Sunday, March 30
The first two disks on the four disk Bob Marley compilation, Songs of Freedom, might just be the best music you'll ever hear--anywhere. The first two disks contains the bulk of Marley and the Wailers' pre-Island material, including their phenomenal work with the great Lee "Scratch" Perry (work that is widely regarded as the finest music of Marley's career), plus the central tunes on the Wailers' first two Island releases, Catch a Fire and Burnin', and a smattering of other tunes from that era. These tracks include some scorchers like early (and better) versions of classic Marley songs like "Stir it Up," "One Love/People Get Ready," and "Small Axe," along with some wonderful ska tracks (especially "One Cup of Coffee"), some rare gems like "High Tide or Low" (from the Catch a Fire sessions; unreleased on the original Island disk), and some flat-out cool songs like "Bend Down Low" and "Nice Time."
After Burnin' was released (actually, even before it was released), Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh left the band, and Marley replaced their voices with the I-Threes (which included Rita Marley). From that point forward, Marley would become not only a huge superstar but, really, an icon of mythic proportions. Even today, Marley is revered unlike almost any other musician (with the possible exception of John Lennon and Elvis).
Unfortunately, the music that made Marley a superstar--the bulk of the tracks on disks 3 and 4 of the set--is fairly pedestrian. It's not BAD music; it's just sounds a little too dated today than his earlier work. Why is this? Well, after Bunny & Peter left the band, Marley focused on being a superstar and less on being an innovator or even a musician. Sure, the songs on his later albums are good--Exodus has been hailed as one of the great works of all time--but the music itself isn't quite as crucial as the music he made earlier in his career.
I don't blame Marley for choosing fame and myths over musical experimentation. Heck, it's not like he truly sold out in the way most rock stars sell out. Far from it: he realized early on that his role in life was to be a symbol of power, respect, and reverence for black people everywhere (Rastafarians especially). He realized that his fame went beyond his music. I can't blame him for realizing the obvious and acting on it.
Still, most people know and love Marley's music best because of the songs on disks three and four of Songs of Freedom. Included are the songs that everyone knows by heart: the Exodus version of "One Love," "Jammin'," "Three Little Birds," "Exodus," "Waiting in Vain," and "Redemption Song." Yes, those are all wonderful songs, and they keep my attention. But there are a lot of songs on those two disks that don't really keep my attention--songs like "Zimbabwe," "Ride Natty Ride," "Rastaman Live Up," and so on. They aren't bad songs, but they sound too much like overproduced late 70s tracks to really hold my interest today. On the contrary, songs from 60s like "I'm Still Waiting," while lacking the political lyrics, nevertheless SOUNDS timeless, as if it could have been written in the 20s, 50s, or even 90s. It's that timeless quality that really makes Marley's early music so incredible, and so essential. The latter music lacked that timelessness, though, by that point, it was Marley who was timeless, not his music.
So half of Songs of Freedom is essential; the other half is interesting. It's still worth the US$60, simply because you'll never hear better music than those first two disks--and that includes The Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Elvis, Prince, Michael Jackson, They Might Be Giants, Vivaldi, Sinatra, Eminem, or even Aboo!
After Burnin' was released (actually, even before it was released), Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh left the band, and Marley replaced their voices with the I-Threes (which included Rita Marley). From that point forward, Marley would become not only a huge superstar but, really, an icon of mythic proportions. Even today, Marley is revered unlike almost any other musician (with the possible exception of John Lennon and Elvis).
Unfortunately, the music that made Marley a superstar--the bulk of the tracks on disks 3 and 4 of the set--is fairly pedestrian. It's not BAD music; it's just sounds a little too dated today than his earlier work. Why is this? Well, after Bunny & Peter left the band, Marley focused on being a superstar and less on being an innovator or even a musician. Sure, the songs on his later albums are good--Exodus has been hailed as one of the great works of all time--but the music itself isn't quite as crucial as the music he made earlier in his career.
I don't blame Marley for choosing fame and myths over musical experimentation. Heck, it's not like he truly sold out in the way most rock stars sell out. Far from it: he realized early on that his role in life was to be a symbol of power, respect, and reverence for black people everywhere (Rastafarians especially). He realized that his fame went beyond his music. I can't blame him for realizing the obvious and acting on it.
