Every Sunday until I get bored of it, writenoise will be taking a look back at the roots of hip-hop through some of its most influential artists. This Sunday, DJ Kool Herc.
Even though it’s a cultural movement barely thirty years old, it’s difficult to identify a precise moment in history in which what we might definitively call ‘hip-hop’ was born. It was, like Rock’n’Roll before it, the product of varied cultural, historical and sociological influences, whose constituent parts are sometimes traceable, but whose final synthesis is necessarily shrouded in mystery.
Birthed in the hearts and heads of people who existed on society’s fringes, it had its immediate origins in everything from a Greek kid’s bored tagging of his name on New York City subway trains to the Godfather of Soul’s choice in drummers to the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway.
But if any one man can be termed the “father of hip hop”, that man would almost certainly be Clive Campbell, AKA DJ Kool Herc. Born in Jamaica in 1955, Campbell moved to the South Bronx in 1967, where he began deejaying at neighborhood parties. In his sets, Herc incorporated two major influences from the land of his birth — the enormous sound systems then prevalent in Jamaican dancehalls (Herc later called his the “Herculoids” — to get an idea of their size check out the YouTube clip below) and “toasting” an oral tradition with its roots in Africa that involved the DJ rhythmically chanting or boasting over the music — it, along with other African-American rhyming/singing customs [PDF], laid the groundwork for what would become Rap.
Herc’s own contribution to the genre was born out of a simple desire to keep crowds at his DJ shows moving: discovering that the “break” — essentially the part in a song where the music drops out and only the drums remain — was what party goers liked best, he decided to extract that portion from the record and loop it over and over. Since he didn’t have access to electronic sampling, Herc accomplished this by setting up twin turntables, playing the break on one record until it ended, and then quickly switching, or “cutting”, over to play the duplicate break on the other record.
Again betraying a Jamaican influence (for more on the Jamaican connection to hip hop see this article) Herc would go on to play louder, more extravagant DJ sets in public places, like parks (the work became so much that he had to hand MC duties off to Coke La Rock, who is widely regarded as the first MC in the genre) introducing new people to the art form, including such godfathers as Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa, both of whom attempted to emulate his style, and both of whom would go on to much greater renown.
The reasons DJ Kool Herc never achieved success beyond his now well-recognized roles as both progenitor and originator are myriad, and range from the fact that he never recorded an album of his own, to being quickly overshadowed by the same artists he helped nurture, to his being unable to keep pace with advances in technology. (For his part, Herc blames a stabbing incident at one of his shows for his downfall).
Whatever the reasons, one thing remains certain: anyone writing a history of hip hop must begin with DJ Kool Herc.
If it’s Tuesday, it must be another Ryan Adams album. With four long-players out in the last two years alone, Adams records like other people breathe, and his twangy prolificacy would be almost comical if the bulk of his output weren’t so damned amazing.
The latest addition to that lengthy oeuvre, Easy Tiger (out June 27th) finds the hard working North Carolinian continuing the journey back to his alt-country roots, a path he’s traced since 2003’s disappointing Rock N Roll. Only this time, it sounds like Adams has jettisoned the “alt” portion of the equation completely, preferring to channel the classic 70’s country that he was weaned on. Listen to album opener Good Night Rose for instance, and you’ll swear you popped on an old George Jones or Conway Twitty record by mistake, so convincingly does Adams mimic their rhinestone bombast. He wouldn’t sound out of place as the musical guest on an episode of Carter-era Hee Haw here, and, well, I think that’s a compliment.
Second track (and first single) Two sounds more like the sort of thing Adams could do in his sleep — a drunk-loser heartbreak ballad that’s charming, but little else. From there we move past the straight ahead rock (and goofball lyrics) of the pretty awful Halloween Head to be immediately redeemed by the tender piano of Oh My God, Whatever, Etc., a song whose spare arrangement echoes Adam’s best pillow weepers, like When the Stars Go Blue and La Cienga Just Smiled.
Easy Tiger crests with Tears Of Gold and The Sun Also Sets, two glorious country songs that seem preoccupied with aging and death, and it’s third masterpiece, the folky Pearls on a String, which sounds like Ryan decided to abandon the dive bars to go pluck his banjo in a bluegrass band. (This is also (amazingly) a good thing.)
