Frank & Earthy blog
Today, David Byrne formally announced Here Lies Love, his musical about Imelda Marcos. It will debut in Australia next month. As the page says, this production is a “first sketch” of a “performance [that] will be set in clubs, with non-stop music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim.”
Oh word? Word.
Dylan rehearses new album in Poughkeepsie.
We take our good news where we can get it.
I’m in the minority of my friends in that I think that Times Square is actually quite nifty. It’s nicer empty, of course, late at night. When I started taking cell photos, Times Square was at the back of my mind. After discovering how cool bright light looks crammed into 1.3 megapixels, I figured Times Square would be a cinch.
I made my first stab last week, and I was utterly, entirely wrong. Making light distort requires that the lens be reallllly close to the source. Shots of buildings tend to look massively insubstantial on a cell cam. The scale of Times Square is gigantic, and its beauty is as much about its residual glow than the specifics of any one display. The light is in waves, visible only when they crash into each other or lap at the sides of buildings or windows. Photographing Times Square, I think, is like painting pictures of the ocean.
The first batch I took was uniformly bad, save one shot (the last below). The second batch was slightly better (I think) though still doesn’t capture it entirely. More next time I have an excuse to go to Times Square…
“Toc” – Tom Zé
from Estudando O Samba (1976)
released by WEA International as twofer with Correio da Estação do Brás (1978) as Serie Dois Momentos, vol. 15 (2000) (buy)
(file expires on February 13th)
Welcome to the working week. Here’s a Monday morning freak-out to clear your head before you get back to sticking it to your local incarnation of the Man. Though Tom Zé is the Brazilian equivalent of David Byrne or Beck, “Toc” — from 1976’s Estudando O Samba — finds him on the more experimental end of his spectrum. Practically a proto-minimalist exercise (the whole song rests on one looping guitar part), nearly every single second is tailor-made for sampling. That is, one could grab just about any chunk and build a song around it, from the lovely rhythmic grid that makes up the first minute to the James Barry-like horn fills that glide in to the torrent of chattering voices and the clangs of typewriters to the whirs of electric drills (samples in 1976?)
I’m still learning my way around the Zé catalogue, but (at the moment) “Toc” seems like a good key to understanding it, containing a representative palette of Zé’s tricks from which to make sense of everything else. The whole track is utterly groovy, too, and — well — Brazilian. He’ll supposedly be touring later this year, behind his new album Estudando O Pagode (which is pretty rad). Hope he does.
Brother Andy just posted the newest installment of the Frow Show. Thanks, Andy!
Listen here.
1. “Pot Ads” – Eugene Mirman (from The Absurd Nightclub Comedy of Eugene Mirman)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Going to Tennessee” – The Mountain Goats (from Protein Source of the Future… Now!)
4. “Blue Bayou” – Roy Orbison (single)
5. “Private Idaho” – The B-52s (from Wild Planet)
6. “Bubble Gum Independence” – various (from Sublime Frequencies’ Radio Phnom Penh)
7. “Have A Banana!” – The Beatles (from Live at the BBC)
8. “A Hard Day’s Night” – The Beatles (from A Hard Day’s Night)
9. “Happy Colored Marbles” – Ween (from Quebec)
10. “ABC” – Jackson 5 (single)
11. “I’m a Believer” – Robert Wyatt (from Solar Flares Burn For You)
12. “Let’s Spend the Night Together” – Jerry Garcia (from Compliments of…)
13. “How Much I’ve Lied” – Yo La Tengo (from Little Honda EP)
14. “Snail Shell” – They Might Be Giants (from John Henry)
15. “Walking With the Beggar Boys” – Elf Power (from Walking With the Beggar Boys)
16. “Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed” – Silver Jews (from Tanglewood Numbers)
17. “Hard Times” – Bob Dylan (from Good As I Been To You)
18. “Trampin'” – Patti Smith (from Trampin’)
I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a sports guy. But I love me some Chuck Klosterman. He’s blogging from the Super Bowl all week for ESPN.com, and it’s glorious stuff. He began on Sunday night. Here is his most recent posting.
Jann Wenner is (possibly) opening a Rolling Stone-themed casino in Las Vegas. “Will there be a ‘New Dylan Album’ slot machine,” Gabriel Sherman wonders, “where every pull comes up five stars?”
Hunter Thompson would be rolling over in his grave if he hadn’t been shot out of a fucking cannon.
The Village Voice posted the results of their annual Pazz and Jop poll. My ballot is here. I made the comments section this year, however blandly, under the “Earphone Heads” category.
Here are the full comments I submitted with my ballot, which I am going to indent because I think it looks nifty:
Since one can only take small planes off the island, I opted to take the ferry back. It was choppy as fuck, and I tried to listen to my iPod and watch the horizon. The boat was a jungle of sounds, all leaking queasily through my headphones: deep rumbling engines, calypso-tinged Christmas muzak piped through the cabin’s tinny speakers, chattering families, and emerald Caribbean waters slapping against the window.
Halfway across, I noticed that one noise — beats — had grown more distinct than the others. I turned, and studied the skinny island kid on the bench seat next to me. He scrolled through ringtones and detonated them one after another, a hit parade of instantly gratifying hooks. He noticed me watching and I took my headphones off.
“You like hip-hop?” he asked, studying me back. “Probably not, huh?”
“Sure,” I said. “I like all kinds of stuff. Who do you like?”
