"Ish" - Unlicensed/Bootleg Edition
james
chicago 1,863 Posts
I don???t know how many folks know this, but in the first half of the life of soulstrut there used to be this occasional feature called ???Ish,??? which was just dudes picking ten records--sometimes there was a theme, sometimes not--and talking a little about how and why they were into them. I started with soulstrut around like 2000, and I remember ???Ish???es started a couple-few years after that, once the community on the messageboard had coalesced a little and the personality of the place had really started revealing itself.
I imagine that a fair amount of the records checked therein would get ho-hums today, but the kind of focus and voice they were presented with was a big deal to me, and there???s a number of those features that I think back on with a lot of fondness: Decade- and genre-spanning shit from High-C, rape_donkeys, and noz; Bambouche???s black-power records; tenaciously regional shit from Deejay_OM and jinx74; prairie b-boy shit from my man DCastillo; young HCrink sample-spotting(!) spoken-word records; Aussie and Euro dudes--Kinetic, Sheep, John Stapleton, et al.--hammering away at shit I???d never see otherwise; and on and on and on.
Anyway, sometime in the last year or two someone floated the idea of reanimating the ???Ish??? feature and started collecting names. I don???t at all consider myself a collector of the same magnitude of the dudes I???ve listed, but I learned a lot from those features at a time when I really had a lot to learn, and I wanted to make some gesture toward repaying the favor. I PM???d soulstrut management in late 2013, and never heard anything back.
But like the man says ???If I can???t get in the club / the club???s in the parking lot,??? you know? So in the interest of settling accounts, I???m just gonna leave this here:
???
The Makers
???Don???t Challenge Me???
(Midney 197?)
If you???re a record collector with any kind of obscure focus, over time that focus tends to drive you inward, deeper into your own sensibility. Because of that, I think you always remember those first few occasions when you hear your tastes reflected back to you from without, and get those first independent confirmations that this music that has for you become so interior might actually have some kind of resonance in the world beyond your headphones.
That???s an oblique way of saying that, as someone who at the time self-identified mostly as an eccentric-funk obscurantist, first stepping into Sheer Magic???s monthly at Danny???s Tavern around 2001 unfastened my wig considerably. I know I sound like every dude ever with this, but you gotta understand: Just a few years prior I had moved to Chicago from a place where ???hearing funk played out??? mostly meant maybe the shitty marina band at that lily-white place out by the lake might fuck up a let a couple minutes of ???Tighten Up??? slip out, and here was a room packed windows-to-the-wall with a decently (if not thoroughly) polyglot and largely non-record-nerd crowd sweating out their good shirt to shit like Scorpio and His People???s ???Unforgiven,??? Timeless Legend???s ???(Baby) Don???t Do This To Me,??? East Of Underground???s ???Hell Below,??? and god knows what else.
The night ran from 10:00 until 2:00, and the consensus among my kind of people was that while it was okay if you showed up a little late, you never wanted to leave early, because that last hour was when they played the really fractured, otherworldly shit. Records like Sidney Owens???s ???Sputnik,??? and like this one. This was pre-smoking-ban, pre-E2 Chicago, and by 1:00 on a Wednesday night the whole overcrowded room was a single compressed cube of human, pumping slow Flemish hell: the bare wood floorboards would be spongy, the air would be the color of coffee, we???d all be on the far side of something, and then some incredible song would come on that sounded like spaceman brain with drums, and all you could do was look around with goggled eyes and hope that it would all somehow wait for you. Hearing records like this in a place like that was affirming in a way I???ve never forgotten. Peace to funky promethean DCastillo for getting me out of the house, and to Superhost DCarfagna, without whom.
I???ve already talked a little bit about this record elsewhere and so won???t repeat all that, but would add that this record is really pretty fucking unique. The Makers have another far poppier 45 on Midney under another name and with a different singer, and an eerie religious-jazz-prog 45 on another label with the same singer but under yet another name. I tracked down one of the dudes in the band, Mark, and he told me that they were all session players who played for protean discotheque maximalist Boris Midney on his various records in exchange for him producing their demo, which they wanted to shop to a major. Mark says that although Midney???s production on their demo was pretty straightforward, when they did session work for his records he would take the individual tracks they put down and process and recombine them in ways that no one could ever figure out. And indeed, the band???s demo tracks, while having their own spacy, tuneful appeal, are nothing like the forward-looking and rhythmically slippy tracks that Midney put together for his own use. Listening to the demo tracks you can clearly detect something of the same sonic fiber that???s on the Makers record--the raw building blocks of the sound are definitely there???but some crucial juke is missing. The chromed elasticity and deep cyborg bounce of ???Don???t Challenge Me??? belong to it alone.