Still, most people know and love Marley's music best because of the songs on disks three and four of Songs of Freedom. Included are the songs that everyone knows by heart: the Exodus version of "One Love," "Jammin'," "Three Little Birds," "Exodus," "Waiting in Vain," and "Redemption Song." Yes, those are all wonderful songs, and they keep my attention. But there are a lot of songs on those two disks that don't really keep my attention--songs like "Zimbabwe," "Ride Natty Ride," "Rastaman Live Up," and so on. They aren't bad songs, but they sound too much like overproduced late 70s tracks to really hold my interest today. On the contrary, songs from 60s like "I'm Still Waiting," while lacking the political lyrics, nevertheless SOUNDS timeless, as if it could have been written in the 20s, 50s, or even 90s. It's that timeless quality that really makes Marley's early music so incredible, and so essential. The latter music lacked that timelessness, though, by that point, it was Marley who was timeless, not his music.
So half of Songs of Freedom is essential; the other half is interesting. It's still worth the US$60, simply because you'll never hear better music than those first two disks--and that includes The Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Elvis, Prince, Michael Jackson, They Might Be Giants, Vivaldi, Sinatra, Eminem, or even Aboo!
Wednesday, March 26
The war's started, but the protests continue. In most cases, for most wars, that would be appropriate. Not this time, I think. I think the protests aren't helping much. In part, this is due to the simple fact that protesters are simply annoying--or appear annoying when portrayed on TV. They scream, they yell, they mace cops--they do everything other than represent "peace." These antics cause those who would otherwise be supportive of the protester's position to second-guess that stance and assume that the protesters are against the troops, not the war. Of couse, that's silly--protesters are as supportive of the soldiers as anyone else (heck, more so: they don't want any of them to be killed). But false dichotomies like this, when screamed loudly enough by talk radio idiots, tend to beat out logic every time, so there you go.
However, the REAL reason protests aren't helping much is that the media is doing the protester's job for them. This whole thing about embedding troops is fascinating, I've got to admit, and it's brought home the real horror of this war in such a way that even those in favor of the war are second-guessing the logic behind getting soldiers killed for such a specious outcome.
This coverage shows just how far video games have come. That sounds weird, but hear me out. In the first Gulf War, the coverage was all staged by the military--they had press briefings and they showed videotapes of bombs expertly hitting their targets (complete with the crosshairs to prove the target was hit). At the time, lots of people talked about how this coverage made the war look just like a video game. Of course, the video games they were thinking about were the old arcade games like Asteroids, Missile Command, and the like: games that were extremely two-dimensional.
Have you seen the ads for the latest batch of simulated war games? Have you seen the D-Day one, where troops Saving Private Ryan their way off the boats in Normandy and battle Nazis and watch their best friends get shot in the face? Well, it's those kinds of games that are being portrayed now on TV, only this time it's real life. The gruesomeness of video games, the thing that all the parents groups bitch about, is now a 24-hour reality show, presented live on TV.
Trust me, in the next few weeks, someone will get shot on live TV and the cameras will be there to record every single moment of the pain and suffering--probably complete with a final farewell for the family, who might or might not be tuned in to CNN at the time.
With war coverage like that, who needs a protest?
However, the REAL reason protests aren't helping much is that the media is doing the protester's job for them. This whole thing about embedding troops is fascinating, I've got to admit, and it's brought home the real horror of this war in such a way that even those in favor of the war are second-guessing the logic behind getting soldiers killed for such a specious outcome.
This coverage shows just how far video games have come. That sounds weird, but hear me out. In the first Gulf War, the coverage was all staged by the military--they had press briefings and they showed videotapes of bombs expertly hitting their targets (complete with the crosshairs to prove the target was hit). At the time, lots of people talked about how this coverage made the war look just like a video game. Of course, the video games they were thinking about were the old arcade games like Asteroids, Missile Command, and the like: games that were extremely two-dimensional.
Have you seen the ads for the latest batch of simulated war games? Have you seen the D-Day one, where troops Saving Private Ryan their way off the boats in Normandy and battle Nazis and watch their best friends get shot in the face? Well, it's those kinds of games that are being portrayed now on TV, only this time it's real life. The gruesomeness of video games, the thing that all the parents groups bitch about, is now a 24-hour reality show, presented live on TV.
Trust me, in the next few weeks, someone will get shot on live TV and the cameras will be there to record every single moment of the pain and suffering--probably complete with a final farewell for the family, who might or might not be tuned in to CNN at the time.
With war coverage like that, who needs a protest?
Sunday, March 9
Here's a review of Taylor Deupree and Kenneth Kirschner's Post_piano album for SubRosa Records. I don't think it belongs in the main area of this site, since I spend most of the review commenting on everything other than the music. However, I think it's worth posting anyways. Enjoy!
