Okay it was a phase, but it was one I remember with some warmth and – more – it’s neither a guilty pleasure nor one that the wash of tacky synths that accompanies many of these records can demolish. I’m talking about the era of the great electric-soul men.
Their stylistic godfather was Teddy Pendergrass, both with Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes and solo on the still blissfully timeless Philadephia International label – and I’ll get to that – but it was Luther (do a I need a surname? I still remember large groups of white sox and loafer clad lads roaming London in the mid 1980s chanting ‘Loofa.. Loofa..’) who heralded the arrival of the classic 1980s styled big soul men, men whose producers melded together big, soaring male soul voices, post-disco funk and burgeoning studio electronica. It was Luther who made it acceptable for so-called hard men to break down to the huge emotional soul ballads and epic synth-filled anthems that defined a big part of the edge of the 1980s.
He also had Marcus Miller - and others, like Doc Powell (pictured above). That helped. It was to Luther’s bands that Miles Davis turned in the middle of the decade.
In Auckland at least, it bought together a generation of white kids rolling away from the tail of the post-punk era and a whole new generation of South Auckland Polynesian kids who both grabbed it as central their to soundtrack.
By the end of 1982 the hipper clubs were filled with men – of all skin tones – dressed in double breasted suits, some immaculate, some simply garish 1
It was both fun, and it offered a happy respite from the standard male club uniform of denim and (T) shirt. Looking onto a dancefloor around 1986 one saw a sea of style – even if we laugh at those suits and shoulders now.
And yes, many of the the lyrics – romance, sex, fast cars, expensive anything and so on – made us all grimace as much then as we do now. But it was, to borrow, about the vibe…. and the voice. And nobody grimaced to Luther. Nobody.
We swooned to the music, and – more – Luther and the rest changed the way we sang and constructed vocal tracks in the much of the music we made thereafter, such being the nature of urban soundtracks, whether we knew it or not at the time. The stylised soul vocal had really made little impact in New Zealand before the 1980s – we hadn’t really bought large quantities of the deeper styled male soul in the years since the end of the 1960s and even then the experience was largely blues or pop-soul (Motown). I well remember Philly albums sitting unloved and unwanted in the 50c bins in the mid to late 1970s. Bobby Womack? Who?
Luther and the soul men played a big part in changing that.
And then Luther died – quite some years after the scene was gone – but, still, I had one message from an old friend who simply said “He really was why, wasn’t he?” And he kinda was, and – more – the broad cultural reverberations that Luther and the soul men bought to the city I was a part of when they bought us all together still remain largely unrecognised. There’s more to this – much more – and it’s one of the crucial elements of Pasifika as it fused with Aotea that still remains unexplored. It was about the music.
This isn’t the time to pursue that, but for no other reason that I had a Luther an extended Luther YouTube flashback today I thought I’d throw up a few videos for and of the eighties soul men…..
Tashan recorded a couple of albums for Def Jam in the middle part of the decade, when Russell Simmons decided that if Rick could sign metal, he could sign soul.
The first album was the one, and this, the title track from it, Chasing a Dream, is a bonafide lost 80s classic.
From the same album, Got The Right Attitude.
There was a time when the name Lillo Thomas was almost whispered. He was the man – and true soulboys simply nodded in quiet agreement when records like I’m In Love were talked of. Never a big star, his records were hugely sought, but none more than:
Downtown. If you didn’t get this – or even know of this – you weren’t a true member of the clan. The 12″ was semi-sacred and awfully hard to get hold of. This, sadly, ain’t it, but it’s still a monster of the genre in any format.
Will Downing managed one listenable album before heading off into 90′s schlock but here, with a vocal reworking of Coltrane’s Love Supreme, he’s quite something.
This is obscure as hell, and opens with a ridiculously tacky ”Sweet and tender lady” line before moving into a vocal that owes a hefty debt to Al Green. Will King came out of the same stable as the mighty Gap Band and you can hear that too here.
I’m not sure if he really belongs in this post, given that I have no idea what or who he was beyond that, but it has the obligatory vocal swoops half way through and for that reason it stays.
Eugene Wilde arrived with a couple of dancefloor hits (as Simplicious) before releasing this song, Gotta Get You Home Tonight – a tune that was almost inescapable around ’85. Lyrical references to Dom Perignon gave it extra soulboy credentials.
I love Alexander O’Neal. To quote one of the wonderfully ridiculous interludes from his second album ‘Alex, baby, Alex’ was second only to Luther in the pecking order.
A former member of the same band that produced Prince, his Jam & Lewis produced albums straddled Minneapolis funk and deep soul. This tune, from his debut – with Cherelle – is best heard in it’s fabulous eleven minute 12″ mix. But this will have to do…
And another, from the first, self-titled, album. This Soul Train take of What’s Missing is pretty rough, but you get the suit effect – and it’s still a hell of a tune. Alex used a double bed as a stage prop. You can’t get much more soulboy than that.
Chuck Stanley was Russell Simmons’ second soul signing to Def Jam but large parts of his pretty decent debut album seem to be missing from the ‘net. This video, of a track off that longplayer, is worth it for the suit. Nice tune too.
Curtis Hairston jumped from label to label any never really managed any substantial commercial success – but in downtown Auckland this song kinda hit briefly and The Morning After became yet another hugely sought after 12″ single.
I loved the first Keith Sweat album, produced by the still-in-his-teens Teddy Riley wunderkid. This remake of the old Dramatics tune In The Rain is still rather special.
To Luther. There are a million Loofa vids on the net so I chose a couple that reflect lessor known tracks first up. The radio (and 12″ mixes) of The Rush were remixed by David Morales in his classic organic Def Mix style and feature an uncredited pianist (maybe Eric Kupper or Peter Daou).
The 12″ mix of this rocks.
And Heaven Knows, perfectly re-produced by Morales’ legendary partner, Frankie Knuckles, with Terry Burrus on piano.
