Hope y’all had a peaceful day—or not, if that is your wont
Thanksgiving for every wrong move
27 11 2014Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: Poi Dog Pondering, Thanksgiving
Categories : Music
Autumnsongs: U2
30 10 2014You knew this one was coming.
I thought I’d get to it earlier, but this whole month has been unusually warm, and when I think of “October”, I think not just of a fading sun through fallen leaves, but sweatshirts and collars pulled up and knuckles reddened from the chill.
Some New York Octobers, yes, but not this one.
Still, it wouldn’t really do to play this in November, and today the wind did smack me around a bit, so why not now?
It’s lovely and melancholy not too much, in the way that U2 is often too much.
I loved that about U2, actually, that they were so often too much, too hot—never cool. I loved the righteousness and the politics and the absolute emo—a term nowhere in evidence back in the day—of the joint.
U2, in other words, were never cool, and I was all right with that.
Still, “Seconds” was about as cool as they got, in terms of perspective. It was angry, yes, but in a kind of can-you-fuckin’-believe-it way.
Why is this an autumnsong? The detachment, perhaps, but more so that I associate this song with that first semester at college, when the air in Madison was definitely chill, and I was running around trying to soak up all of the politics my skinny 18-year-old self could handle.
One weekend just about tipped me over: a Mondale/Ferraro rally (with which I was very involved) at the Capitol on Friday, an anti-nuke march in Chicago on Saturday, and a speech by Gloria Steinem in Milwaukee on Sunday—bless that skinny little heart, but I made them all.
The Chicago rally was a bit odd. I went alone (on the bus), wiped out, broke, and marched with I don’t know how many thousands of others through the foggy streets of Chicago, before we we emptied ourselves into a park to hear, oh man, was it Helen Caldicott? could Petra Kelly have been there? It seems like it, but thirty years on, and memory, like the sun, fades.
Well, except for Jesse Jackson, hometown son. I remember him, up next to the stage, I remember him. Man, the man could speak.
So, “Seconds” is a foggy Chicago Saturday in October, thousands, tens of thousands of us marching against the bomb, against our annihilation, and for our lives.
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Tags: anti-nuke rally, atumnsongs, Chicago, cool, Jesse Jackson, Madison, Politics, U2
Categories : Music, Musing
Autumnsongs: Joni Mitchell
12 10 2014Young Joni Mitchell is late spring, early summer.
That high, high voice streaming up clear like water from a bubbler, so pure your heart stills as your breath is pulled out of you. If you’re not given to tears you close your eyes to keep them in, but that voice, that high, high voice steals them from you anyway, the song carrying them away.
It took Prince to make me appreciate Joni Mitchell. I was a horrible music snob when younger, and by horrible I mean: I missed so much good music because the artist did not fit into what seemed to me ought to matter. I wasn’t quite sure about Prince, either, but when that small, strange genius said that Blue was one of his favorite albums, I thought, Well.
And oh, is Blue a genius album. I generally favor low voices, but Joni was one of the exceptions.
Was is the operative word, here: time and cigarettes have sunk her soprano into the sand, and instead of singing the clear blue sky she sounds like forests and falling leaves and a retiring sun.
She sounds like October.
I was reminded of this as I listed to a Tierney Sutton rendition of “Woodstock”—which is lovely, but I wanted to find a late edition Joni, to hear her sing herself back to a song that was wistful even in her youth.
If you are no longer so interested in keeping the tears in, this version of “Both Sides Now,” from 2000, is for you.
I’m still in my summer, perhaps my late-summer, years. And all this regret and wisdom and that voice, that incredible charcoal voice, makes me yearn for all I didn’t learn in my spring, and all that autumn will bring.
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Tags: autumnsongs, Joni Mitchell, life, Music
Categories : Music, Musing
Summersongs: Martha and the Vandellas
3 09 2014Labor Day has come and gone but the heat remains.
Now, I generally associate Stax and soul music more with heat than Motown, but this happy tune bounces over an insistent beat, and while the anti-war protests hadn’t really yet hotted up, I can’t help but hear the call to dance in the street as a kind of if-I-can’t-dance. . . defiance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17yfqxoSTFM
I could pull out a political undertone from this tune, too, but honestly, I just hear that there’s no way to escape the heat—and maybe that ain’t so bad.
Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: heat, Martha and the Vandellas, Motown, protest, summersongs
Categories : Music
Summersongs: Frente!
31 08 2014How did I hear of Frente? I have no idea.
I didn’t have cable so I wouldn’t have seen them on MTV (if they were on MTV), and I mostly listened to MPR when I lived in Minneapolis, so I doubt radio was the source.
I can think of two possibilities: a music review in either City Pages or the Twin Cities Reader, or it was playing at the Electric Fetus.
Anyway, “Accidentally Kelly Street” is pure confection, a state I associate with summer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdJYrkra0nk
This is not wholly complimentary, insofar as I’m a more tang/salt than sweet kinda gal, and, of course, I don’t like summer.
Still, if one is in the right—which is to say, light—mood, it can be kind of charming.
Not all of the songs on Marvin the Album are as, well, twee, as this one, but Angie Hart’s high and breathy voice makes even political songs like “Cuscatlan” sound like bouncy summer fun:
Now, I’m not unalterably opposed to twee—I do own a coupla’ Belle & Sebastien cds, after all—but I can only listen to so much before it’s helium “hi! hi! hi!” attitude grates.
Still, in the summer, a song or two of helium-hi’s aren’t all bad.
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Tags: Frente!, Music, summersongs, twee
Categories : Music, Musing
Summersongs: Romeo Void
7 08 2014Had enough of the angry money posts? How about biting sex posts?
Biting sex. . . hmmm, I see how that could be taken a couple of different ways. In any case, the “biting” refers to the attitude of Deborah Iyall toward sexy sexytimes and the occasional aftermath.
I first thought “A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing)” would be the summersong, but after a night out with C & K, thought that maybe “Never Say Never”
Whatever. It’s Romeo Void, and even tho’ Iyall tells the girl that old man would “be warm in your coat”, why be literal about the coat-wearing and the presumably cold weather?
It’s about the beat and the attitude—and the backup boys singing temporary temporary in the chorus.
Do pop songs even use sax anymore? And, yeah, those Eighties video production values. . . .
I might like you better if we slept together
I might like you better if we slept together
I might like you better if we slept together
How can you not sing along to that?
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Tags: Music, Romeo Void, sex, summersongs
Categories : Music, Musing
Summersongs: XTC
23 07 2014Moar music!
Yes, I’ll continue with my Listen to the music series, but I’m feeling a bit. . . limited by the one-way trek through my cd collection. So why loosen things up a bit, and gambol thru some songs of the season.
XTC’s Skylarking is, to me, a summer album. The first single was released in 1986, smack dab in the middle of my college years, and tho’ the album didn’t come out until the fall, my (mis?) memories are of listening to this in the green months of Madison.
The most well-known song may be “Dear God”, because in 1986 in the United States it was controversial to put out a single mildly criticizing/questioning the Big Kahuna. It wasn’t until I brought home my own copy of Skylarking that I realized that I got an alternate version: “Dear God” wasn’t included.
On the one hand, I was pissed, because even though the song wasn’t that great, I liked it well enough, and I didn’t like that it had been removed. On the other hand, I probably laid out 8 bucks for the new vinyl and wasn’t about to shell out even more money just for one song.
Singles? No.
Anyway, the songs that tie me most closely to that time are “Summer’s Cauldron/Grass” and “That’s Really Super, Supergirl”. I could never figure out Andy Partridge’s attitude toward the Supergirl—was he being nasty or pouty?—but I thought, get over it. In fact, I might have liked the song just for the attitude it inspired in me.
Listen to the lovely:
And enjoy the smirk:
Bonus fun fact: I recall Andy Partridge saying in an interview that all Englishmen had two of the following three characteristics: had bad teeth, were bald, were gay. He noted that he was bald and had bad teeth.
Don’t know why I remember that, but I do.
Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: Andy Partridge, Madison, seasonal songs, Skylarking, summersongs, XTC
Categories : Music
Where can I go
27 03 2014Oh, this caught my ears.
Nothing earthshaking or odd—the sound is a bit a throwback (The Band? Van Morrison?), really—but that snatch of lyric: No one comes to take me home.
A lament. A recognition. A sigh. A shrug.
A night.
h/t: Jian Ghomeshi, at Q
Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: Laura Marling
Categories : Music
AbsurdBeats 