November 2nd, 2009
Sach O can’t stop partying.
When it came to vocalists, Reggae fans became increasingly open-minded in the 1970’s. From weirdo toasters to Rastafarian firebrands, Jamaican audiences quickly embraced the unique voices that followed Reggae’s creative boom leaving a number of wonderful Rocksteady acts in the dust. Thankfully, not all soul-influenced groups faded into the sunset–many persisted and found success, bridging their earlier romantic approach with the rebellious spirit of the times, resulting in powerful, gospel-like paeans to Jah and sufferer’s odes to Jamaican life. Of these groups, few were as successful as the legendary Heptones whose collaborations with maverick genius Lee “Scratch” Perry stand as some of the finest Jamaican music ever recorded.
Like the Temptations teaming up with Norman Whitfield, The Heptones’ work with Perry is a daring fusion of pure soul and psychedelic weirdness. Known for velvety voices that would have been just as comfortable belting out ballads in Detroit or Memphis as rockers in Kingston, the Heptones weren’t obvious candidates for the Upsetter’s avant-garde production. Thankfully, what could have been a total mess instead feels like the best of both worlds on Party Time!–a record that merges the group’s perfect pitch with Scratch’s bubbling soundscapes.
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October 13th, 2009
Sach O never joined the Psychic Friends Network.
Paper Mache
Dionne Warwick built her career by flipping the conventions of easy listening and infusing them with soul and passion but it’s still shocking to hear her weary, resigned kiss-off to the 60’s consumer culture she was supposed to embody. While the hippies were raging from the outside, Dionne takes an insider’s look at modern culture’s failure to offer anything of substance to the people whose lives it was supposed to enrich. Years after punk dulled our ears to the electric guitar, it’s still shocking to hear this kind of stuff over xylophones and accordions.
Wives and Lovers
Opening with off-kilter ¾ jazz drumming, “Wives and Lovers” is Dionne getting to play bad girl, threatening a housewife that she’ll steal her man right from under her. On one hand, the whole thing feels like a period piece to modern ears but on the other, just how many R&B singers are singing about the exact same thing with a few extra slang words in 2009?
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October 12th, 2009
Sach O would have totally hit that back in the 60’s.
When it comes to pop music idolatry and indie cred name-dropping, composer Burt Bacharach, lyricist Hal David and singer Dionne Warwick are simultaneously too conservative and too radical to get theirs. They didn’t rock the pop world like The Beatles, waste-away in an acid fueled nightmare like Brian Wilson or produce the Ramones at gunpoint like Phil Spector; so for second-generation flower children and fist-shaking punks, the trio weren’t the first choice in the stylistic-revival lottery. Taken on their own terms however, the Bacharach/David/Warwick alliance was remarkably prescient: their producer-singer format would go on to become the de-facto standard in black pop and their chamber music orchestration would find a home with everyone from twee kids to psychedelic soul artists. Or put another way: how many groups do YOU know that can claim influence on Timbaland and Aaliyah, Belle & Sebastian, Isaac Hayes AND Stevie Wonder in equal measure? These days, Bacharach and David get occasional props, be it Austin Powers shout-outs or band nerds conspiring to bring back string sections but truthfully, they would just be a forgotten (if remarkably talented) 60’s songwriting team if it weren’t for their secret weapon: Dionne Warwick.
Paving the way for every black vocalist who’s tried her hand at the pop charts, a quick look at Warwick’s career reads like a how-to guide to contemporary success. She couldn’t belt them out like Aretha or play teenager like Dianna but Dionne’s take on swinging-sixties pop was equal parts seduction and heartbreak. Combined with her image as a sophisticated black woman, that seduction was something that couldn’t be discounted in an era where inter-racial relationships were still verboten. Before James Brown came out and said that he was black and proud, Warwick was making strides for racial equality by being the sultriest singer on the pop charts, race be damned. Whitney, Mariah and Beyonce all owe their stardom to the post Brill-building pop that Warwick recorded with her producers.
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August 23rd, 2009
Sach O something-something-something Muhammad Ali.