One more, just because I can: Never Too Much live
Finally, for a bit of fun, a mini doco on the David Bowie and Luther Vandross connection:
As one of the talking heads points out, Young Americans actually sounds like a Luther Vandross record as much as a Bowie release, and you only have to listen to the Luther version of Bowie’s Fascination (from the Young Americans album), which Luther wrote and recorded as Funky Music, to get that connection even more precisely:
There were others of course: Freddy Jackson sold a lot of records but was just too lightweight and his producer Paul Laurence lacked substance.
Since I’m getting all watery around the eyes about retrospective old soul music that simply does it, I might offer a plug for the absolutely incredible Philadelphia International Re-Edits collection, wherein tracks that any reasonable ageing soul purist would insist were sacrilege and untouchable are successfully dissected, reworked and reassembled by a bunch of relative unknowns.
Try the reworking of the grossly overplayed – it’s become a desperation tool for countless struggling bar or party DJs – Ain’t No Stopping Us Now (reworked by Noodleman):
Or the the absolutely lovely stroll through Harold Melvin’s Wake Up Everybody as reconstructed by DJ Apt One:
And if that isn’t enough, at the time of writing I’m eagerly checking the mailbox daily for the just released 4 disc set of Tom Moulton remixes, expanding upon the perfectly named 1977 album, Philadelphia Classics, itself about as close to perfection as it’s possible to get on double vinyl.
There go the post-punk credentials…
Monsoon Menswear in Auckland’s Vulcan Lane offered tailored suits in a massive variety of tones, and guys from South Auckland often tried to out do each other both in fabric-tone volume, and sheer ‘width’. ↩
They feel like roar past at quite a rate as they end, but going back through the music in each one in detail in December they somehow see almost eternal. Some of the stuff on this page seems like half a decade back.
The records I liked a lot in 2011 provided – I thought – a fairly short list as I mentally worked them through the other night.
And then I woke in the morn and tried to write this list down. I scanned iTunes and pulled apart the recently neatly stacked records and CDs on the shelf to try and work out exactly what I’ve listened to in 2011.
It grew.
Of course this list would be longer If I added in all the older records I either discovered or re-discovered in 2011. I’d be forced to add two Bowie albums from his largely ignored later years (the common wisdom of course is that his ‘interesting’ career path ended abruptly after Scary Monsters in 1981), Heathen and 1. Outside, or the compete 70s oeuvre of Gil Scott-Heron after he passed, or countless old 12” singles that took my fancy for a day or two whilst I banged them to death only to forget them again for a year or perhaps more – The timeless FK EP anyone?
I’ve added a couple of re-discoveries or reworkings, the Trax and Nu Groove re-edits, and the never actually fully released before Smile simply it seemed wrong not to.
However mostly the records here are new and new sounding enough for me to offer another blast of hogwash at Simon Reynolds’ Retromania thesis and to anyone who leapt all over it this year. So…
As Trax was to Chicago I guess you could say that Nu Groove was to the big Apple. It was the label that rode the path to the future in that city in the late 1980s, and in a way it was more important. Not only was it not run by charlatans, as Trax was, but it encouraged invention (at Trax that was largely incidental/accidental) and created a huge part of what we thought of as electronic music (Dance Music doesn’t work – this wasn’t just music to dance to) in the next decade and beyond.
Nicholas is a 25 year old Italian who has embraced all that, perhaps in a way that only a younger person not in awe of the legacy could do, and twisted a dozen key moments into something both vaguely contemporary and reverential, albeit not claustrophobically so.
As with the Trax album, he hasn’t tried to force these songs onto a modern dancefloor, and in a world awash with awful remixes of songs you loved that’s important to me.
The remix of Houz’ Nergroz (producer Rheji Burrell, who along with his brother Ronald played a key role at the label) ’92 classic How Do You Love A Black Woman, a dramatically sensual fusion of raw r’n’b, King Tubby, and what we were to call deep house in years to come, is worth the price of admission to me. He tags it the “Fierce Beats Remix” but it’s far more provocative than that. Instead he draws out and teases with the famous lo-fi organ refrain and taunts with a snippet of the vocal sample that punctuated the original. It pads and sways in a way that simply restates just how important Nu Groove was to so much that came afterwards.
That music is as important to me as this next record:
As I tweeted or maybe Facebooked – if you don’t get Brian Wilson I can’t help you.
I’d like to develop that line just a little more, but it may offend.
How does somebody not get Brian? Unless they’re Mike Love in which case they make up for it by consciously and continuously belittling him, screwing him and then bathing in the credit and income he’s bought you thereafter. And reforming the band to bleed him just one more time.
I digress – but I probably needed to, and now I’ll finish the diversion the way it should always be finished: Fuck Mike Love. Really.
Prior to 1966 just about the only people to have added external sounds to pop music were Shadow Morton and Spector, and they limited it to rain, thunder and a motorbike. In ’66, with Pet Sounds Brian Wilson took that a little further. Let’s Go Away For a While and the title track were the amongst the first pop records that tried to conjure something more than just fun and emotional attachment to a person or a thing. The first of the two, an instrumental that blissfully evoked a journey and was an aural and subjective precursor to Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express, offers the most direct suggestion of what was to come – or not come at least for some 45 years (officially) – with Smile.
And that makes Brian Wilson a spiritual and conceptual godfather of much of what I’m writing about below, from sonic guitars to the bass-based revolution that dominates the last part of the first decade of the twenty first century.
So here we have a story – I think, as I’m still not quite sure what it is in this Barnum and Bailey concoction – built using farmyard and building site noises, layered/structured warm analogue audio complexity that we seem to have lost the ability to create in these digital days, gorgeous harmonic progressions and cadences, intensely psychedelic melodic tangents – sometimes rambling – with such scope they could really only be handed down by a semi-crazed drug-fucked genius deaf in one ear.
And of course inclusive of Brian’s finest composition – Surf’s Up.
A few million words have been expended on Smile since 1967 and I don’t feel much need to add many more (although I guess I have), suffice to say this release is perfectly structured to accommodate the level of intense anorakism – with boxed sets and outtakes galore, many of which offer more insight into the semi-finished album on offer than the album itself – the customer feels comfortable with. And now resplendent in the sort of sonic quality and finality those shitty bootlegs never offered (and I own a few).