“Mike Jones,” he replied.
“Who?” I asked.
“Mike Jones,” he repeated, unimpressed.
“Who?”
“Mike Joooooones,” he sang and laughed. “You like that shit?”
“Meh,” I shrugged. “I like the screwed and chopped stuff more than his regular stuff.”
“That shit’s weird,” the kid declared.
“Yep,” I nodded happily, and somehow found myself in another conversation about Houston hip-hop, some quarter way across the hemisphere from Brooklyn’s indie-dork enclaves (let alone Houston itself).
He went back to his ringtones, 50 Cent thugging out in the background picture on his cell, as the ferry pulled into the harbor.
***
Despite making for retarded hard copy, Mike Jones’ shtick made for a hell of a meme: news vessel as pop hit, doesn’t even matter what the song is (hell, sing it in every song), and doesn’t even matter if that news is merely the arrival of Jones himself.
R. Kelly did it, too, in his boggling serialization “Trapped in the Closet.” Then there are the mash-ups, like the Notorious K.O.’s “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People.” Give or take the Texas robo-trippers — who are truly psychedelic and have added a cool new tool to the pop kit — it’s all just the latest iteration of novelty, except these novelties have concepts that somehow play with the technology of the moment, and that’s sorta nifty. Sorta.
“It disappeared up its own fundamental aperture,” Tom Wolfe snarked in The Painted Word, his 1975 treatise on contemporary art, “and came out the other side Art Theory! … a vision ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.”
Lord knows, Mike Jones (who?) ain’t, um, a Universal Soul, but his meme-pop is the very definition of ineffable, the place where music — that self-contained world of melodies and performances — takes steps towards a broader universe of breathing things.
And, of course, if Jones’ endlessly circulating mp3s are steps, then the ringtones are crowbarred intrusions — sudden infections that come unannounced from somebody’s pocket, and disappear just as suddenly. And if you don’t have ’em on your phone, you can’t play ’em again.
Which is exactly why ringtones are music and not just sound: if done right, you want to hear them again. I’ve seen it on the subway, too: kids clicking through ringtones because it makes them happy.
When The Residents recorded their Commercial Album in 1980, cramming 40 60-second “pop” songs into 40 minutes (with instructions to play each thrice), they were operating on the assumption that the entirety of a pop song could be condensed into a minute. As Mike Jones has proved, they were off by about 50 seconds.
While ineffable, it’s hard to think of Jones’ hook as particularly transcendent in and of itself. But it points towards the new — or, more accurately, the old. Like every new medium, it will be used to reassess and repackage the past.
As of this writing, a half-dozen old tracks — call them proto-meme-pop — are scattered across Billboard’s top 50 Hot Ringtones chart: “Jingle Bells,” “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies,” “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” the “Super Mario Brothers” theme, the “Pink Panther” theme, and — blessed art thou, oh Lord, our “Bob” — “Sweet Home Alabama.” Like all truly classic folk works, each can be boiled down to one central idea that pretty much anybody reading this can almost surely remember.
If the advent of mp3s returned us to the New Golden Age of the Single, then ringtones may well introduce an even more primitive age, one that never really existed outside the head of people who thought ’70s rock was a good idea: the Age of the Riff, where the popcraft of Skynyrd will meet the genius Japanese techno-artisans who code the sound of chirping crickets.
And what a challenge! Who can create something magnificently short? Who will be the first to cram meaning into a 10 second statement? It’ll be like building ships in bottles, or carving micro-sculptures in the heads of needles. When will the ringtone mash-ups start to drop? Will “Smells Like Teen Spirit” come ricocheting rudely up the ringtone charts during 2006’s inevitable grunge revival? Will it still rock? Can it?
Features:
Forty Years Upon Our Heads: A Recent Rap with Jerry Garcia on Perfect Sound Forever (an interview from late last year about the Grateful Dead, life after death, the Deadheads, and copyright, among other digressions)
Album reviews:
Feels – Animal Collective, published in Paste #19
Lookaftering – Vashti Bunyan, published in Paste #19
Omnibus – Tarkio, published in January/February Hear/Say
Slow Rewind – Sam Champion, published in Paste #19
Nice Talking to Me – the Spin Doctors, published in Paste #19
Thumbsucker Original Score – Tim DeLaughter and the Polyphonic Spree, published in December Hear/Say
self-titled – No Use For Humans
Live reviews:
Iron and Wine/Calexico at Webster Hall, 5 December 2005
Come On Falcon/Bustle In Your Hedgerow/Danjaboots at the Tribeca Rocking Club, 7 December 2005
Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s, 27 December 2005
Freaks Ball (Metzgerville and Coxygen) at Coda, 21 January 2006
Columns and misc.:
BRAIN TUBA: How I Spent My Christmas Break
Only in print:
o February/March Relix (Bob Weir cover): album reviews of Derek Trucks Band, Robert Fripp, Wilco, and Robert Wyatt; book reviews of Grievous Angel: An Intimate Biography of Gram Parsons and The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu
o December Hear/Say: albums reviews of Lightning Bolt and the Grateful Dead
A helpful way to observe the State of the Union was to pretend that I was just watching the tail end of a shitty (and vaguely hilarious) prequel to the really dope trilogy where the good guys save the galaxy. I fully expect that the loose ends will be tied up shortly: hands and heads lopped off, faces melted, children born and exiled to desert planets, etc..