Although his detractors will continue to dismiss him as being everything from derivative to a self-indulgent brat (and indeed, everybody has a “I saw Ryan Adams live and he was a total asshole” story. Ask around) you can’t deny Easy Tiger its due. It may not quite be the return to form it’s being trumpeted as, but it’ll definitely keep the fans satisfied until the new box set comes out later this year. (And no, I’m not kidding.)
Electro-Shock Blues, written and recorded after the deaths of Eels front man Mark Oliver Everett’s mother and sister, is understandably a dark affair. That it’s also one of the most honest and uplifting meditations on mortality and loss ever committed to tape is a testament both to Everett’s largely unheralded gift for songwriting and his seemingly indestructible –- if decidedly world weary — optimism.
Had the heartbreaking chain of events that led to its inception never occurred, Electro-Shock Blues would still deserve placement alongside such classics of grief-obsessed, not-quite-concept albums as Magic & Loss, Automatic for the People, and Blood on the Tracks. That in fact much of the record is autobiographical adds another dimension to its poignancy — elevating it beyond mere depressive artifice and into transcendent art. When E voices his sister (lost to suicide) on Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor, with the line: “My name’s Elizabeth, my life is shit and piss”, it’s as haunting in its simplicity and directness as a million Top-40 tear jerkers put together, and nowhere near as trite.
That tendency towards maudlin platitudes, which death inspires in us like nothing else, is one that E dismisses completely on Blues. He’s not out to win sympathy or offer empty consolation here – he’s caustic, funny, self-effacing, confused — a mass of conflicting emotions that refuses to trivialize its loss with a neatly worded epithet; refuses to consign the intensity of its pain to the vapidity of a hallmark card. For an album that’s so sad, Electro-Shock Blues never gets caught feeling sorry for itself.
In fact, if you went through the first half of the disc without really paying attention to the words, you might think you’re hearing a different record than the one I’m describing. As bittersweet as these songs are, many of them inhabit sonic landscapes that are as sunny as anything Beck ever cooked up; from the lovely sampled strings of My Descent Into Madness to the infectious Casio bounce of Last Stop: This Town, misery never sounded so good. And elsewhere, E’s willingness to encase his subject matter in non-traditional song structures only serves to heighten their emotional resonance, as on Cancer for the Cure, which restlessly queases along like it aspires to be the soundtrack to a night spent vomiting into a hospital toilet.
It’s the final third of the album, however, that cements it as a classic. These last five songs represent something of a sea change in the musical and emotional narrative of Blues, tossing off the samples and drum loops that had been de rigueur up until now for the largely acoustic strum of tracks like Climbing to the Moon, perhaps the most affecting song Eels have ever recorded, and following through to album closer PS – You Rock My World, which manages to perfectly encapsulate both this woefully underrated band and Electro-Shock Blues itself: resigned to the inevitable sorrows of life, but not blind to its joys either.
On their debut EP, 2006’s Clouds of People, Delaware’s The Sky Drops didn’t so much blaze new ground as they comfortably inhabited familiar territory, forgoing innovation in favor of reassembling the building blocks of 90’s indie-rock into a distinct amalgam that sounded old and new at the same time.
It helps that they know what to salvage and what to ignore — great songs like Hang On marry the cascading guitars of My Bloody Valentine (fun side project: go find a review and count the lines until the word “shoegaze” appears) with the folky melodicism of Belle & Sebastian, while smartly omitting the excesses of both; namely the dissonance of the former and the tweeness of the latter.
Of course that isn’t to commit the heresy of suggesting that the Sky Drops, after a five song EP, are better than either of those bands, but if their taste remains this good, they certainly have the potential to be.
And now, writenoise presents: Blogging for Dummies – lesson # 32: How to write a description of Australia’s All India Radio.
First, let’s reach into the grab bag o’ music-blogging terminology shall we? The following oft-mentioned words will most certainly need to be included: Cinematic, Moody, Ethereal (”ethereal” is always a great word to use) Noir, Electronic.