Saafir
???Light Sleeper???
(Qwest 1994)
This record was kind of a turning point in the way I listened to music. About halfway through college I saw it on Rap City or whatever, when I was like nineteen or twenty, and I was not feeling it, did not understand it at all, and in my case-hardened East Coast orthodoxy--laughable now, but serious business back then, dunny--borderline refused to recognize it as rap music. The video finished, and I screwfaced and rolled my eyes and sucked my teeth, and the day went on (including this odd interlude where the resident racist gym-rat tried to bond with me over a TBS broadcast of Clash Of The Titans, an awkward and eternal-seeming conversation with heavy Of Mice And Men vibes, but I digress), but man, I could not stop thinking about that fucking Saafir song.
A couple years before, I???d read some book about boxing, and one of the trainers was talking about how even the best heavyweight fighter could lose to some untrained flyweight yokel: Boxing, he said, has an accepted kind of timing, its own particular grammar, that creates a zone where trained, experienced fighters unconsciously but consistently operate; and all it takes is for the yokel to step slightly outside of that timing, and anything could happen.
I???m not saying I was some heavyweight, and I???m sure not saying that Saafir was some yokel, but this was definitely outside of whatever sense of timing and grammar that I had at the time. I fucking hated it, but I knew I needed it, and it stands as one of the formative instances of my buying a record not in spite of not understanding it, but buying it because I didn???t understand it.
I have a little more of a handle on it now, twenty years later, but it???s still a slippery, amazing record to me. Probably about fifteen percent of it is battle-MC flimflam--you know, that shit that rappers of a certain pedigree use just to get from Point A to Point B (calling it a ???mic device,??? saying ???I???m lyrically [verb]ing,??? etc.)--but the rest of it is a master class in how a really great MC can make so much hang together on so little, can hold up a skyscraper with just a couple thumbtacks. Dude???s flow is so dense, and his rhyme scheme so disjointed, and there???s a lost weekend???s worth of unintelligible phantom shit going on in the background, and the track has this flabby, slabby, sunken-submarine-bell, thrice-dubbed-tape fog to it, but???but???it???s also got those two little sung parts (the ???I???m just a roustabout??? part, as well as the evergreen real-head Successory that is ???I don???t need psychology to see the dichotomy in me???), and even though I like those far less than I like the murky parts, I can???t deny that they???re the two perfectly placed, perfectly delivered, and perfectly oxygenated pin-pricks that somehow crystallize the whole thing. Beautiful.
I think I also own this on double promo vinyl somewhere, but this cassingle was what I was working with back then, so this is gonna have to be okay with you.
The Fans
???Deathwish???
(Blue Beam 1980)
My dear friend Hopkins is an Atlanta native, and he put me up on this record at a listening session a number of years ago. My grip on punk and new wave is limited, but this record had me going all kinds of apeshit in pretty short order. The opening is the kind of anxious, angular gallop that will be familiar to Southern-college-rock witnesses of a certain vintage; to the rest of you, it will just sound like ???Runnin??? Down A Dream.??? Once the vocals come in, though--gothic and overwrought, but also heavy with real threat--the song turns pure idea-bomb, every line a manifesto: ???Give me just real vision,??? ???Go on and take / ???cause I don???t need what I make,??? and my favorite, one of the few lines that can challenge Kool Keith???s ???I just need what I need??? as a near-perfect distillation of my worldview: ???What do you mean, ???personal????! EVERYTHING???s personal!!!??? The music is nothing too unhinged for about the first two-thirds, but then everything parts for a weird hard-panned ???one!???/???zero!??? count-off, with the competing voices getting progressively more frayed. After an absolutely hope-devouring scream, the music slams back in for the final sixty seconds, this time all wiggy radar-scramble guitar and lacerating synth scree. The title phrase hisses out of and into the green ether, then a single, stentorian ???ONE!??? brings the gavel down on everything forever.