Post_piano is three unique yet interconnected works in one. The first is a simple, one-second, 22 kHz sample of a single strike of a piano key. The second is musician Kenneth Kirschner's abstract, piano compositions created entirely out of that initial sample. The third is electronic artist Taylor Deupree's reworking of Kirschner's compositions.
The music is very good—interesting, engaging, even beautiful. Kirschner's compositions are lilting, effervescent creations that seem lifted straight out of some of the creepier scenes in Stanley Kubrick movies. Meanwhile, Deupree does a wonderful job taking these deeply simple yet deeply weird compositions and examining them down to their component parts before he, then, crafts his own distorted, fragmented reworking out of the debris.
The music, however, is only part of the story. The other part is the fact that each of the three elements is encoded onto the CD differently: the piano sample in AIFF, the Kirschner compositions in mp3, and the Deupree reworkings in Red Book.
As Kirschner's liner notes suggest, the hope for this release is that you will listen to Deupree's tracks, get inspired, and then take Kirschner's original sample and his piano compositions and create something of your own out of them. In other words, they (or, more specifically, Kirschner) offers this work up to the world, in the hopes that the world will not only listen but react and reimagine this work in a new form. This simple offering is an indication of how digital technology is changing the rules for music production. Yes, Kirschner's work is avant-garde, and avant-garde music has always had a political component to it. In this case, the political act is to give away music in order to encourage collaboration and to spread imagination.
Of course, Kirschner isn't giving this CD away (though you can download mp3 tracks on Kirschner's web site). He is, however, authorizing free use of his music, and that's a development that's starting to gain ground among the more political elements of the music industry. The Electronic Frontier Foundation have set forward tenets for what they call "Open Audio License," which, as they note, " allows artists to grant the public permission to copy, distribute, adapt, and publicly perform their works royalty-free as long as credit is given to the creator as the Original Author." Software programs like Cubase and Logic have built-in file-sharing programs that allow artists to collaborate on compositions, and as these programs (and others, including free ones) become more pervasive, open licensing will begin to play a key role in the music industry.
Post_piano is a hybrid album. It offers a choice: to listen or to listen and react. It suggests a change in the way music will eventually be created, but putting that change within the context of a listening album (one that I had to buy) suggests that this digital transformation of how musicians work with each other will spill out to non-musicians, too. After all, music inspires us in innumerable ways: to think, to learn, to dance, to talk, to fuck, to bathe, and, yes, to create more music. Because technology is getting to the point where just about anyone with the inclination can create professional-quality music with very little training, I can imagine a time not too long from now when remixing other people's songs is as common as mix tapes are today. Of course, I can also imagine a time when owning an mp3 is a criminal offense. I guess which future wins out will depend in part upon whether works like Post_piano aren't simply listened to but acted upon.
And what, you might ask, am I going to do with my AIFF sample? Why, throw it into a Reaktor instrument, dick around, and see what happens, of course. Isn't that what music's all about?
Post_piano is three unique yet interconnected works in one. The first is a simple, one-second, 22 kHz sample of a single strike of a piano key. The second is musician Kenneth Kirschner's abstract, piano compositions created entirely out of that initial sample. The third is electronic artist Taylor Deupree's reworking of Kirschner's compositions.
The music is very good—interesting, engaging, even beautiful. Kirschner's compositions are lilting, effervescent creations that seem lifted straight out of some of the creepier scenes in Stanley Kubrick movies. Meanwhile, Deupree does a wonderful job taking these deeply simple yet deeply weird compositions and examining them down to their component parts before he, then, crafts his own distorted, fragmented reworking out of the debris.
The music, however, is only part of the story. The other part is the fact that each of the three elements is encoded onto the CD differently: the piano sample in AIFF, the Kirschner compositions in mp3, and the Deupree reworkings in Red Book.
As Kirschner's liner notes suggest, the hope for this release is that you will listen to Deupree's tracks, get inspired, and then take Kirschner's original sample and his piano compositions and create something of your own out of them. In other words, they (or, more specifically, Kirschner) offers this work up to the world, in the hopes that the world will not only listen but react and reimagine this work in a new form. This simple offering is an indication of how digital technology is changing the rules for music production. Yes, Kirschner's work is avant-garde, and avant-garde music has always had a political component to it. In this case, the political act is to give away music in order to encourage collaboration and to spread imagination.
