death of Murphy’s longtime therapist, the literal grief of losing a loved one. The latter is more the grief of time, exploring how relationships and missed opportunities change faster than it feels possible. These have a more melodic sound and less repetitive lyrics to them, and it’s more obvious the way these songs wear their sincerity. Similarly, the closing ballad, “New York, I Love You” is undeniably a downer-ballad, still removed with some humor but also very sincerely celebrating Murphy’s home city. Less lyrically emotional is “Sound of Silver,” but its sonic journey is maybe the most adventurous and epic build on the album, situating its “teenagedom” very personally in Murphy’s own adolescence.

The end of the party is how LCD Soundsystem fancied itself at the time. The myth is that with the death of the Meet Me In The Bathroom New York rock scene, we gave in to modern pressures and got old. We’d reached the end of the line, and there was nothing left to say in the rock format. Obviously, anyone still listening to modern rock music can dispute that with their own assortment of twenty bands who are doing something exciting and interesting and personal, or who are using Pixies and Springsteen and new wave to say new things. That feeling that you’re getting old and the world isn’t following your vision anymore is attractive to people of every generation. It’s fun to listen to LCD Soundsystem sell the fantasy of being The Last Good Band, because boy, they sell the hell out of it.

KEY TRACKS: “Time To Get Away”, “Someone Great”, “All My Friends,” “Sound of Silver”
CATALOG CHOICE: This Is Happening
NEXT STOP: Challengers Original Score, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
AFTER THAT: Mosquito, Yeah Yeah Yeahs

DAYDREAM NATION

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DAYDREAM NATION
Sonic Youth
1988

I think for the first ten years I owned this album, I would listen to “Teen Age Riot,” to me the perfect rock song, and then shut it off maybe one minute into “The Sprawl.” I can’t help what I wanted, and what I wanted was The Stone Roses. There was more I would’ve liked at the time, even just finishing “The Sprawl” or listening to songs like “Total Trash,” but I didn’t have the appetite for something as burned out and adult as “Silver Rocket.” Hell, I barely had patience for long instrumental sections – so much of my enjoyment of music for so long was built on singing along, I’m not sure I would’ve stuck through anyway. I got my fill through so many bands inspired by Sonic Youth, from Yeah Yeah Yeahs to The War on Drugs.

I started Sonic Youth from the beginning when I started getting really into the less radio friendly side of Pixies, looking to recapture the distortion and feedback of being in my twenties at the Majestic in Madison and blowing my ears out. Coming back to Daydream Nation after listening to their 80s output, it’s so much clearer why this is considered their landmark album. They’d mastered noise rock with evil lyrics a few years prior, Bad Moon Rising culminating in the extremely uncomfortable “Death Valley ‘69,” making music for the end of the world. Daydream Nation instead comes out of making longer instrumental jams, and those jams resulted in much more melodic guitar parts with a lot more texture. Without that context, I was under the impression the darkness was overwhelming melodic beauty – now, I understand instead that the distortion and uptempo rage was the starting point.

I’ve been reading through William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy this past year or so, and Sonic Youth’s “The Sprawl” came out two weeks before the publication of the third novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive. Where Neuromancer cohered into pretty cogent worldbuilding and rage about our increasingly transactional reality, the second novel Count Zero is 90% fun action and vibes and 10% conspiratorial agitprop. It’s hard not to joke that “The Sprawl” also borrows that structure, with maybe two minutes of fairly enjoyable and poetic reflection on transactional sex, imposter syndrome, and a decaying, rusting home and then six more of absolutely gorgeous guitar interplay.

A lot of the lyrics on this album are window dressing on top of a massive instrumental jam. “Candle” is a pretty simple reflection on feelings of fatalism at a young age, but any sense of anger or resolution is really only told through the dark riff under the verses or the noisy instrumental break. This still isn’t a pop album, but it represented the breakthrough into popular critical acceptance and college radio airplay that Sonic Youth hadn’t found yet. Their next album, Goo, would include more radio friendly dance music and fewer songs over 7 minutes long. It also amped up the political and pop culture references, a little less vague and poetic.