Lyrics. In this dance about architecture, lyrics are the proverbial Tango on a Gehry. For every genre with an expressly coded form of lyricism (say, Hip-Hop) you get two where it’s impossible make an objective statement. Is Jim Morison’s poetry art or the ramblings of an overblown 60’s acidhead? Depends on who you ask. And the plot just gets thicker when you throw in a foreign language: how can a reviewer accurately assess a song when he can’t even understand the words? With this in mind, I approached Brazilian legend Caetano Veloso’s Bicho (Beast) humbly and with but a few tools: a longstanding appreciation for the man’s recordings, an Allmusic profile describing him as “The Bob Dylan of Brazil”, Babelfish and the absolute certainty that you don’t need to understand a word of Portuguese to appreciate the grooves on display.
Best known as a singer-songwriter in Brazil’s late 60’s Tropicalia movement, Veloso is one of those artists that everyone’s heard of and yet few grasp. It’s understandable, considering his intimidating discography spans five decades and over thirty albums. Genres covered include acoustic balladry, psychedelia, straight-forward rock and experimental, to name just a few. Recorded after an eye-opening trip to Lagos for that year’s Art and Culture festival, 1977’s Bicho stands as one of the most interesting and approachable points in Veloso’s oeuvre-boasting a great song collection, an inspired backing band, and clean, occasionally orchestral production that never goes overboard.
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June 15th, 2009
Sach O rides like a Samurai
Fuck a cliché–Marseillais rapper, Shurik’n’s 1998 solo release, “Ou Je Vis” (Translation: Where I live), is poetic autobiography. While that’s like describing rap as “the hood CNN”, Shu’s rhymes about French rap’s second city actually fulfil their aspirations. Marrying an investigative scope to vivid descriptions of personal struggle and a metaphorical exploration of eastern culture, “Ou Je Vis” stands as one of the most uncompromising albums ever recorded.
As a member of the country’s single greatest rap crew IAM, Shurik’n grew from the group’s Phife into an emcee rivaling group leader Akhenaton, playing a major role in the group’s ascent to mega-stardom with 1997’s “L’Ecole du Micro D’Argent”, an album still regarded as the most successful in French history. However, when his solo debut was released the following year, few were ready for the stark collection of pessimistic musings delivered over minimalistic self production. “Ou Je Vis” wasn’t the expected follow up to a blockbuster, rather it was 32 years of frustration put on wax; a personal album preserving man’s struggle and society’s failings for posterity.
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April 13th, 2009
SACH O SACH O Sach O sach o IS IN EFFECT EFFECT Effect effect
The received wisdom is that Dub is first and foremost a technological and chemical achievement. Years before professional remixing and electronic music, Jamaican producers took crude equipment and created a revolution out of reverb, bass and collie weed, setting the stage for the idea of musical recordings as source material rather than final product. Roots music meanwhile, was the thinking man’s Reggae: ideological, idealistic and full of ideas. Black Uhuru and Burning Spear had something to say, Sly & Robbie were a studio rats experimenting with effects.
Granted, with so many versions being producer-only affairs and so many tracks concerned solely with satisfying the sound systems, it’s not unfair to think of dub as music for the body. What’s often forgotten though is that for millions of reggae fans, dub is Jamaica’s own psychedelia: mind expanding music in the vein of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. So it’s one of music’s great ironies that Jamaica’s psych revolution was often shepherded by England’s punks: a group little enthused by wandering hippie grooves.
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March 16th, 2009
Sach O ate fries with mayo and two burritos while researching this story.
In the mad dash towards Tropicalia, Hindi-Pop, Afrobeat, and every other hastily discovered internet-approved form of non-Anglo pop music, there hasn’t been much room for humor. Seriousness begets authenticity, authenticity begets that warm fuzzy feeling of self-importance in a record nerd and anything remotely funny reminds everyone that we’re still all dealing with pop records and NOT discovering some long-lost culture. Our foul decade was one with irony as a defining virtue, but oddly enough while the “wink-wink-nudge-nudge” so-bad-its-good ethos works for shitty electro, everyone wants their (ahem) “foreign records” to represent an ideal, authentic representation of another culture, sans giggles. Why else would you bother with stuff that isn’t in English?
(Note: I guess I shouldn’t complain. Apparently Irony+Afrobeat=Vampire Weekend, a band that makes the paternalistic accidental colonialism of 80’s “world music” look downright appealing in comparison.)