Of course, Kirschner isn't giving this CD away (though you can download mp3 tracks on Kirschner's web site). He is, however, authorizing free use of his music, and that's a development that's starting to gain ground among the more political elements of the music industry. The Electronic Frontier Foundation have set forward tenets for what they call "Open Audio License," which, as they note, " allows artists to grant the public permission to copy, distribute, adapt, and publicly perform their works royalty-free as long as credit is given to the creator as the Original Author." Software programs like Cubase and Logic have built-in file-sharing programs that allow artists to collaborate on compositions, and as these programs (and others, including free ones) become more pervasive, open licensing will begin to play a key role in the music industry.
Post_piano is a hybrid album. It offers a choice: to listen or to listen and react. It suggests a change in the way music will eventually be created, but putting that change within the context of a listening album (one that I had to buy) suggests that this digital transformation of how musicians work with each other will spill out to non-musicians, too. After all, music inspires us in innumerable ways: to think, to learn, to dance, to talk, to fuck, to bathe, and, yes, to create more music. Because technology is getting to the point where just about anyone with the inclination can create professional-quality music with very little training, I can imagine a time not too long from now when remixing other people's songs is as common as mix tapes are today. Of course, I can also imagine a time when owning an mp3 is a criminal offense. I guess which future wins out will depend in part upon whether works like Post_piano aren't simply listened to but acted upon.
And what, you might ask, am I going to do with my AIFF sample? Why, throw it into a Reaktor instrument, dick around, and see what happens, of course. Isn't that what music's all about?
Sunday, March 2
It seems like a good time for a couple of Top Ten lists. I always liked those lists as a kid, as they always gave me good ideas for movies or books or (especially) albums. I really don't like the idea of writing top ten lists for a single year, however, as well over half the music I listen to in a given year wasn't released in that year and I can't count it (hence, it's not an accurate list of my actual listening interests). Ah, but favorites of all time? Well, I can just about throw a list like that together. Here's two--one for albums, one for movies.
Ten Favorite Albums
[Note: I'm numbering these, though this order probably changes depending upon what I'm listening to. And note I said "favorite," not best. This is the music I personally favor over all other music.]
1. Lee "Scratch" Perry, Arkology
2. The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations
3. Pan Sonic, Aaltopiiri
4. Random Inc., Jerusalem: Tales from Outside the Framework of Orthodoxy
5. Various Artists, Inflation (*0 0.000 Remix)
6. The Congos, Heart of the Congos
7. Richard and Linda Thompson, Shoot out the Lights
8. Hiyao Miyazaki & Azumi Inuome, My Neighbor Totoro (soundtrack)
9. Various Artists, Clicks_+_Cuts
10. Sogar, Apikal Blend, Basal, and Stengel
Comments: I put all three Sogar albums at #10 because I couldn't pick one. So kill me. I picked The Congos album because it IS one of the great albums of all time, but I'm starting to listen less to it and more to other reggae/dub works like The Abyssinians Satta Massagana, Augustus Pablo's East of the River Nile, King Tubby's many wonderful disks like Dub Gone Crazy, Freedom Sounds in Dub, and the Tubby/Pablo collaboration King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown. Oh, and the Clicks_+_Cuts disk is still the best compilation of its kind, though there have been a few new releases--especially Lowercase Sound 2002--that might eventually supplant it. What else? Yes, the Totoro. Well, have you ever heard that soundtrack? Do you know how rare it is to come across music that is happy without being sentimental, joyous without banality? This soundtrack is simply a gem (though the title song is a bit scary, I'll give you that).
Ten Favorite Movies
[Note: see note to previous list.]
1. Stalker (Tarkovsky)
2. Come and See (Klimov)
3. The Decalogue (Kieslowski)
4. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Herzog)
5. Ikiru (Kurosawa)
6. My Neighbor Totoro (Miyazaki)
7. Monty Python's Life of Brian
8. Ivan the Terrible (I & II) (Eisenstein)
9. Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)
10. Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)
Comment: Two Tarkovsky, yes, but I'm not apologizing. His films move me unlike any other filmmaker's. His films are unique because they are entirely his own creation--no one else could have or would have made his films. He is the closest thing film has to an artist in the traditional sense, in that he is one of the few directors capable of making films (an act requiring the labor of hundreds or thousands of other people) entirely expressing his own thoughts, ideas, feelings, beliefs, and (yes) delusions. The other films? Well, these are all incredible films that continue to move me--intellectually, emotionally, aesthetically--each time I watch them. I must have watched Life of Brian at least 50 times, but it's still as fresh today as it was that first time (when I was about 11). The only one of these films that isn't available on DVD is Ikiru, which is Kurosawa's best film hands-down. I don't care how many people tell me that The Seven Samuari is better; they're wrong. It's easy to make a samuari film about courage, but it's almost impossible to make a film about a courageous bureaucrat. That's Ikiru. I could easily put every single Miyazaki film on this list--even Whisper of the Heart--but I picked my favorite of his, though you should be aware that Disney is finally releasing all of Miyazaki's films on DVD this year, so if you haven't seen Kiki's Delivery Service, Laputa (Castle in the Sky), Nausicaa, or Spirited Away, you'll have your chance. Finally, the least well known film on this list is Klimov's Come and See, but it is the finest film about World War II I have ever seen. It is an unmerciful look at the atrocities of the German invasion of Byelorussia through the eyes of a young boy--a boy who ages about 50 years in the course of the film's 2.5 hours. If you have any way of getting your hands on a copy of that film, I urge you to do so. Watching it will be an experience you'll remember forever.