The signs of that change are in that song I loved so much as a teen, “Teen Age Riot.” That song was originally titled “J Mascis For President,” and Dinosaur Jr.’s frontman is still in there with his Marshall stacks. The opening, Kim Gordon’s “spirit desire” intro, is so funny – whatever its original intent, it comes across now as a lampoon on the post-hippie new age radicals and manifestation as resistance. Then, the power pop arrives, the perfectly tuned guitar tones of Thurston Moore and Lee Ronaldo in conversation with one another, chunk and clean. The remainder imagines a revolution with a charismatic alt-rock hero, and it ends still on the riot trail. I think there’s enough humor to the song to understand that this may be some “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” bullshit (“He acts the hero/We paint a zero on his hand”) but it doesn’t give in to that defeat. Taken out of context, that might sound like cynicism swallowing a dream – but, again, this is the daydream of the people who’ve put out some of the darkest no-wave noise rock of the 80s, so maybe it’s the start of believing in something.

KEY TRACKS: “Teen Age Riot,” “The Sprawl,” “Total Trash”
CATALOG CHOICE: Bad Moon Rising, Goo
NEXT STOP: Bossanova, Pixies
AFTER THAT: A Deeper Understanding, The War on Drugs

LOW

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LOW
David Bowie
1977

I lifted the format of these writeups directly from Tom Moon, author of 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, as he was essentially my bridge between Guitar Hero and actually enjoying multiple genres of music. In his introduction to 1000 Recordings, Moon writes, “Finding renegade jazz pianist Cecil Taylor next to sensitive singer-songwriter James Taylor, who abuts the Russian composer Tchaikovsky underscores the astounding range of musical expression available, while subtly discouraging people from hanging out in their genre neighborhoods (ghettos?) they know best. This journey taught me that there’s great treasure waiting on the other side of wherever you draw your territorial lines.”

Few figures in music history underscore that philosophy more than Brian Eno, whose collaborators range from John Cale to John Cage, Sean Kuti to Sinead O’Connor, and perhaps most famously David Byrne to David Bowie. Eno’s influence is bringing ambient and classical into pop, African polyrhythm into rock, and subverting listener expectations in ways that enriched the quality of pop songwriting in ways we might now take for granted. While Bowie is quick to point out Eno is only a contributor and not a co-producer on his experimental Berlin Trilogy, Eno’s contributions help define what makes Low so different from Bowie’s Thin White Duke era of funk-infused pop.

The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bowie’s first starring role, was originally supposed to be scored by a version of the album that became Low – Nicolas Roeg rejected it and opted for a more traditional score from John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas. Bowie was coming off Station to Station and the Thin White Duke, a persona defined by snorting coke and saying fascist bullshit. The plot of The Man Who Fell To Earth is that of an alien who becomes addicted to fame, alcohol, and TV before being imprisoned by the government – there’s temptation to apply that template to Bowie’s own decline (not to mention Bowie’s own Ziggy Stardust, whose “Rock N’ Roll Suicide” culminates the most iconic and beloved of all Bowie’s albums) but there’s no reason to read Bowie’s dependency as managed by outsiders or brought upon by anyone but himself.

Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, Low, Heroes and Lodger.

Low reflects this fragmented place in life. The first half of the album, through “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” is a series of wonderful song fragments. They’re equal parts funk, blues, rock, maximalist decadence of layers upon layers and minimalist anti-pop with vocals that crash in with forty-five seconds remaining on the track (if at all.) For an act often defined by Bowie’s yelp and star persona, Low is a spotlight of Bowie the multi-instrumentalist, trading parts with longtime guitarist Carlos Alomar and session musician Ricky Gardiner. Without looking at liner notes, it’s easy to miss where Bowie fits into some of these tracks at all (sometimes, it’s mostly saxophone!) This album bops along through the transition of “Be My Wife” and “A New Career in a New Town,” slowing slightly and becoming more traditionally rock, “Be My Wife” a song that would have fit just as well on Diamond Dogs or Hunky Dory.

On the second side of the vinyl, Low shifts to “nighttime,” Bowie’s largest adventure into the Eno-esque ambient. It’s easy to imagine “Warszawa” or “Subterraneans” scoring The Man Who Fell To Earth – the jaunty funk of side one for the narcotic highs, the droning despair of “Art Decade” filling the scenes of isolation and dependency. This is, for me, where Bowie lays out the future that leads to The Next Day and Blackstar. He’s creating an eerier sense of drama than the pomp (fun) of “Five Years.” In confronting his own darkness, Bowie’s found something more honest, and it’s something harder to look at directly.

