Saturday, February 14th, 2004

Wow. I gotta admit, I Love Music–which has often been terrible for both my self-esteem and my general optimism about humankind–has been required reading this week.

Here’s one that hit it out of the ballpark. It’s called Feminists and Feminist Sympathizers Unite: A Bold Call for Pazz & Jop Activism, and it starts with a provocative proposal (detours into an amusing debate over the relative sexiness of Ralf or Florian from Kraftwerk) and includes a show-stopper by Ms. Kandia.

posted by @ 2:10 am | 0 Comments

Saturday, February 14th, 2004

(Updated Saturday evening…now WITH MORE LINKS THAN EVER!)

One non P+J thread that’s attracted lots of comments is this one on Steely Dan. Someone even posted the liners to the Royal Scam, a certifiable 5-star, 10.0 classic.

So I went and dug up this unpublished review I did last year, partly inspired by Vernon Reid and Greg Tate’s paean to Becker and Fagen in Tate’s book on whiteness, Everything But The Burden.

The review is part of a bunch I’d like to put up on the cantstopwontstop website later this year. Concept: revisionist rock reviews from a hiphopcentric point of view. Oh yeah, hip-hopism to match the old rockism.

Whoo hah. Hope I stop blogging before I get (really) old.

Steely Dan

The Royal Scam

MCA 1976

In 1977, the year of punk’s rebel cry and hip-hop’s street uprising, Steely Dan retired to the floating world of Aja. While the kids spat and spun hurricanes, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen painted Malibu hilltop Buddhist retreats that stirred samba carnival heights of ecstasy. Two against nature perhaps, but it could be they were just ahead of their time. Their masterpiece, The Royal Scam, had been released the year before, spiritual kin to the recognizable rage and incomprehensible joys of a new generation.

On the Dan’s bleakest, funkiest album, the losers are trapped on the far end of beautiful, among zombies dripping with mojo or menace, carrying drugs or explosives or everything they own, and the ends they face are downright ugly. Freedom here is only available in fleeting moments of wordplay and deep grooves.

At the time of its release Robert Christgau bemoaned the group’s “melodic retreat”, although one listen to Larry Carlton channeling B.B. King on the soaring solo in “Kid Charlemagne” is strong counter-evidence. The melodies weren’t the point anyway, it was all about the beats. In a sharp departure from the prettified rock of their first four albums, Becker and Fagen dollied back and faded to black, leaving the groove in the hands of bassist Chuck Rainey and drummer Pretty Purdie. With a pocket as big as Aretha’s “Rock Steady” on nearly every track, the other players, especially guitarists Carlton and Denny Dias, turned in some of the most inspired playing on any of the Dan’s records. Clearly the funk moved.

So, freshly dipped in their hips, Becker and Fagen were released to conjure outlaws and outcasts in circumstances moving inexorably toward violence, and to capture them in their moment of clarity before the great collision: the bookkeeper’s son whose Oedipal revolt has become a SWAT scene (“Don’t Take Me Alive”), the bored, alienated housewife who scandalizes her white-bread home with an kinky merengue episode in a Caribbean hotel and then returns to the states to domestic violence (“Haitian Divorce”, “Everything You Did”).

The mixed-up, miscegenated baby of that consensual union–unwittingly born into a world of rejection and desire–is a metaphor for the album’s true concerns. The Royal Scam is the rare rock record to directly confront the complexities of racial wages and debts. In other words, the close relationship of funk and race is no coincidence. If Aja remains Steely Dan’s most accessible record, The Royal Scam is its most influential, cited and sampled by Prince, Vernon Reid, Pharoahe Monche, and DJ Shadow (another reclusive, cerebral young white studio hound with a jones for black music) the way the Dan had Ellington, Silver, the Atlantic Records house band, and Piri Thomas.

“Kid Charlemagne” chronicles a superfly San Francisco pharmacologist who has “crossed a diamond with a pearl” and turned on the world. This is the story of a fall, Charlemagne plunging from all-city champ to man-on-the-lam. When the hammer comes down, his “low rent friends are dead”, his white hippie patrons have “joined the human race”, and he’s assed-out. “You are obsolete,” Fagen sings. “Look at all the white men on the street.” A pusher’s tale suddenly sounds like a race fable, a people’s history of American popular culture. Becker and Fagen are winking at their rhythm section. They could be those white men on the street. Or perhaps, in the daisy-chain of pop permutation they are also two Kids Charlemagne, the Eminems of the rock era.