It’s everything you wanted it to be, way better than the still worthy solo remake in 2004, and it’s every part of what you wanted to hear or deconstruct of the legend – you choose – and as with the mighty Pet Sounds Sessions Box, offered in way that adds to the magic rather than stripping the mystery.
Me? I’m in the corner under a blanket with headphones very tightly on, listening over and over to the sublime Surf’s Up demo, ironically with all that stuff I rambled about up-thread stripped away.
Let’s start the new stuff with an album that – and this and the one after are the only ones on this list I think – almost, and just almost – justifies Reynolds’ loudly voiced circular-obsessive pitch.
Does that matter? No, not at all. Music does not always need to be radical. I also like Nick Lowe and Mayer Hawthorne. And I dig this.
Guitar based rock has become an indulgence rather than a journey of discovery for me, but I still thrill to it – nothing quite kicks like amplified noise.
For all that, this sparkling record – which I first heard on 95bFm, so radio still offers discovery sometimes, albeit less and less if I’m honest – which draws a direct line back to Brian Wilson and Phil Spector, stopping off along the way at early power-pop, Wire’s Chairs Missing and that debut Jesus and Mary Chain longplayer (and yes, the opener Iceblock steals a chorus and melody from Real Life’s Send Me An Angel without obvious shame), was my day starter for several weeks. I’d wake with the ‘Don’t Forget / you never forget’ chorus of Circles, or the pseudo-modernism of Disco’s intro and tinsel chorus in my head.
The touches of electronica in the construction do give it a sheen of modernity but at its soul this is closer to The Ronettes or The Righteous Brothers than any reference point it might try to claim in 2011.
I don’t think this is record for the times, but it was my record for a time.
When I bought this unheard from Conch in Ponsonby, I asked what it sounded like. It sounds like an album made by a bass player Dustin said.
Oh.
Marcus Miller? Paul McCartney? Stanley Clarke? John Entwhistle? Bootsy?
But, yeah, he was absolutely right. I get it now.
A year or more in being recorded, The Golden Age Of Apocalypse seems to exist mostly because it was fun to make. There is no grander reason for it in the greater scheme, and the story goes that co-producer Flying Lotus, for whom Thundercat (= Stephen Bruner) plays bass, had to push the artist into finishing the fun and putting the thing into the marketplace so we could all enjoy.
Bass players make those sorts of records. Nobody else quite can. Think of The Fireman, or Jah Wobble, or, hell, the complete works of Larry Graham, post Sly – they simply groove and more or less ignore the commercial or artistic imperatives that limits or corrals the records made by musicians who were driven instead to be vocalists or lead guitarists (McCartney straddles both camps, but he’s Paul McCartney, and he either invented or at some stage restated most camps).
Dreamy, lazy, unpredictable, soulful, and – I keep trying to convince myself – thoroughly modern despite the fact it wraps itself around the likes of Herbie Hancock, Stanley Clarke and George Duke, I’ve dug this album a lot in the last few months.
And yet without aggressively struggling to achieve that artistic imperative, it achieves it nevertheless as it builds towards the last two tracks, the almost surreal semi-cinematic double act of Mystery Machine and the all too brief expanse of Return to The Journey.
I guess it’s nothing special, it is after all a bass player’s album. But in aspiring to be nothing special it is.
If this album contained only Danny Native’s 18 Ghost Hands it would be enough to sell it to me – the mighty Dee Patten revisited and stripped back to the rhythmic essence that made Who’s The Bad Man (originally on Leftfield’s Hard Hands label about ’95) one of my favourite singles of that decade.
But it doesn’t of course. This collection of assorted mostly unknowns, produced by Londoner Danny Yorke (ie. Danny Native), a follow on to 2010’s Tenement Yard album (there was a volume two this year), doesn’t break any new ground but still sounds rather magnificent at some volume as I bounce around the house (I no longer do clubs – I don’t want to be the sad old guy at the end of the bar), as it pulls together and lovingly restates the most thrilling – noisy – elements of dance and rave culture and does so with some panache.
It’s a joyous record, which just works.
Danny tweeted a few days back that he was somewhat disappointed at not being named in any end of year lists. Well, I might not be Pitchfork or Factmag but this was one the records I thrilled to most in 2011. Ok, Danny?
Devonté Hynes was also Lightspeed Champion. Then he was the brief flavour of the month, with a most-likely spread in Mojo – which must be the kiss of death – and he released a country-folk-rock-lite album that had mixed reviews. As has this, but I don’t care because I like it. Lots.
It’s odd. Like the misplaced soundtrack to some lost half-finished David Lynch movie – the cliched one where a confused and lost couple in an old broken Impala stumble into a beaten-down club for respite where they find David Sylvian fronting a pick-up band – played by Orange Juice.
Unless you place it that context it doesn’t make sense. Once you do, it does.
Yep, its eighties’ reference points are strong but structurally – the arrangements, and the space – have a now about them that betrays the latter part of the decade it was made in. It has to have arrived post Massive Attack, but, more, after Mathew Dear’s two solo longplayers and that solitary astounding album from Damian Lazarus.
Hell, there is no way this record could’ve arrived before The XX.
Jamie Teasdale takes the noises made on machines before punk came along in 1977 and pushes them into holes created by the urban soundscrapings of the twenty-first century.
To borrow without apology: It’s like Tangerine Dream and DJ Roc are stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company, then mixed in Cinemascope (remember that).
A year or so back I listed volume one of this in my 2010 list. In the twelve months since this sound has exploded, becoming the dominant gamechanger in contemporary music in 2011. From hip-hop to bass to IDM – plus anything else that touches on any of these – juke has radicalised the way music was made this year.
The whole Juke/Footwork ethos thrills me: brutalised snippets of random melody (with a clear debt to J Dilla although he was gentler in his appropriations) and sound, often violently digitalised and reassembled without respect or deference. It’s excites.