Second, the following artists will need to be cited as influences: Portishead, Sunidhi Chowhan (it helps your credibility to invoke an artist no one has ever heard of) Radiohead, and, because they’re from Australia, Men At Work (and possibly A-ha).
Third: If possible, work in a Crocodile Dundee reference: you’ll appear culturally ignorant, and Americans admire that.
And lastly, we toss everything into a bag and shake. Let’s see what comes out:
Don’t let the name confuse you, bollywood lovers: All India Radio are not from India. They’re from Australia. The moniker was apparently birthed when (and I quote) “founding member Martin Kennedy heard a scratchy cassette recording of Indian street noises and decided it contained some of the most evocative sounds he had ever heard.” Ahem. Whatever you say, Marty.
Reading that, you might imagine that A.) Martin Kennedy is certifiable, and B.) AIR are some kind of weird mash up of Men at Work and Sunidhi Chowhan. You’d, thankfully, be wrong (at least on the second count).
No, All India Radio instead mine the cinematic noir of bands like Portishead, creating rolling vistas of electronic moodiness that occasionally soar above the fog into romantic explosions of ethereal beauty.
With songs like these, they may be the best thing to come out of the land down under since Crocodile Dundee (or possibly A-ha).
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There, see how simple that was? Join us next week when we teach you how to effectively fake hipness by pretending you don’t find Joanna Newsom’s voice grating.
For a band you’ve probably never heard of, Austin’s Shearwater have forged quite the pedigree: NPR (or, if we’re being nitpicky, some dude at NPR) dug Palo Santo, the group’s fourth album, enough to name it 2006’s record of the year.
And he wasn’t alone: Palo Santo has gotten rave reviews from such established arbiters of taste as the New York Times and the Washington Post, and from there on down to just about every Tom, Dick and Harry with functioning ears and a word processor at their disposal. And if all that doesn’t impress you, Jonathan Meiburg, the group’s now full-time vocalist, is an ornithologist for god’s sake. (Quick: name the last ornithologist you met. You can’t. No one can.) How’s that for rock’n’roll?
While that description alone is probably enough to send liberal suburban college professors everywhere into an orgasmic stupor, it may also fool you (”you” being the one 18 year old Lily Allen fan who reads this blog) into thinking that Shearwater are a band who, although they sound admirable enough, are better left to the aged ex-hipsters who spend their evenings doing crosswords while listening to This American Life.
Of course, you’d be wrong. Shearwater live up to the hype while simultaneously transcending it. The proof is on wax: Palo Santo really was one of the best records of 2006: A trembling, thunderous wall of sound that was sensitive without being tame, intelligent without being pretentious, and that managed to comfortably inhabit some literary folk-netherworld between dark americana and art rock experimentalism. (Trust me, this is really hard to do.)
Ever the tinkerers, Shearwater have taken advantage of their recent signing to Matador by re-recording Palo Santo (or 5 songs of it, at least) adding a second disc of demos, and bundling the whole thing in fancier, birdier packaging. While fans of the original may scoff, there’s little reason for concern: When Meiburg writes of track Red Sea, Black Sea “we aimed for a queasier sound on the next version, more agitated…” it’s obvious that the aim wasn’t just to polish Palo Santo, but instead expand it into even darker, weirder territory. And with Shearwater, weirder is definitely better.
Here’s Red Sea, Black Sea [MP3]
Shearwater are on tour now (with Xiu Xiu and Casiotone For the Painfully Alone on selected dates) so why don’t you drop that David Sedaris book long enough to go check em out, alright? Here’s where you’ll find them:
06-15 Denton, TX – Rubber Gloves
06-16 Austin, TX – Emo’s
06-18 Tucson, AZ – Plush
06-19 Los Angeles, CA – Echo
06-20 San Francisco, CA – Bottom of the Hill
06-22 Seattle, WA – Crocodile Cafe
06-28 Salt Lake City, UT – Kilby Court
06-30 Denver, CO – Larimer Lounge
07-01 Oklahoma City, OK – Conservatory
07-05 New York, NY – Castle Clinton (Free!)
