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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January 29th, 2009
Sach O only slept with your mother cuz she’s dirty.
Good writing and complex writing aren’t one and the same, a notion conveniently ignored by white indie rappers, college educated singer-songwriters and pretentious-ass music bloggers with little to say and the lingering desire to make their college education seem like it was worth the money. I came in the door, I said it before, I never let mic magnetize me no more, doesn’t even mean anything but Rakim GIVES it meaning. Same with I’m a millionaire, I’m a Young Money Milli-on-aire, tougher than Nigerian hair for that matter. Music thrives on economy and often its strength is expressing so much with so little. With that in mind, I give you one of my favorite album openings of all time.
Son. I’m thirty.
I only slept with your mother cuz she’s dirty.
See that? Two bars and a short story’s worth of details. A father and son have a heart to heart, the dad breaks down and admits that the kid’s an accident and the only reason he even exists is that his mom was an easy lay. In two bars! And it only sounds better in the context of the Happy Mondays’ masterpiece, Pills N Thrills and Bellyaches. While the Mondays are unfairly remembered as drug casualty follow-ups to New Order as depicted in the film 24 Hour Party People, there was much more to the group than pills, Martin Hannett and Paul Oakenfold. Of course, they benefited from superb production (Oakenfield’s beats on this album recall another Paul: Prince Paul) but the brothers Ryder had bluesy funk and lyrics to spare and are so sorely underrated by a generation that all-out ripped off the post-punk that inspired the Mondays that you’d think they’d been blacklisted by some broody tastemakers hell bent on sucking the fun out of music.
It’s probably because they’re not nerds. While we somehow expect rappers to emerge from the hood as prodigal poets untainted by the history and self-awareness that surrounds white music, a BAND is a whole other story. Post-punk is (falsely) remembered as a bunch of art-school kids rescuing punk from itself but these guys were more Sex Pistols than Gang of Four: they couldn’t play their instruments, ripped off the Beatles for the fuck of it and their fans were God damned candy ravers who danced to 80’s HOUSE.
(Psst: remember when indie kids hated house, before it got all minimal and boring? I do too.)
But give me Pills N Thrills N Bellyaches over Daydream Nation any day. Even if my inner music critic can’t sulk to it.
Sean Ryder’s sardonic screeds on love, life, family, sex, racism, customs officials, clothing and of course, drugs are half clever and half dumb, recalling the aforementioned Wayne in their nursery rhyme catchiness and layered meanings. 16 Men in an empty hotel comes off as a non-sequitur on its own but sung over a breezy accordion based sea-shanty (on a “rave album” no less) it’s something else entirely: the initial description of a bunch of misfits.
Who’d Have Thought That These People Would Be Fans of SHITDISCO?
Ryder uses the same trick on “Family” writing about his grandfather’s funeral using the bare bones language of an autistic kid but sparing none of the emotion, even the uncomfortable bits. “It’s only the old man that’s died so why’s everyone making a fuss?” he more-or-less says in tossed off couplets. “Bob’s your uncle” is a sex jam that would make Too $hort blush and stands as the album’s most dated moment but in an era of
“Lollipop” apologists it may as well be considered a highlight. Sean’s creepy Gainsbourg-like crooning may utterly fail at sexiness but at least it delivers a laugh-a-second. My personal favorite though? “Loose Fit”: a guaranteed personal anthem, a song that advocates baggy jeans, drug consumption, individualism and doing what you feel like in the face of trends and social pressure.
I can’t overemphasize how bad Nu-Rave sucked, so let’s try this whole revival thing again. Ignore the neon colors, the dopey haircuts and the druggy afterglow surrounding Madchester. Instead, take a look at the lyrics born out of tough times, the funky beats inspired by the best of 70’s funk and the positivity that finally killed off the dull artiness that had become British pop in the wake of the Smiths. There’s a lot to be explored there and in the post-Bush years, this is the kind of music we need to become a cultural touchstone for upcoming bands. I don’t need to sell you The Stone Roses (though if you’ve never heard their debut, shoot yourself in the foot, B) and the rest of the bands in the movement might be a bit much from the get-go (I’ve got a Paris Angels write-up in me down the line) but give this a listen and more importantly, give it to your kid brother that’s starting a band. If Sean Ryder can pump out a 5 star classic like this after hearing George Clinton and Ian Curtis, then the next generation just needs the right push.
Download:
MP3: Happy Mondays-”Kinky Afro”
MP3: Happy Mondays-”Loose Fit”
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January 21st, 2009
Sach O kicks it P.L.O. style, buddha monks with the owls.