And I guess I’m not alone – at least half the releases on this page wear an influence, sometimes substantial, from the rush to embrace this sound.
I’d be foolish to describe this album as anywhere close to easy to listen to – it loops, crashes, soars, speeds and then often unpredictably stops in 26 sometimes rather brief (although the tracks are mostly longer than Volume 1 – there are actually semi-songs here) melodramatic bursts of intense energy. Like Dilla, it draws the melody out from small parts of larger creations, and amplifies that element before quickly casting it aside and moving on.
I don’t ever expect a wide audience for this, as much as I personally buzz to it. Its wider influence is undeniable though, which takes me to:
Eighties r&b vocal samples – the big gorgeous but wretched ballad type, think Alexander O’Neal, Morris Day and Paul Lawrence – stripped of their post-boogie synths and structure and dragged in pieces, sometimes a tiny fraction, other times a whole verse, to a bass soundscape mostly defined by the aforesaid Chicago juke and the urban inventiveness of Britain’s eternally bleak urban spawls.
And thus, appropriately, this is made in Liverpool, in the same way the UK garages and clubs have ripped apart and subverted US underground sounds since The Beatles (and then often handed them back – witness the interesting US made stuff in the often very regressive and somewhat depressing Pitchfork 50 this year: it almost all draws from Britain’s cities).
Half the fun is trying to work out exactly where that verse comes from – what battered 12” tucked in the back of a box that I haven’t played for decades has that very familiar few seconds been lifted from? It’s a game that can drive you nuts.
Most fun, part dua. A record to lift you back to mid-nineties rave culture, albeit with twists added from the present day.
What? No, me neither. I was well past rave culture by the mid 1990s, hanging out blowing whistles and sucking on various gases to get a thrill never quite did it for me. It was little like the ugly end of the punk era after 1980 – when the distant ‘burbs who never quite got it earlier on, all rushed to town and misunderstood. And, yes that’s as elitist and old-ist as fuck because it wasn’t my scene but it’s my page, so be it.
So mostly I liked this because it was both uplifting at a time when I needed inspiration and because of – once again – how it gathered past strands together and unashamedly modernised. A track like Surph might have all the synths and sway of an old Network kiddie-rave tune but the vocals and the production takes it bang into 2011. In late 2012 it will probably sound dreary, but I rarely take more than a handful of records I love with me from year to year, and this is one I know I’m just loving for the moment.
House music has lasted far longer than it should have. It’s overstayed its welcome by a decade or more, and yes as cynical as I want to be about it, like rock’n’roll, which had its last inspired, non-recyling, moment around 1990, I’m still a sucker for a recording like this and I’m a sucker for Omar-S, who’s raw grooves travel their own individualist course.
This album is almost an anachronism in 2011 as electronic music flows and mutates at an increasing speed, driven by the past, the future and the technology, but it really doesn’t matter because – with the sole exception of the grating Look Hear Watch – with an unnecessary porno sample swamping the whole track – every track on here is agelessly sublime.
What really gets me – at this particular moment, probably not in five minutes but I’ll write it down whilst I think of it in case it slips – is: who are all these people? Not specifically the two people who made these two records, but the hundreds of people who arrive every year, make astounding records and then seem to slip away. It’s mostly a 2000s phenomena – at least to the levels we now see it.
The thing is, at least half the people who have made the music I’m talking about on this page are new to me. I have never heard of them before. And I may not hear of them a year or so from now. Our turnover has accelerated and continues to do so.
Maybe I’m ignorant. Maybe the world has passed me by and I simply don’t know anything anymore. Or maybe it’s just become so pepper-shot democratised out there that the taste or market makers no longer make any rules that matter.
Almost no records make every list. In 1979 when I was a kid, Talking Head’s Fear of Music, Gang of 4’s Entertainment, Armed Forces, London Calling, Setting Sons and about a dozen other albums made every single end of year summation.
That was it unless you niched yourself in jazz, classical or country.
No longer – there are literally hundreds of records that are now amongst the best of 2011, and that’s a mighty thing. No longer are a few scribes and a few content-creating corporations defining what we like or should like. There is no need to feel insecure because you simply don’t get the widely touted top album. Or know who they are.
Now you make your own list and the rest be damned.
So – returning to this – I’d not spent much time with Travis Stewart, despite the fact his name had gone around and round since 2001, and he recorded for a well trendy label (Merck). It was more a case of other folks mentioning him and me not really taking the time to notice, and then when I heard Room (S) somehow feeling insecure or inadequite in the knowledge that I’d also missed things like this (from 2009):
Thus I comforted myself with the above personal meme. You can’t know everything.
And jumped into Machinedrum’s 8th or 9th album, depending on how you measure these things, on its own merits, partially based on the fact that Planet Mu is the one label that’s not let me down in the last year or two.
Room(s) finishes with a tune called Come1, a joyous tune which leads from a piano and percussive riff that really could’ve been lifted from an old UK house stormer, circa 1992 (think Congress ), it seems rather out of place here although the point of the placement seems obvious: none of the tracks before could’ve existed without it.
The ten earlier tracks provide a complex but grand amalgam of contemporary styles, genres, sub-genres, and mini-genres and it is all but none of those exactly – the parts have created a greater whole. A gorgeous, unique and utterly confident release that was as perfectly pop as a record could possibly be without feeling the need to be subsumed by a charge for the charts.
And in that way it will likely define this year far more as time passes than much of what we hear on radio and see in our top 40s. I feel the need to toss superlatives at Room(s), but can’t find anymore that don’t sound trite (I think I’m already sailing too close to that..), so I won’t.
Record of the year maybe?
And if that wasn’t enough, Sepalcure – Stewart with Praveen Sharma – have made an album that might also make claim to that. It’s odd to hear such a celebration of all things electronic, as filtered by the British underground, come from American producers, but so it is. The shambolic route that is the endless dissection and reassembly of all things dance and rhythmic by UK acts in the past twenty years or more provide the backdrop and elements necessary for this wonderfully soulful excursion that even borrows a line or two from Pete Townshend on one of the standouts, See Me Feel Me.