07-06 Washington, DC – Rock and Roll Hotel
07-07 Philadelphia, PA – North Star Bar
07-08 Cambridge, MA – T.T. The Bear’s Place
Blonde Redhead have already released one of the most brilliant and evocative albums of the year with 23, but if you’re itching for more from the New York trio (and by more, I mean more talking) you’ll want to check out the 23 podcast over at the band’s website.
Now featuring interview clips with vocalist Kazu Makino and guitarist Amedeo Pace, the podcast is set to deliver videos inspired by the band’s music from artist/director Mike Mills, so keep an eye out.
Here’s the first episode, with Makino discussing how her need for simplicity led to the album’s bad-ass artwork. See? You’re learning stuff already.
If Hot Rod Circuit’s The Underground is a Dying Breed is a hard record to hate, it’s an even harder record to love. For thirty seven minutes this Connecticut (by way of Alabama) four piece efficiently churn out song after song of accomplished, straight outta 1997 guitar rock, all the while managing to engender neither contempt nor affection in the listener (think Al Gore, or Switzerland). Vanilla to the extreme, Underground plays like an indie version of the Weather Channel – a kind of background muzak for the Urban Outfitters set, if you will.
That’s a pity, because the raw material of something special is certainly on display here — it just never adds up to more than the sum of its parts. As great as the opening riffs are on tracks like Stateside and Battleship, for instance, those songs quickly devolve into yawn-inducing mall-punk knockoffs that would’ve been cliché back when Blink 182 ruled the world. Are they catchy? Yes. Are they also infinitely boring? Sadly, also yes.
Of course if you accept the fact that Andy Jackson and company aren’t going to spring any surprises on you (or if you simply maintain an irrational yearning for the days when Blink 182 did rule the world) you may find a lot of Underground not just listenable, but actually enjoyable. The formula may be dated, but when it works, as on songs like Holding on to Nothing, which somehow manages to wrap an extended treatise on despair into a two minute power-pop gem, it’s more than serviceable, it’s actually kinda good. If only it were good enough to be remembered five seconds after it ends, then it might be something more than merely the highlight in a string of underachieving songs.
And “good” is a word that pretty much sums up The Underground is a Dying Breed. It’s what my fifth grade English teacher used to call a “penny” word — overly simple, formless, harmless, lacking any weight or descriptive power — much like Underground itself. Ambivalence is not the emotion you want to experience when listening to rock music; at least awful records get your attention. This one just kind of strolls past you on the street, ever so slightly tips its hat, and then continues along its merry way.
Considering Hot Rod Circuit have been around for ten years, we probably shouldn’t expect any more major departures in style or sound, but the disc’s bonus track – an untitled alt-country toe-tapper – hints that the band might be capable of stretching out into other genres, and maybe even producing music that doesn’t sound like something we’ve all heard a million times over. Let’s hope so. Another record like The Underground is a Dying Breed will put me to sleep – even if it puts me to sleep with a smile on my face.
That the indie aesthetic — who-gives-a-fuck fashion, freaks and geeks aping rock stars, sonic adventurism, etc. — that once exploded out of that “other” city in the pacific northwest (and that once, remarkably, gripped a nation) is long, long dead is a forgone conclusion. Frat boys today couldn’t fathom the idea of bobbing their drunken noggins to a greasy outcast who wore dresses on stage; your little sister wouldn’t listen to PJ Harvey if you paid her — she’d rather watch American Idol and shake her milkshake to Paris Hilton (worst case scenario here).
Whether this trend toward blandness is just a natural turn in the suck cycle of popular music, or whether the digital segmentation of music lovers into specialized niches who don’t really bother to communicate with each other (or the outside world) has forever rendered the idea of a sweeping, culture changing musical movement obsolete, I gots no idea. I only know that the king, as it were, is dead.
Unless you happen to live in Portland, Oregon.
While no hipster worth his horn-rimmed glasses and tweed blazer would be caught dead in flannel, something of those old DIY ideals remain in the city’s vibrant music scene. And though it may lack the cohesive push (Portlanders aren’t very pushy) and media interest needed to spark a revolution, that scene is still a baking soda volcano of quietly erupting aural awesomeness mixed with a quirky, “yeah, you can sound like that” attitude that emboldens both the tone deaf and the backyard genius alike.