At first glance, you’d think there couldn’t be a more politically inconvenient time to bump Baader Meinhof. A conceptual album by Auteurs front man Luke Haines; the record is essentially a first person account of a radical leftist student group of the same name that operated in various forms out of Germany from the 60’s to the 90’s. While their car-bombing of ex-Nazi statesmen who found their way into the West-German government isn’t likely to push people’s buttons, their affiliation and sympathy with the more radical aspects of the Intifada and PLO can hit a little too close to home as rockets land on both sides of the Gaza strip. I’m not here to talk politics though, (if you must know my stance it goes along the lines of “fuck those in power on both sides for playing politics with civilian lives”) I’m here to talk music and Baader Meinhof like Public Enemy, The Coup and Rage Against the Machine is a band that simplifies politics for musical purposes but still has something worthwhile to say.
Released as Brit-Pop peaked and began to stagnate into a sad retread of the British Invasion, Baader Meinhof sounds totally alien to the scene. An off-kilter mix of Indian Percussion, funk licks, drum breaks and punky lead guitar, the album’s eclecticism is startling. A studio project in the truest sense, each instrument benefits from extreme separation and a spacious mix gives the record a fidelity and warmth absent from most Britpop which seemed intent on plastering albums with walls of ringing guitar. These cinematic sounds set the stage for a loose narrative involving rich German university students and their assassination attempts, highjacked flights to Somalia, heinous plots to wipe out women and children, regrets, loses and vengeance over a traitor. Intense stuff presented with all the flair of a Hollywood thriller but also sung more than little tongue in cheek. After all, as man better known for his Kinksian descriptions of English life, Haines was about as close to the PLO as fellow 90’s name-dropper Method Man making it hard to take his words at face value. A product of a pre-9/11 world, Baader Meinhof discussed terrorism and the issues surrounding it in a way that seems impossible or at the very least loaded for western artists in the aftermath of the WTC attacks. Lines like “do it for God, do it for Allah” referring to suicide missions would be chilling if they weren’t delivered with campy gospel backing vocals over grungy fuzz bass. Equally groovy is “Mogadishu” which somehow manages to turn what was surely a horrifying skyjacking into a laid back jam extolling the beauty of the perpetually war-torn Somali capital as presented by a Lebowskiesque Captain Mamoud. The most poignant moment though is “there’s gonna be an accident” where the protagonist kills off a Government official only to realize that he’s gone too far and can’t turn back. When’s the last time you heard a song about THAT?
As an unapologetic leftist and pacifist (shit, there goes my promise to keep politics out of this) Baader Meinhof can be an uneasy listen at first. No matter the irony, Luke Haines’ lyrics can come off as a promotion of terror to achieve ones aims. But stick with the record and the lyrics reveal emotions spanning the gamut from violence to regret, raising interesting points about radicalism both eastern and western. Baader Meinhof treats its subject with respect and intelligence reminding us that “terrorist” can be applied to anyone the government disagrees with and while I’m hoping for Peace in the Middle East, I’m bumping this record too.
Download:
MP3: Baader Meinhof-”There’s Gonna’ Be An Accident”
MP3: Baader Meinhof-”Mogadishu”
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January 13th, 2009
Sach O kills at Chinese 4AD karaoke and still prefers reverb on his vocals to autotune.
So I’m trading music and talking shit with Douglas “No one on the corner got Fresh Cherries like Us” Martin and the subject of 4AD came up. To me, one of the lazier cliches in music writing last year was the comparing of any reverb heavy band to 4AD artists, particularly the label’s flagship act The Cocteau Twins. Thing is, anyone with a set of ears knows that NO ONE sounds like the Cocteaus. Granted, Elizabeth Fraser kicked down the door for alternative female singers to fully explore the studio space and is quasi-responsible for everyone from Bjork and Cranes (yay!) to Enya and that Deerhoof chick (ugh!). But all ground breaking influence aside, none of Frasier’s successors sound remotely like her and the early digital sheen which formed the soundscapes she worked with is totally absent from any of these new releases. It’s like comparing Neyo to Marvin Gaye: sure there’s an obvious debt but no one’s going to confuse one with the other. I’ll go as far as to say the only person whose music ever sounded remotely like the Twins is Faye Wong, a 39 year old Queen of Canto-pop who’s best known as “the Celine Dion of Asia”.
Bear with me here, it’s going to take a few paragraphs to sell you on this.