Less dense and arguably a little more flowery than Stewart’s epic solo disc, Sepalcure makes few claims to be much more than just a wonderful listen, an acceptable artistic indulgence. And so it is.
Vaughn Robert Squire is from Vancouver and is a big part of the reason Canada has become really interesting musically in recent years. Free to all comers via his website (there is a new album up there in the past day or so, but I’ve had no time to listen).
Stylistically this sits in the never-never land from long long ago, where genres sat together comfortably – where house music and hip-hop were related and ideologically co-existed. And thus you have deep, deep house – with clear references to the music found on that Nu Groove record above, next to hip-hop that knows both Pete Rock and Shadow. And it’s extraordinary, and sensual and quite timeless.
I like the way this record is intentionally un-numbered – you choose the track order that suits you. I find myself ordering the slower tracks – what could tentatively be called hip-hop – towards the end of this sprawling collection that embraces styles that supposedly clash. To flow from the faster tracks – house if you need a descriptor, and mostly we do, to the down paced tunes makes sense.
From LA and unashamedly lo-fi, this album, an almost perfect melding of hip-hop and an alternative, almost folky ethos, was perhaps the most immediate thing I listened to all year. I feel in love with it first after finding this video on some site or other, and the album followed quickly.
A collection of ghostly, intensely melodic and irresistible mini-symphonies that sometimes feel almost too fragile to exist in the real world beyond the creator’s head, Bad Vibes is the opposite of much else I’ve liked in 2011 in that it’s not complex or technology driven. But for that that, I find this sits comfortably with the surreal, spectral aura of much of the best music I’ve heard and loved this year.
And yes, it’s almost too late to say anything more about it as it became the hipster album – they call it a mixtape but the line is at best arbitrary surely – to own and love this year. I did both despite its ubiquity and omnipresence – and Drake’s latter day anointment.
I’ve long had a strong love-dislike thing going on with New Zealand hip-hop. Every time I fall head over heals with something – and there have been more than a few moments across the years – I get bludgeoned in short order by something else that misses the point so awfully that it drives me away.
And then there is this – a bonafide classic of underplayed homeliness, culturally unique, for want of a better word but there rarely is one, soul that buries all those cringe factors once again and takes me back home again.
I worry that the system is so restricted in New Zealand these days, so defined by a very few anointed big acts, that the wealth of fascinating acts, like @peace, often slip through the cultural cracks. Why isn’t this album everywhere? Is it on mainstream radio? Or then, perhaps it is and I missed it from afar. It did however take a couple of clued up friends to point me towards it.
Why do I search YouTube and get “No video results for “@peace””? The NZoA grants list seems to be devoid of their name. Hopefully it’s just because they haven’t asked.
Sure, it has a clear debt to the seminal Native Tongues posse, and whilst it is arguably somewhat unadventurous musically, the sounds are still sublime and it speaks to me in way most hip-hop in 2011 doesn’t. The words are considered, evocatively emotional and uniquely those of a young voice in the country I grew up in and call home, and that makes it much more than just another hip-hop record.
What any ugly word dubstep has become. It’s the ultimate musical hate word now. Much like Prog was in 1977 or Trance in 2000. Grumpy old men sit in cafes complaining that the clubs have become infested by ‘dubstep’. Forums rage against it. There are dozens of Facebook pages like <a href=”https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dubstep-needs-to-die/100427843330164″>this.
And then there are records like this: wonderful, dramatic, almost ethereal at times, inspired and organic collections that hover around the history of the term but have long ago moved on from the thing that so many love to despise.
These two – Pinch (Rob Ellis) and (Sam) Shackleton – defined the progressive edge of the genre and Pinch’s Underwater Dancehall, from 2007, sits comfortably as one of the decades classics. From it emanated so much, and yet here we are four years on with an album that makes Dancefloor seem almost Neolithic.
The ghost of post-punk past – not the sounds, but the ethic – infuses this. It’s radical, experimental and soothing all the same time. It takes few prisoners but offers up little resistance when you want to love it.
A couple of years back I rather fell for Andy Stott’s Unknown Exception, a compilation of his earlier vinyl releases. I liked, then loved and swooned around to it, despite the fact that little on it was in anyway sonically innovative. It was – simply – a gloriously warm, heavily melodic, comfortable melding of classic deep-house and nu-techno that I loved to have around.
Despite my love affair (and the fact that I still play it all the time) I mostly lost touch with Stott’s releases thereafter. His name would appear on release sheets, I’d see the odd track on Boomkat or Phonica, but unintentionally I’d lose the thought to listen in the increasingly disorganised – and sometimes frantic – way I hunt the internet for new music.
And then came Passed Me By, and, a month or two later, its sequel We Stay Together. A couple of online reviews drove me back towards the guy and I bit.
In a way I’m glad I didn’t try and cross the ground between the compilation and this duo of less than full length releases (both are around 35mins) because that allowed me to approached the first of these, Passed Me By, as a novice – unprepared – and I wasn’t led down or confused by what may have been a fairly uncomfortable route to this place (I’ve since taken a couple of inquisitive steps backwards into 2009 and 2010 and I’m not unhappy I missed the stop 0ffs).
Passed Me By, and the record that followed, have almost no relationship with Unknown Exception, aside from a name. You can’t draw an unbroken line between the three.
So instead of the traditional electronic dance landscapes of the earlier work, Stott now confronts and challenges the listener with something that sounds like the aural equivalent of Logan’s Run. The albums, or album if we consider these to be one work – are almost leaden in their slow post apocalyptic grind, which sounds awful but is majestically quite the opposite.
There is an obvious debt to the fractured tonality of Actress, and yet Arthur Russell’s most adventurous and intriguing work is all over these records, as is the minimalism electronica of The Field, Shackleton and Maurizio and yet it is none of these as this work stretches the relationship between techno, dub and texture just that little further.
Bleak, dark, and extraordinarily beautiful, perhaps the album/s of the year.