The last I heard, lead singer and chief idea man Alfredo Villar was working at the library at Emory, but refused to talk about The Fans, or about anything else, for that matter, with the exception of the political situation in his native Cuba.
The multifoliate packaging for this record is scrappy and gorgeous in the finest 1980 DIY tradition. My copy would be perfect except for I gave the lyric insert to Hopkins because his copy was without.
Larry Dixon
I???am So In Love
(LAD, 1980)
I have a soft spot for this record probably for two particular reasons: One, it was recorded just a stone???s throw away, at the wonderfully/appallingly named Copherbox. And two, it???s the last good record I pulled out of the original location of Dr. Wax, a store that taught me a great deal about my own city (and where I once saw a Camaro parked outside with vanity plates that said ???GDKNGBD???--George Benson still gets it in around here, believe it).
Moreover, it???s just a great local record, you know? Ramshackle, a little confused, but charming as hell. The best fast song on this record and the best slow song on this record both have the same first line--???Hey you, over there??????--and because this is Chicago, you get bongos under everything, no charge. Inner life, inner limits, equal measures. My kind of???record.
The Arms Of Someone New
Burying The Carnival
(Office Records 1984)
Midwestern dolmen music, colonially homebrewed Pink Floyd, a drum machine recorded with unusual crispness punctuates dragged parlor organ to create nervous flicker and thick strobe, while some weird processing gives the sound a reversed, sucking quality, the kiss gone wrong. The voice reaches out in reclusive half-harmony, singing against someone who is there only in moments.
On the lyric sheet, almost none of the songs is transcribed accurately: some songs are printed with verses they don???t actually have, some songs are printed with verses missing, and some songs have unrelated poetry printed in place of their lyrics. It becomes hard to tell whether the words are calling into question the existence of the songs, or vice versa, and thinking about what???s added and what???s left out and what???s transformed slowly pieces together in the mind this little shadow country that hovers somewhere between the page and the ear.
This record has what I think of as a particularly Midwestern feeling: on the one hand it sounds visionary and aspirational, a hopeful if challenging transmission, but it also sounds irrevocably entombed in the everyday. There is always a tomorrow, yes, but tomorrow is always a work day.
My first exposure to this band was via a worked copy of their excellent first seven-inch--???The Holy Dance??? / ???Whitefriars??????that was part of a foot-high stack of sleeveless beaters I blind-bought at X Records in Greenville, South Carolina in a ???I???ll sell ???em to you cheap, but you gotta buy the whole box???-type deal from my man Ted. I lost that copy in a heater accident a few years later, but over the following decade managed mint up incrementally, and now I have a nice copy with all the pieces. Anyway, The Arms Of Someone New have a few seven-inches, a couple full-lengths, and a lot of loosies on tapes and compilations, but to me, this EP is thee one.
In a side note: This record???s title and cover image have to do with a storied cemetery in neighboring Forest Park.
Lee Jones & The Sounds Of Soul
???This Heart Is Haunted???
(Amy 1968)
A teacher of mine used to say that a well-written persuasive sentence is like a basketball game, where a poorly-written persuasive sentence is like a love affair: You know when a basketball game starts, you know when it???s going to be over, and it proceeds in regular, measured beats toward an anticipated end; with a love affair, by the time you realize it???s over, it???s been over.
One of the only soul records that can compete with this one is Eddie Holman???s towering ???I Love You,??? both being records of the dark freefall that occurs upon realizing that it???s over. ???I Love You??? is a deeply, deeply masterful song, constructed with an interlocking perfection that underscores how immovable its anguish is. ???This Heart Is Haunted,??? though, sounds more truly broken. It only really comes together in the sad bloom of the chorus; the verses are all just strings of awkward wording, fumbling diction, phrases that seem as though they were chosen mostly to occupy a certain number of syllables. It doesn???t sound like a well-written song, or a well-written anything--it sounds halting and devastated. Eddie Holman at least knew. Lee Jones did not. Hear one man???s entire life emptying like a dumped grail: ???One day I found myself alone / and my love was a superstition.??? My god.
Melvin Bliss
???Synthetic Substitution???
(Supreme 1974)
I read a lot of music writing, but one of main music books that, as the kids say, changed my life didn???t really have any writing in it at all.