Faye Wong is a huge star in places where the music industry is a disturbing mix of b-grade MTV dance-pop and 1940’s style celebrity glamour. If you’re a 20 something male (read: the target audience) you’ve probably heard her unbearably maudlin theme to Final Fantasy VIII and based on that, there’s nothing that hints at anything beyond “middle of the road foreign pop star”. But there’s more to Faye Wong than meets the intro to her wikipedia profile. For one thing, she made Restless.
Released as a contract ending experimental “fuck it” in 97, Restless is the rare art record from a traditional pop star that works. Having already covered the Cocteau Twins’ work earlier in her career, Wong collaborated with them on new songs capturing the ethereal (I know…) sound the group mastered on Heaven and Las Vegas without ever sounding second rate or plagiaristic. Ranging from giddy guitar pop to digital torch-blues to post-electro film music, Restless manages to merge disparate genres into a cohesive whole and remains surprisingly accessible to western audiences. While more lyrical than the Cocteaus’ early work (topics touched upon include Buddhism, death, happiness and other “big” issues), Faye Wong matches Elizabeth Frasier by conveying the full emotion of the song solely through her vocal tone. You get the gist of it without understanding a word of Chinese. Standout Cocteau collabo Repressing Happiness somehow manages to split the difference between achingly slow blues and cheap casio synthesizers without losing the earth and grit of the former or the modern sheen of the later. Instrumentals Uneasy and Wild Three Hills sound like Low-era Bowie in an alternate reality where post-punk was a mid 90’s reaction to Tiananmen-square. Meanwhile on the lighter side, pop songs like Where come closest the Cocteau sound with digital funk and airy vocals that are perfect for sunny days.
Not that I’m complaining, but with all the shallow international influence-jocking going on, you’d think that more people would name-drop this album. While the studio-sheen isn’t indie-ready and there’s a sense of professionalism that separates it from alternative music proper, Restless is also one of those rare instances where a big budget star goes left and delivers a meditative, personal album that experiments with the boundaries of the pop-format. It’s certainly more radical in the conservative context in which it was conceived, but like all good music it manages to transcend its story to exist solely as sound. Plus it totally sounds like 4AD.
Download:
MP3: Faye Wong-”Repressing Happiness”
MP3: Faye Wong-”Where”
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January 8th, 2009
Sach O put his money where his mouth is and moved to a country without indie kids. He didn’t anticipate the dance-pop though.
I love Lupe Fiasco’s new band, Japanese Cartoon. I hope they blow the fuck up, take over the world and become the biggest phenomenon in music ever.
Not because I like their stuff mind you, oh God no. Yeah those demos that leaked are funny and all but do I really need to hear a Chicago rapper’s overly digital take on sub-Oasis Brit-Pop? No, I just enjoy the poetic justice involved because Japanese Cartoon is payback for every single smug, upper class, white-liberal douchebag who’s been appreciating rap “ironically” for the past few years. This is a taste of their own medicine, this is karmic, this is what’s right.
Look upon thy creation and despair hipsters for thou haft brought thy own ruin upon thyself and it bears the name Fiasco.
I anxiously await the despondent Pitchfork news reports about Pazz and Jop naming the group’s forthcoming release Indiestar album of the year. I’m making popcorn for the angry British people complaining about the accent (sorry guys: Mick Jagger) and the hordes of black kids dressing in Abercrombie and Fitch, saying “mate” and rocking their jeans entirely too tight while laughing at it (already happening). I can’t wait for the first single to sample some obnoxiously obvious indie rock loop and for Japanese Cartoon’s adoring fans to rock out to it while completely laughing and disregarding the source material. I want the Youtube video to get millions of hits and to feature a preening Lupe going through every rock cliché in the book as if it was a completely new and novel idea and I want the viewers to think “hey, this is easy, I can do this too!” and then go off to form their own shitty bands.
30 years down the line, I want Japanese Cartoon to be remembered as the single greatest rock band of their generation, the group that brought guitar music back from the dead and bravely explored new fusions between electronic music and rock. I fully expect their greatest hit packages (in remastered, mind-implant form) to dominate virtual stores everywhere and to go quadruple Diamond in Indonesia. Their reunion shows will sell out stadiums worldwide culminating at Beijing’s Grand National Stadium, the center for all world culture. They will be music.
Well, maybe not, after all indie kids are the only ones who treat other people’s music like that. And if all that happened it’d probably get real old, really fast.
But it’d still kind of be worth it.
Download:
MP3: Japanese Cartoon-”Army”
MP3: Japanese Cartoon-”Heirplanes”
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