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This was an amazing, wonderful year to be listening to new music.
As an aside, every one of these – with the exception of She’s So Rad and Thundercat – I own the digital edition of. This is the year I mostly dispensed with CD altogether, and will now, unless unavoidable, purchase on file and vinyl.
I had a wonderful lunch with my friend Chris Bourke a week or two back, sitting in his grand living room up in the hills above Wellington. The day was blue and gorgeous as only the capital can turn on -on those days, not as rare as we Aucklanders would like to think, when it supplies the sort of weather it loves to boast about when it repeatedly says ‘you should see me on a beautiful day’.
Chris has a magnificent view, almost beyond words. I’d love to post a shot of the man standing in his balcony – overlooking the harbour and the rugged undulations of the hills that roll down to it – but he made me promise faithfully when I took several not to put any online, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
Before, over and after lunch Chris pulled out books and boxes of items, many of which were used by him when researching his groundbreaking book, the Book of The Year winner, Blue Smoke, an incredible, inclusive, history of pre-Beatles New Zealand popular culture.
They included a box of old 78s which he’d been gifted – including the first recording ever made New Zealand, and a bunch of those Australian pressed Parlophone issues from the 30s with the fabulous New Zealand labels:
A national treasure.
Not Chris, that is – he is too young and still has far too much to contribute to be lumbered with such an onerous tag – but the book itself.
It is, of course, a book about music, or at least that is the raison d’être it hangs itself around, and I guess it probably needed one, not least to convince publishers who, in New Zealand, are rarely adventurous folk (this is published by the University Of Auckland). It’s subtitled ‘The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964′ and it methodically and joyously tells that story in a way that not only draws the reader inescapably in, but also takes you to the world that surrounded the music and those that made it. It talks extensively and details, but never boringly – quite the opposite – the people who made it possible for others to make music or were pivotal in the dissemination of the sounds that shaped what we listen to now.
I’m thinking of people like Arthur Pearce, who, via his radio shows based in Wellington but broadcast much further afield – across years when radio showed active disinterest in anything contemporary - educated, informed and entertained generations of eager ears. His (as linked) biography on Te Ara, well written by Chris, is very thorough but it is hardly likely to excite anyone given that it sits in a general online encyclopaedia of New Zealand bibliography.
It takes Chris’ book to do just that. I think it’s one of the most important New Zealand works to be printed since… well, since I don’t know when. Let’s use the word ‘ever’.
I’ve read Blue Smoke twice, and given a copy away to somebody I knew needed to own a copy but was unlikely to ever buy one (he did and said so repeatedly after he’d finished it).
However, what makes this crucial work so different to the vast bulk of the many, many New Zealand non-fiction works I have on my shelves is that it doesn’t just tell us the factual parameters of our past. It doesn’t just document and record the music made and the music makers, it instead broadly opens up for us, excitingly in both visual and written ways, how we entertained ourselves for the best part of three quarters of a century.
Blue Smoke is an extraordinary work and we’ve never seen the like of it in print before – that I know of at least. The words, the layout, the imagery and the the overall style all contribute to its uniqueness.
The pages on Johnny Devlin – never before documented or written this way with such life – not only tell the story of one of the most astounding frenzied phenomena ever in New Zealand, but – more – what it felt like to be a 15 year old in big town and smaller town NZ at the time.
You feel as if you are one step away from the stage at The Jive Centre when Devlin first arrived in January 1958.
How we entertained ourselves and – more – how we interacted with and those being entertained drove that entertainment, because we did – Devlin was a public phenomena long before Phil Warren and Graeme Dent took that to the next level, and kids were screaming at him simply because he was Devlin – is as much who we are as any stories of war (they’re in here too but in a way they’ve never been told before – the war stories alone make this book worth the admission price), social demographics, politics or the nation’s traumatic upheavals.
All of which are included here as well of course, as our entertainment reflects, reacts and then influences.
The story of the Maori Community Centre in Freeman’s Bay (extant until a few years ago – in most of the world it would’ve earned a plaque on the wall, in ours it’s now a glass block unmarked) says more to me of the Maori exodus from the country into the ‘smoke than any number of words on paper or screen full of statistics. Kiri Te Kanawa used to share a rickety stage with Charlie Tumahai once upon a time. That, to me, is fabulous in so many ways, but until now, until Blue Smoke, who that wasn’t of that era knew?
Hell, you even begin to like Sir Howard Morrison as a person. Almost.
I get in huge trouble sometimes because I’m not traditionally patriotic. I hate national anthems (who exactly is defending New Zealand and from what. Given the last twelve months or so the endless request seems to have fallen on deaf ears, besides it’s an awful minute or two of stodgy music). Flags turn me off. All these things cause wars. They kill people.
If we lose on the weekend it may take more than a faux-deity to save the nation, at least in the short term.
That said, I’m very culturally patriotic. I love and am completely enthralled by where I come from, and by the places that the stories in this book will indirectly take those who come after even if they don’t know it at the time or ever – because all on a personal and national level that is driven by the cultural stories we have created in our islands. And no matter where I am in the world that stays with me.
It’s why expats away for decades still call New Zealand home. It is. It is who we are.
Chris’ book tells me so much of that and I love it.
I wrote a piece for Social Media NZ a short while back. It was published here, and seems to have picked up a pretty positive response, although, given a few of the comments from the US & Europe, I continue to be amused/bemused by the way Western observers misunderstand the new Asia, either simply because they don’t get the scope of what is happening in this part of the world, and how it it effects the global future, or because – almost wilfully – they just don’t want to. A step back and an attempt to look at the world in a timeline that goes beyond the year, decade or even century we are in is helpful.
Or, hell, maybe I’ve just got it wrong and I should simply hang tight for the next U2 album to work out my cultural bearings.
One who did seem to understand what I tried to say was Asian Correspondent’s Jon Russell, here.
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This photo turned up from nowhere thirty-two years after the event – which was a record signing session in Taste Records in Hight Street in Auckland in July ’79, a store owned by a quiet hero of mine, the late and much missed Dave Perkins.