I started actively buying old records sometime in my late teens, and by early college was in full-on ???Breaks, Yo??? mode. Having pored over stuff like Rap Sheet???s World Of Beats,??? the first issue of Grand Royal, and whatever stems and seeds were to be had in The Source, Spin, Rolling Stone (shudder), and the back pages of assorted mid-80s rap/breakdancing cash-in books (many of which were published by Scholastic--elementary-school heads know the deal), I was left with this ridiculously lofty idea of the bookish rap-production enthusiast (that is, myself) as noble musical archaeologist--finder, rememberer, and protector of otherwise forgotten records, records forsaken by a general populace that was too blind, nay, too ignorant to recognize what divinity these slabs (slabs, money!) of dusty vinyl held in their grooves. God, I threw up in my mouth a little just typing all that.
And you know, I???m not too too regretful of any of that; I consider that kind of insufferable but earnest romanticism an important rite of passage for record dudes of my age and type (for record dudes of any age and type, really). But I also think that just as important is getting oneself thoroughly disabused of all that bullshit. And for me, that happened when I was like nineteen and checked a book out of my college???s music library--plain grey hardcover, no dustjacket, worn block type on the spine in blue ink--that was basically just a three-hundred-page index of the top hundred songs on the black music charts between nineteen-sixty-something and nineteen-eighty-something. That???s it. No commentary, no analysis, just page after page of numbered, chronologically ordered, sales- and airplay-data-based lists. As I spent however many days or weeks going over it with Talmudic focus, I was repeatedly shocked at how many records that I???d previously considered hopelessly obscure and utterly unknown had in fact dented the charts, had not only actually existed before this doughy white suburban had read about them, but had actually been, for at least a week or two, popular. You mean real live people knew about ???Hook And Sling????! There are actually sales figures for LTD???s ???Cuttin??? It Up????! Enough living, breathing people walked into honest-to-goodness record stores and paid actual money for motherfucking ???Impeach The President??? that somebody somewhere wrote it down?! Holy fucking shit.
All of which is just to say that it???s impossible to overstate the impact of my realization that the sampling culture surrounding rap is really an extension of black popular-music culture. I know that???s some real entry-level shit, but even in 2014 I???m surprised and disappointed at how often I detect the whiff of White People Saving Black Music From Black People Who Can???t Love It Like White People Can. Or if you???d prefer not to think about it in terms of race (between you and me, though, at some point you really oughta do that), you can call it the whiff of Smug Obscurantists Who Think They???re The Only Ones Who Get It.
It is in the spirit of all that that I present to you this record, a cut that for so many years I believed to my soul must be--had to be--hyper-obscure, borderline nonexistent, and, as a dystopian nightmare delivered in a challenging warble, naturally unlovable to everyone except sensitive, thoughtful, complex Me.
And yet, here it is, somehow fully existing, in one its four original-era issues.
In a picture sleeve.
From fucking Belgium.
Labeled ???Especially For Discotheques.???
I am saying.
Inc.
???Swear???
(4AD 2011)
Amidst the fizzy and dynamic black pop and r&b of the eighties and nineties, I remember how singers wanting to be taken seriously would kinda have to drop a slower, heavier cut, just to show that they could, you know, Really Sang. These days, though, with so many hipster whiteys with too many Jodeci CDs and too much internet all doing mopey six-minute slow jams and tryna prove they can tell you what the 80s like, I find that in my head an inversion has taken place: it???s hard for me to take any of these dudes seriously until I hear them kick something uptempo. It just is. Until I hear them do something with some nice little popping snare in it, it???s tough for me to go all the way (girl).
So when this record came out a few years ago, it won me over. It dares to swing, has a real nice bass presence, and genuinely rich production that sounds great out loud but also rewards the headphone listen (the claves that drop in just before the three-minute mark are the ice in your drink). The Inc. dudes themselves are twin brothers who, for all their talent, tend toward some very awkward visual presentation, one that I???d recommend missing if you can. They make real good records, though. And though it seems to have since been swallowed by the internets, there used to be a cool ninety-second studio-footage teaser video for this song that showed their Billy Preston-esque organist going the fuck off???freaking the stops, I mean just hammering shit. (Also, nothing to do with nothing, but I get a little chuckle out of the fact that a song so heavily indebted to Prince--who is a Jehovah Witness and is therefore forbidden to use profanity--has as its hook ???Do you swear????)