Ten Favorite Albums
[Note: I'm numbering these, though this order probably changes depending upon what I'm listening to. And note I said "favorite," not best. This is the music I personally favor over all other music.]
1. Lee "Scratch" Perry, Arkology
2. The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations
3. Pan Sonic, Aaltopiiri
4. Random Inc., Jerusalem: Tales from Outside the Framework of Orthodoxy
5. Various Artists, Inflation (*0 0.000 Remix)
6. The Congos, Heart of the Congos
7. Richard and Linda Thompson, Shoot out the Lights
8. Hiyao Miyazaki & Azumi Inuome, My Neighbor Totoro (soundtrack)
9. Various Artists, Clicks_+_Cuts
10. Sogar, Apikal Blend, Basal, and Stengel
Comments: I put all three Sogar albums at #10 because I couldn't pick one. So kill me. I picked The Congos album because it IS one of the great albums of all time, but I'm starting to listen less to it and more to other reggae/dub works like The Abyssinians Satta Massagana, Augustus Pablo's East of the River Nile, King Tubby's many wonderful disks like Dub Gone Crazy, Freedom Sounds in Dub, and the Tubby/Pablo collaboration King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown. Oh, and the Clicks_+_Cuts disk is still the best compilation of its kind, though there have been a few new releases--especially Lowercase Sound 2002--that might eventually supplant it. What else? Yes, the Totoro. Well, have you ever heard that soundtrack? Do you know how rare it is to come across music that is happy without being sentimental, joyous without banality? This soundtrack is simply a gem (though the title song is a bit scary, I'll give you that).
Ten Favorite Movies
[Note: see note to previous list.]
1. Stalker (Tarkovsky)
2. Come and See (Klimov)
3. The Decalogue (Kieslowski)
4. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Herzog)
5. Ikiru (Kurosawa)
6. My Neighbor Totoro (Miyazaki)
7. Monty Python's Life of Brian
8. Ivan the Terrible (I & II) (Eisenstein)
9. Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)
10. Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)
Comment: Two Tarkovsky, yes, but I'm not apologizing. His films move me unlike any other filmmaker's. His films are unique because they are entirely his own creation--no one else could have or would have made his films. He is the closest thing film has to an artist in the traditional sense, in that he is one of the few directors capable of making films (an act requiring the labor of hundreds or thousands of other people) entirely expressing his own thoughts, ideas, feelings, beliefs, and (yes) delusions. The other films? Well, these are all incredible films that continue to move me--intellectually, emotionally, aesthetically--each time I watch them. I must have watched Life of Brian at least 50 times, but it's still as fresh today as it was that first time (when I was about 11). The only one of these films that isn't available on DVD is Ikiru, which is Kurosawa's best film hands-down. I don't care how many people tell me that The Seven Samuari is better; they're wrong. It's easy to make a samuari film about courage, but it's almost impossible to make a film about a courageous bureaucrat. That's Ikiru. I could easily put every single Miyazaki film on this list--even Whisper of the Heart--but I picked my favorite of his, though you should be aware that Disney is finally releasing all of Miyazaki's films on DVD this year, so if you haven't seen Kiki's Delivery Service, Laputa (Castle in the Sky), Nausicaa, or Spirited Away, you'll have your chance. Finally, the least well known film on this list is Klimov's Come and See, but it is the finest film about World War II I have ever seen. It is an unmerciful look at the atrocities of the German invasion of Byelorussia through the eyes of a young boy--a boy who ages about 50 years in the course of the film's 2.5 hours. If you have any way of getting your hands on a copy of that film, I urge you to do so. Watching it will be an experience you'll remember forever.