The guy with the glasses behind Ig is Kim Sinclair, a mate of mine who some years later would win not only an Oscar, but a BAFTA. Further back is David Herkt, another good friend through the years, who is now a writer and director of some note, and a spokesman from time to time for the gay community.
The guy behind with the moustache is Terry Hogan, the man who designed the Ak79 and Class of 81 sleeves, plus countless iconic posters. He also signed Toy Love to WEA Records – he was art director there – and thus played a huge part in the evolution of the NZ recording industry.
The woman in front of him is the Auckland actor and playwright Yvette Parsons.
The woman talking to Ig is Anne Louise Martin, then Rip It Up writer and now somewhere in the South Island.
The guy almost out of shot to the right is Jonathan Tidball, one of my best friends at the time and someone who’s images of the Auckland punk scene are now amongst the most iconic. His younger brother, Andrew, is familiar to anyone who knows anything about the music being made in NZ.
A pretty amazing shot, it was taken by the iconic artist and cartoonist Chris Slane and I had no idea he had taken it until yesterday.
Iggy was in the country to promote his New Values album and was friendly, funny and talkative - and signed all sorts of things including backs, shoes and a couple of handbags. I managed to get my whole Pop/Stooges collection squiggled on – on Raw Power he drew a tree all over the cover and, underneath, wrote ‘Iggy grew here’.
Despite his later notoriety there were surprisingly few people at the afternoon-long instore. Ig bought two cassettes: a Hank Williams collection and Donna Summer’s On The Radio.
We latter spent part of the evening with him but that’s another whole story.
I don’t usually link to the Soundcloud mixes that fill part of my working day. No reason – they just come, often make me happy and productive, and then go. Every now and then I’ll favourite one but rarely if ever, given the amount of time that exists in my day and the way I go through music, return to them.
I might play this one again: Juan Atkins & Master Reece (a.k.a Kevin Saunderson), two thirds of the holy Detroit triumvirate who did their bit to shift the world’s musical axis in the 1980s and beyond, recorded off a 1994 Deep Space Radio show hosted by R&S, the hugely important Belgian label. It is, I think, Kevin Saunderson actually in the mix all the way through, and – I’m not sure about this having only met the guy once – Juan Atkins voice. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong.
Either way, it’s a fantastic, albeit noisy, mix that draws from all edges of the electronic spectrum.
From left to right: Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins, Eddie Fowlkes and Derrick May on the day they were honoured by the Detroit Historical Museum for inventing the future.
Simon Reynolds knows a lot about the history of rock, pop, soul and all forms of popular music, as well as the interesting bits from the edges. He, over the years, has recited this perfectly – in perfectly formed books that I mostly – with reservations as below – always enjoy reading. And, too, online, where his blog is a must-read. His knowledge is detailed, arguably encyclopaedic in scope. I’ve always had a lot of space for his words and the journey through places I know fairly well that those words often take you to.
That said, despite my liking for his works over the past decades, I wasn’t going to.
The central premise of the book – that popular music has become so involved in its own past that it’s now going around in what Reynolds describes in the book as ever faster [and, by implication, destructive] circles; that it has lost track of a future and seems overwhelmed by its multiple and varied obsessions with rock’n'roll (and soul and electronica – insert whatever genre you want)’s glorious, and often inglorious history – seems to me in mid-2011 to be vaguely ridiculous.
Mostly, he says, music has eaten itself:
It could be like in jazz, where young players come forward who do good stuff, but it’s not going anywhere and it doesn’t have any connection to the zeitgeist. But it’s not just rock that’s ailing; it’s everything—including electronic music now.1
That said, Reynolds writes well and I wanted to see where he took the argument, so I found myself unable to move the pointer away from the one-click.
Even having done that, I found myself reluctant to leap in. It sat on the hard-drive for ages whilst I read two other books. I though about deleting it, but knew I wouldn’t. A few days back, having finished a fascinating but ponderous history of the British Empire, I needed something like this. It was time.
I was drawn in – so much so, that I was on seat’s edge, reading this on kindle, waiting intently for the killer hypothesis that would draw together the pages – upon multiple pages – where he carefully documents the many revivalist sects, tribes, sub-movements, the year 1965 – where, if I get his point, the beginning of the endgame began, albeit in the fashion world, fascinating theories and essays on future/past and more – before rounding, in the final sections, on technology: the iPod, blogs, mp3 and the abundance of the digital marketplace, both legit and otherwise. It’s a mighty sweep and gathers large amounts of fascinating data, stories and more, many of which make intriguing and engrossing reading. I loved the tales of the concert / event re-creationists – the folk who recreated Bowie’s final July 1973 Ziggy show in 1998 gave the show a red-tinge to match the filters used on the famous D.A. Pennebaker film, so that those who were actually there in ’73 would not feel cheated by their now rearranged, and DVD-distorted memories of the event.
And there is the brief, rather funny, look at the most non-collectable records ever – in the USA it’s the likes of Alan Parsons Project, a (non)band so ugly that even decades on they have acquired absolutely no retro, cultural or musical value. Or Bob Seger. In the UK it’s Terence Trent D’Arby. In New Zealand, sadly, it’s tail end Split Enz – the last couple of albums, and those formless 90s albums by forgotten major label acts like World Gone Wild. These are the records that never leave the cheapie bins no matter how many years pass.
All that is wonderful reading, but I realised as I turned the last (digital) page – the counter said 73% so I was still highly expectant of that killer blow but the balance was index and notes – that I was to be left dry. I’d been fed a litany of quite glorious and captivating stories but I was expected to make the case myself by pulling all those together. And I couldn’t. I wasn’t even offered a vaguely appealing batch of strawmen. Instead, I was left with the potted introduction:
This is the way that pop ends, not with a BANG but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing and an overpriced ticket to the track-by-track restaging of the Pixies or Pavement album you played to death in your first year at university.
and a bunch of subjectively handpicked stories that were supposed to illustrate exactly why that was the case, but failed to do so when the niches and railing against technology were left to their own devices to solidify into a coherent case without Reynolds drawing the converging lines he clearly sees in his head. And that was it. I was frustrated. Worse. Gutted.