Katy Lied, this album’s immediate predecessor, ended with “Throw Back The Little Ones”, in which a white hustler tried Godfather-like to move product into the barrio and instead fell in love with the place and the people. This album reverses the process. The moody epic title track opens with a family of Puerto Rican immigrants arriving fresh-faced in the big city with little else but dreams of gold. They end up living in fear amidst ruins and fallen kings. The most literal, didactic track Becker and Fagen have ever cut is also their most pessimistic—the baddest acid from a career-vat of cynicism. In the end, all America has to offer is “the glory of the royal scam”.

posted by @ 1:44 am | 0 Comments

Friday, February 13th, 2004

Kerry-Clark ’04? Can they screw this up? Sure they can! Never overestimate the abilities of the Democratic Party.

posted by @ 7:37 am | 0 Comments

Friday, February 13th, 2004

So Bush’s Sunday appearances did nothing. A Washington Post/ABC poll shows 54% think Bush lied, exaggerated, or truth-stretched to justify war. Last card to play: Osama Bin-Laden, coming in September to an American POW camp near you.

posted by @ 7:31 am | 0 Comments

Friday, February 13th, 2004

Naw, it wasn’t stupid at all.

posted by @ 7:00 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, February 12th, 2004

Meanwhile Haiti burns and so does Courtney.

posted by @ 9:18 pm | 0 Comments

Thursday, February 12th, 2004

SPRING AGAIN AND I’M FEELIN FINE

Well not yet exactly, but a week plus of sunshine and cool weather has me feeling good. These are the days when it’s great not to be East Coast.

So is this song not a muhfuh-in classic? Of course it is. Yeah yeah Big Daddy Kane. But come on. Add some Pure Blend harmonies, and some Honeydrippers and Funkadelic samples and get wet:

“[ VERSE 1: Greg Nice ]

Hey yo

Dizzy Gillespie plays a sax

(Editorial note: I once argued with these guys after a couple blunts and industry open bar at the DNA Lounge about this point for a good hour–or at least it seemed that long, under all those substances…OK back to the beat)

Me, myself, I love to max

Redbone booties I’m out to wax

Stick up kids is out to tax

Spring again, and I’m feelin fine

Pass me an ice-cold glass of wine

So I can get mellow

Lay back, and let my girl play the cello

Hello

I hate Jell-O

Let me be me, relax in my tipi

Watch a hardy boy mystery

Greg N-i-c-e

I’m nitro

And I’m hype, so

Don’t ever believe

That you can deceive me

See many visions of love and splendor

I’m the real thing, not like a pretender

I rock rhymes over beats on the real tip

Stay real strong and hang on like a vise grip

Use my mind to control all my body parts

Got an early start, plus I’m very smart

Type of man that the girls wanna read about

Indeed I proceed to rock the house without a doubt

Steppin up next, no further ado

Smooth B is gonna make it real funky for you

[ CHORUS: Pure Blend ]

I’m gonna make it real funky for you

[ VERSE 2: Smooth B ]

Smooth B, notorious, glorious

Knowledge is infinite, I live in a fortress

(Editorial note: WHAT?!!?!?)

I’m so astronomical, yet on a physical plane

My body’s just a shell, in control is my brain

I strain to gain spirituality

So I can finally be in unity

Harmony with the all eye-seeing

Supreme being

Knower of histories and mysteries

I’m mystic, also stylistic

Not materialistic, simplistic

Humble while others tumble, stumble

Smooth B, not Bumble

Rumble, no, that’s not likely

That’s in my old ‘school daze’ like Spike Lee

Smooth B, my rhymes get better with time

I should get an endorsement for creating fresh lines

And as I grow older, lyrics get hyper

Cause I’m a dominant black pied piper

(Editorial note: WHAAAT?!!!?!)

Spreadin peace and love throughout my travels

And take time to read and unravel

Day to day problems, and then solve them

I can see clearly now as I revolve

Around suckers

Who perpetrate heroes

But I’m no sandwich

More like a manwich

Or maybe like a meal

Which is much more real

Than Clark Kent or the Man of Steel

Teddy Tedd, a hip-hop ambassador

Keepin you on the floor, givin you more and more

His cuts exquisite, what is it? A blizzard

The musical wizard you should come visit

The man in the back, without further ado

Teddy Tedd is gonna make it real funky for you…”

posted by @ 8:58 pm | 0 Comments

Thursday, February 12th, 2004

More P+J: Matos crunches the numbers on the non-singles voters. Like Marley once said, “Feel it in the one-drop…the generation gap.”

posted by @ 11:27 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, February 12th, 2004

Brilliant post by Jay Smooth on Jack White, Marley Marl, and Aaron Copland, re: the functions of noise.

Side note: isn’t it amazing how convos can float through the ether like this and then someone sums it up and you just go ‘wow’, but first you gotta surf through all these people’s blogs to do it?

Just feeling the love this morning. Thank you blog therapy.

Thoughts inspired by Keith Harris. Give the man some feedback, please.

posted by @ 7:48 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, February 12th, 2004

What?!!?! Kandia Crazy Horse gets her own blog, HOT VOODOO. Her book Rip It Up is out now, too, yall.

posted by @ 7:38 am | 0 Comments



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