Anyway, this isn???t a deep cut or rarity anything, just a great recent-ish record that I think mostly got missed. It is, as the one Terry_Clubbup used to say, like a prison mattress: criminally slept-upon.
Matrix Metals
Flamingo Breeze
(Olde English Spelling Bee 2009)
I go through periods where I listen to music that reflects the kind of mind I???d like to have, and I go through periods where I listen to music that reflects the kind of mind I actually have. When I was a late teen and felt like my head was getting overcrowded, I spent pretty much a whole summer listening to Booker T. & the M.G.???s.Their music had a neighborly perfection to it, but also a milky, yearning quality???a spaciousness. It sounded like what I wanted my head to feel like. In my late twenties/early thirties, I found the same effect in Arthur Russell.
The mind I???ve had for this last good while, though, has been heavily occupied--swampy, chaotic and, except on occasions, somewhere past the reach of those ideal records. When I heard the Matrix Metals record in 2010, I locked into it immediately. It had a refracted 80s veneer that seemed to have a lot to do with my memory, it had the kind of utter disregard that always feels a little futuristic, and it had a migraine-inducing density that spoke very much to my present. It???s this endless, repetitive churn that, despite a faint insanity underlying, does acquire its own rhythm, and from which I can pull affirming little fragments of variation.
I???m very easily distracted, and thus usually can only have music on in the background when I???m doing the most menial, mindless shit, but this is one of a very small handful of records--Trouble Funk Live, those first couple Suicide records, and that might be it--that so closely parallels my own mindstate that I can pretty much do anything while it???s playing. And that???s not because it???s so numbing that I can think over it or around it, but because it???s so in-tune that I can think through it and with it.
The guy behind this is Aussie-American Sam Mehran, who used to be in a punk band with critical darling/purveyor mostly of shit I don???t like Dev Hynes. If you proceed with caution, Sam also has a lot of worthwhile stuff under the name Outer Limits Recordings/Outer Limitz.
Sly & The Family Stone
???Family Affair???
(Epic 1971)
I think a lot about words, music, words and music, and words in music. I???m a close reader, a close listener, and I???m real picky and bitter and hard to please. And most days I think ???Family Affair??? is the best ever--the best sound, the best writing, the best song. There are so few words in it, but they all mean so much. Does ???blood is thicker than the mud??? mean that your loved ones will love you even when you fuck up, or does it mean that in 1971 Sly Stone was choosing his bloodied black audience over his mud-streaked Woodstock-won white audience? Yes. Back when VH1 was the baby boomer channel, they used to play a video for this that was all footage of Nixon and Watergate and assorted governmental fuckery, and I knew it meant that, too (knew it even before I knew about Avedon???s The Family). I knew that the certainty of mud meant that you???d always need blood to rely on; and that the entanglements of blood would in some way guarantee that you???d keep finding yourself mud. As old as I???ve gotten and as much as I???ve learned and as much as my life has changed, I haven???t yet known anything that this song can???t contain. I???ve been listening to it all my life, and still haven???t gotten near the bottom of it.
My copy has written on the company sleeve, very small, in delicate ballpoint, ???for Momma.???
As I???m sure is awfully clear by now, I could go on all day. But that???s ten, and anyway, I???ve been re-telling this same dream for a while now. ???Family Affair??? is as deep a record as you???ll find anywhere, but it???s also common to us all, and seems to me like it would be, as David Letterman said to Sam Phillips, ???a real nice way to say goodbye.???
I imagine that a fair amount of the records checked therein would get ho-hums today, but the kind of focus and voice they were presented with was a big deal to me, and there???s a number of those features that I think back on with a lot of fondness: Decade- and genre-spanning shit from High-C, rape_donkeys, and noz; Bambouche???s black-power records; tenaciously regional shit from Deejay_OM and jinx74; prairie b-boy shit from my man DCastillo; young HCrink sample-spotting(!) spoken-word records; Aussie and Euro dudes--Kinetic, Sheep, John Stapleton, et al.--hammering away at shit I???d never see otherwise; and on and on and on.