Contrary to expectations, I was left feeling that Reynolds has constructed his own exercise in nostalgia, in retromania for the passion he’s now losing for a core part of his life to date. He seems to flurrying around trying to work out why this is, and instead of dealing with the obvious, has instead drawn a circle around a series of fascinating cultural markers – beautifully put and wonderfully detailed, sure, as a way of dealing with this. At the end, I sat back and all I can see was a rather unnecessarily sad document, albeit one that will find some resonance with many older readers and scribes, as indeed it already has. In fact, Reynolds asks:
How many records released in 2011 will be as worthwhile an acquisition for a neophyte listener as Rubber Soul, Astral Weeks, Closer, Hatful of Hollow?
Probably quite a few – just not for the author it appears, who, while feigning optimism towards the end – well, he’d have to, wouldn’t he – seems stuck in a slightly curmudgeonly and unlinked sweep against a long list of evils and portents of cultural disaster which he uses to try and explain his disillusionment. I really don’t want to state the obvious, and Reynolds tries to counter it, but those two inevitable words, generation gap, are something we all have to deal with: Reynolds just has the eloquent means to turn his confusion into 449 quite readable pages (in the printed version).
Most of us just go to the pub and sing the old songs. Or go and see The Buzzcocks one more time.
I really enjoyed the writer’s book, Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 – it documented exhaustively a time that matters to me, but like his earlier book on dance culture, another era I was intensely involved with and have an emotional tie to, it seemed somehow divorced from the music. It was words – good words. It covered the ground, listed the acts, but failed to convey much of the passion. It was oddly bloodless. And yet, now that we have the digital means to add the missing soul to the stories and progress documented in those books (RIU was printed a year or two before YouTube arrived) he finds reason to rail against its negative impact.
Actually, I’m not sure music of any kind really works in a museum, a place of hush and decorum.
Isn’t that exactly what the self-anointed role of so many music critics is – Reynolds included? As a teen, I used to look at the pages of lists printed in magazines like Melody Maker and NME: things like the ’100 Greatest Singles of All Time’; ‘The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time’ (yes, really, they were that ridiculously definitive) compiled and annotated by reverential scribes as documents from above. I wanted – I needed – those records, many, if not most of which I couldn’t get. That obscurity was part of the reason they were so desirable. Sadly, many let me down when I did hear them: Spirit’s 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus anyone? 2
Endless fawning over The Beach Boys, Sun, The Velvets and Motown filled acres of print. It’s hard to argue that Rip it Up and Start Again doesn’t have something of the air of a museum catalogue about it. You really can’t have it both ways.
And that somehow leads me to another problem with the book.
Reynolds:
But then again, isn’t there something profoundly wrong about the fact that so much of the greatest music made during the last decade sounds like it could have been made twenty, thirty, even forty years earlier?
It may to you, Simon, however I’m writing this with an iTunes playlist I call Early 2011 playing randomly (a sin apparently – and yes I do tend to listen to songs all the way through: it provides the joy of discovery that Reynolds claims we have lost). Its 132 tracks are ones I’ve loved this year – all new tracks (I have another playlist for reissues) – and it’s fucking fabulous. It’s fresh, challenging and quite delicious. Some of the songs stun – I stop and replay. It’s full of ghosts from the vast musical past, but those ghosts are just that. The influences, the borrowings, the ghosts, are not producing music that sounds like it could have been ‘made twenty, thirty, even forty years earlier’.
Borrowing – even quite slavishly – from the past, or for that matter, from a geographic elsewhere, almost always produces subtle and re-defining change. Reynolds points to The Flaming Groovies as a slavishly retro band in the 1970s. They copied The Beatles. Not just the music, but the clothes, the hair and the graphics. Did they sound like The Beatles? No. They the sounded like a band trying to sound like The Beatles and their recordings opened the door to an interesting amalgam of Beatle-ish melodic guitar pop that sat on the edge of punk, called power-pop 3. That mutated once again in the 1980s, and found resonance amongst many of the early NZ post punk bands. Some took power pop and added ska rhythms.
I could point to NZ hip-hop too: it copied West Coast US rap quite ruthlessly in the early days but ended up sounding absolutely nothing like it, despite the detractors who were both accusing the acts of being weighed down by imitation and clearly not listening whilst doing so.
We borrow, we adapt, we steal, we plagiarise, we look backwards whilst creating the forward, and the play-list I’m listening to right now has all of that. Punk, post punk, hip hop, The Beatles, house and electronica – the touchstones so beloved by Reynolds, and touted as missing in action now, all had all of those things. They all stole, often quite blatantly. There may be no all-pervasive recording artist dominating and changing the planet, but, really, there hasn’t been since The Beatles. Even Michael Jackson, for all his millions of sales, didn’t change the musical direction of the planet as much as few guys in the Bronx cutting up records. Or the kids in urban UK who have changed the face of record production forever with the more interesting end of dubstep.
It strikes me that Retromania is more about a loss of personal faith in new music by the writer, rather than a larger malaise. Through it comes a writer who no longer wants to get it. And neither should he feel the need to – there is no obligation to always keep up, to be endlessly enthralled by the new, to have to sit on the forward edge. However, to assail that loss of faith with an overriding ‘the good times are gone’ extended essay makes no sense to me. And that, in the end, is what I got from Retromania.
Really, who cares if bands reform to play their complete albums as a concert piece? Certainly not the kids who mostly haven’t an idea who or what a Joy Division album or Pet Sounds is, regardless of how much we elderly leftovers would like to romanticise that they do. And if they do, what is the harm of drawing from that legacy?
Pop ought to be all about the present tense, surely? says Reynolds. I agree. However, my daughter wears an Aladdin Sane T-shirt. She’s sixteen and wants to make music (and movies). David Bowie will likely impact on her present tense when she creates those things, but he won’t define it – that will be done by her own world.