KEY TRACKS: “Sound and Vision,” “Warszawa”
CATALOG CHOICE: Heroes, Scary Monsters & Super Creeps
NEXT STOP: Who Is William Onyeabor, William Onyeabor
AFTER THAT: Surf’s Up, The Beach Boys

DIG ME OUT

Posted in Music by

DIG ME OUT
Sleater-Kinney
1997

My first riot grrl song was Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl,” a song I totally rejected as a high school choir boy who did not get it. I came back around with the release of Gone Home, a for-its-time narratively ambitious queer adventure game that heavily used Bratmobile’s “Cool Schmool.” I started reading feminist literature and came around on Kathleen Hanna. I added a few singles to my playlists. This is a self-flattering version of this story. A couple years later, Sleater-Kinney reunited and released No Cities To Love to near-universal acclaim. St. Vincent said the reunion album was her favorite Sleater-Kinney album yet, signaling the beginning of the end of the band as it had existed for twenty years.

1997’s Dig Me Out was the first album after drummer Janet Weiss replaced Lora MacFarlane. According to Corin Tucker, “Musically, she’s completed our band. She’s become the bottom end and the solidness that we’ve really wanted for our songwriting.” Listening to their prior album, Call the Doctor, you can hear the difference – MacFarlane is a much more straightforward 90s rock drummer, with Weiss invoking borrowed fills from 60s girl groups and the British rockers who covered their hits. There’s a sense listening through Dig Me Out that every song is equal part fill and main beat – her style gives a texture that fills each song, already short, with novel grooves.

From left to right: Carrie Brownstein, Janet Weiss, Corin Tucker

That same approach to providing new stimulus grew in the songwriting by Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, too. Corin and Carrie’s vocal harmonies and guitar lines weave in and out constantly throughout the album. While you’d never confuse Corin’s powerful, intense vibrato for Carrie’s clean, more traditionally punk vocal, songs like “Words and Guitar” and “Heart Factory” trade lead and counterpoint often enough that (similar to some great Beatles songs) you can’t easily assign “this is a Corin song, this is a Carrie song.” The intense distortion on the guitars, set in alternative tunings, and Corin’s vocal power help mask some of the more delicate pop origins of some of their techniques.

The Beatles comparisons don’t stop with the harmonies. “One More Hour” tells the story of Carrie and Corin’s breakup, a gay Rumours descendant people don’t talk about enough. Coming up together as young twenty-somethings, Sleater-Kinney burned hot for a little over a decade before Carrie and Corin hung up the band to heal emotionally and spend time on other projects. Carrie had launched Portlandia by the time No Cities to Love came out. Writing The Center Won’t Hold, Carrie and Corin informed Janet that she was no longer an equal creative member of the band. While she’s been nothing but polite in public, she told them to fuck off. Their new music sounds like music by forty somethings – the tempo is slower, the riffs are synthier, there are ballads. They’re too old to write greatest-of-all-time songs about getting head. Corin’s a mom now, so “Little Babies” got taken off the setlist.

I’ve seen Sleater-Kinney twice in concert, both times since Weiss departed. For whatever reason, their new drummer, Angie Boylan, has never quite ascended to full membership in Sleater-Kinney. Sleater-Kinney is the first band I feel like I’ve gotten into right as they got too old to be the band in people’s brains. The first of those shows was rejected by the largely geriatric season ticket holders at the Ryman in Nashville – Carrie invited everyone to the front of the auditorium because it got lonely up there. But they seem to have found their new audience now, their show at The Sylvee a riot of people just as into the music from The Center Won’t Hold and Little Rope as they were “Dig Me Out” and “One More Hour.” I’ll probably keep seeing Sleater-Kinney until they’re too old to keep touring. I love this band a lot. 

KEY TRACKS: “Dig Me Out,” “One More Hour,” “Words and Guitar”
CATALOG CHOICE: The Hot Rock, No Cities to Love
NEXT STOP: Germfree Adolescence, X-Ray Spex
AFTER THAT: Rat Saw God, Wednesday