Here’s a little sampling of songs from Portlanders, or about Portland, or both. (Though to this day I still don’t know whether the Replacements are singing about Oregon or Maine).
The picks range from the obvious (Elliott Smith takes on the Rose Parade, the Decemberists stroll along the Bus Mall and into Old town) to the surprising (Hillstomp’s bluesy roots rock, Cool Nutz trying really hard to make a city with an aerial tram seem gritty) to the next big things (the Blow’s breezy pop, Copy’s snazzy arcade beats) to unarguably the best song ever written about Puddle town (and yes, I am aware of Ms. Lynn) Sleater Kinney’s Light Rail Coyote.
Extremely bangable Swedes Karolina Komstedt (Poprace) and Johan Angergård (Acid House Kings) formed Club 8 back in 1995 as an indie-pop outfit, before subsequently mellowing into an effervescent lounge act whose feathery vocals and elegant electronic flourishes place their current sound somewhere between Ivy and a less kitschy Nouvelle Vague.
You’d probably be forgiven for thinking this is all a little past its sell-by date, but new single Whatever You Want [MP3] (no word yet on when the album drops) should effectively squash your “I’m too cool for anything vaguely reminiscent of something that was mildly popular five years ago” hesitations. I’ll grant you that they’re not reinventing the wheel here, but like finding a forgotten frozen juice bar in the back of your freezer on a hot summer day, Whatever You Want is a welcome – if familiar – discovery.
Wales Reprazent!
That frozen juice bar analogy is a prime example of why I’ll never be plucked from the cacophonous mass of internet bloggers to take a comfy seat next to, say, David Fricke in the upper echelons of musical criticism. But that doesn’t mean I can’t live vicariously through the accomplishments of others.
Take the kids in Los Campesinos! (translation: “The Peasants!”) for instance. These seven Cardiff university students started a band so good it attracted the attention of all sorts of fancy-pants industry types, among them the almighty Broken Social Scene, whom the youngsters have already toured with.
Ace single You, Me, Dancing [MP3] definitely owes more than a little of it’s irresistable charm to those revered Canadians, with a riff that heavily echoes BSS’s Cause = Time, but the rest is all the Campesinos — boy/girl chanting, dancing, and an extended monolouge about the lighting in supermarkets, or …something. First Dylan Thomas, now Los Campesinos! — thank you Wales.
Explore further the low fi charm of Los Campesinos! at their Myspace page.
Art Brut Fe De Yoot, the most recent release from Infinite Livez (AKA Bethnal Green) is the kind of record you’d expect from an art student (green was trained at Chelsea College of Art and Design — see album cover) and if you all just collectively reached for your revolvers when you read that, I don’t blame you — but ease your finger off the trigger there, pilgrim — it’s not as bad as it first seems.
Though on first listen, it does seem bad. The songs on Art Brut Fe De Yoot only barely cling to any kind of coherent structure — if you like your hip hop ingratiating and your hooks meaty, you may want to pick up the new Kanye — these tracks definitely require an involved and equitable listener: i.e. you wouldn’t throw this in the disc changer for a dinner party (unless you really, really hated your dinner guests).
In fact, it probably isn’t accurate to call this hip hop at all, as much as it teeters between a kind of aleatoric music (a lot of improvisation, no second takes) and electronic minimalism (for which we can presumably thank Swiss electro duo Stade, who teamed up with Infinite Livez on the album). Like a lot of musical iconoclasts, Infinite Livez only uses hip hop as the launch pad, from there the rocket blasts off to bizzaro world, whether you’re on board or not.
And OK, sure, kooky experimental records are admirable enough, and will probably impress your snobby music friends — but will you like it? Well, on the one hand, Art Brut Fe De Yoot is an atypical slice of hip-hop originality from across the pond — an admirable break from the usual UK sound, which tends to either remain caught in a kind of perpetual, boring homage to the NY scene that spawned it or lies mired in the deliberately parochial muck of grime (Dizzee Rascal notwithstanding).
But on the other, it’s a record destined to remain on the periphery — both of the mainstream and of your record collection.
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Art Brut Fe De Yoot, the most recent release from 