Chakachas’ Jungle Fever is a funny record. It’s also inherently inauthentic, a funk album by a band of Belgian session musicians specializing in Latin styles already well past their due date among connoisseurs. This would be enough to damn it to the cut-out crates of history, to be dug up by Madlib for some obscure mix-CD except for one important detail: the title track was such a monstrous funk jam that when Polydor released it States-side in 1971, it went on to be a dance floor smash.
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March 11th, 2009
Sach O dedicates this one to his lil brother chilling in Jamaica
When the time of judgment comes to pass, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell better hope that Jah’s into Pop music and not hardcore Roots. All of his accomplishments in promoting Jamaican music aside, his Mango subsidiary’s tempering of Reggae’s revolutionary aesthetic through dubious mixing and poor A&Ring will go down as a capital sin against music.
Case in point: Burning Spear’s incredible Marcus Garvey album. While the record stands as a classic example of Roots Reggae, precious few have even heard it in its intended form. Worried that a concept album about revolutionary black leader Marcus Garvey lacked crossover potential (garsh, ya think?), Blackwell and Island subsidiary Mango records decided to remix the album before its international release, resulting in a brighter, faster, sunnier record.
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March 3rd, 2009
Sach O wrote this one coming down off Codeine.
Bands that hit a zeitgeist are fucked one way or another. Hang on to your once-cool style and you look like a dinosaur, switch it up and you disappoint your fan base. Primal Scream’s response to the changing tides following their era-defining psychedelic masterpiece Screamadelica has been to try every approach under the sun from trad rock (which the critics hated) to increasingly aggressive dance-rock (which the critics sort of liked) and back (by which time no one cared anyways). The one thing they’ve never tried to do is recreate the sound of Screamadelica, an eventuality, given that the very culture it celebrated shifted and disappeared as the 90’s wore on. It’s a shame because while modern critics dutifully applaud the album for fusing electronic and rock music years before it was trendy, celebrating it for its supposed influence misses the point completely.
Ask yourself this: for a dance influenced rock album, how many tracks on Screamadelica would sound truly at home in a club? Maybe the one house track could fit in a mix and there’s some definite chill-out room ready material but all in all the idea that Primal Scream created some sort of rave rock is grossly exaggerated (that would be The Mondays). I’m not saying that producer Andrew Weatherwall and the band’s experiments with samplers weren’t groundbreaking for rock music, but what’s important is what they expressed through those experiments rather than the sonic results themselves. Mainstream rock was late to the sampling party so I feel no need to praise Scream for being first of the last, but they do deserve credit for making an incredible album ABOUT dance music.
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February 18th, 2009
Sach O lost all the music on his iPod in a freak accident. This is the first thing he got back.
French rap is a harder sell than Canto-Pop. I don’t blame heads really: in an art form where lyrics are prized, a language barrier is the ultimate deal-breaker. No matter how bangin the beat or how tight the flow, the obvious reaction is for kids to scrunch up their faces and mumble like the head bully in a De La skit: “umm…what are they SAYING?” For French rap fans it’s frustrating but also a privilege: while East Coast heads lament the golden age, we have access to a whole parallel canon of NYC influenced boom-bap. French music never made a dent in the States but Parisians were the incredible students of the New York sound, studying the masters with all the zeal of a 5 boroughs disciple. In a country fundamentally incapable of rock music (yes, you too Justice) rap found its second home, eventually growing into the world’s second biggest consumer of home-grown Hip-hop. Naming a French G.O.A.T is nearly impossible, but as for “biggest shit disturber,” that one’s easy: Supreme NTM.
Best described as Public Enemy meets NWA and M.O.P, with Raekwon’s descriptive language and a little Das EFX, Mad Lion, and French cynicism thrown in for good measure, NTM (translation: Fuck yo moms) members Kool Shen and Joey Starr first came together in the early 80’s as B-Boys. Emerging as a musical force from Paris’s desolate housing projects a few years later, the group’s incendiary lyrics actually landed the duo in prison for hate speech, a charge unrivaled in America. Their beats drew on the chaos of the Bomb Squad and early Dr. Dre, but also kept a jazzy sensibility reminiscent of Pete Rock and The Beatminerz merging the violence of early gangsta rap to the groovier funk that blew up in the 90’. By the time their 1995 masterpiece Paris sous les bombes (Paris under fire) hit the shelves, their unique mix of aggression and funk had hit Chronic level sophistication and now stands as a defining moment in the evolution of French Hip Hop.
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