Anyway, sometime in the last year or two someone floated the idea of reanimating the ???Ish??? feature and started collecting names. I don???t at all consider myself a collector of the same magnitude of the dudes I???ve listed, but I learned a lot from those features at a time when I really had a lot to learn, and I wanted to make some gesture toward repaying the favor. I PM???d soulstrut management in late 2013, and never heard anything back.
But like the man says ???If I can???t get in the club / the club???s in the parking lot,??? you know? So in the interest of settling accounts, I???m just gonna leave this here:
???
The Makers
???Don???t Challenge Me???
(Midney 197?)
If you???re a record collector with any kind of obscure focus, over time that focus tends to drive you inward, deeper into your own sensibility. Because of that, I think you always remember those first few occasions when you hear your tastes reflected back to you from without, and get those first independent confirmations that this music that has for you become so interior might actually have some kind of resonance in the world beyond your headphones.
That???s an oblique way of saying that, as someone who at the time self-identified mostly as an eccentric-funk obscurantist, first stepping into Sheer Magic???s monthly at Danny???s Tavern around 2001 unfastened my wig considerably. I know I sound like every dude ever with this, but you gotta understand: Just a few years prior I had moved to Chicago from a place where ???hearing funk played out??? mostly meant maybe the shitty marina band at that lily-white place out by the lake might fuck up a let a couple minutes of ???Tighten Up??? slip out, and here was a room packed windows-to-the-wall with a decently (if not thoroughly) polyglot and largely non-record-nerd crowd sweating out their good shirt to shit like Scorpio and His People???s ???Unforgiven,??? Timeless Legend???s ???(Baby) Don???t Do This To Me,??? East Of Underground???s ???Hell Below,??? and god knows what else.
The night ran from 10:00 until 2:00, and the consensus among my kind of people was that while it was okay if you showed up a little late, you never wanted to leave early, because that last hour was when they played the really fractured, otherworldly shit. Records like Sidney Owens???s ???Sputnik,??? and like this one. This was pre-smoking-ban, pre-E2 Chicago, and by 1:00 on a Wednesday night the whole overcrowded room was a single compressed cube of human, pumping slow Flemish hell: the bare wood floorboards would be spongy, the air would be the color of coffee, we???d all be on the far side of something, and then some incredible song would come on that sounded like spaceman brain with drums, and all you could do was look around with goggled eyes and hope that it would all somehow wait for you. Hearing records like this in a place like that was affirming in a way I???ve never forgotten. Peace to funky promethean DCastillo for getting me out of the house, and to Superhost DCarfagna, without whom.
I???ve already talked a little bit about this record elsewhere and so won???t repeat all that, but would add that this record is really pretty fucking unique. The Makers have another far poppier 45 on Midney under another name and with a different singer, and an eerie religious-jazz-prog 45 on another label with the same singer but under yet another name. I tracked down one of the dudes in the band, Mark, and he told me that they were all session players who played for protean discotheque maximalist Boris Midney on his various records in exchange for him producing their demo, which they wanted to shop to a major. Mark says that although Midney???s production on their demo was pretty straightforward, when they did session work for his records he would take the individual tracks they put down and process and recombine them in ways that no one could ever figure out. And indeed, the band???s demo tracks, while having their own spacy, tuneful appeal, are nothing like the forward-looking and rhythmically slippy tracks that Midney put together for his own use. Listening to the demo tracks you can clearly detect something of the same sonic fiber that???s on the Makers record--the raw building blocks of the sound are definitely there???but some crucial juke is missing. The chromed elasticity and deep cyborg bounce of ???Don???t Challenge Me??? belong to it alone.
Saafir
???Light Sleeper???
(Qwest 1994)
This record was kind of a turning point in the way I listened to music. About halfway through college I saw it on Rap City or whatever, when I was like nineteen or twenty, and I was not feeling it, did not understand it at all, and in my case-hardened East Coast orthodoxy--laughable now, but serious business back then, dunny--borderline refused to recognize it as rap music. The video finished, and I screwfaced and rolled my eyes and sucked my teeth, and the day went on (including this odd interlude where the resident racist gym-rat tried to bond with me over a TBS broadcast of Clash Of The Titans, an awkward and eternal-seeming conversation with heavy Of Mice And Men vibes, but I digress), but man, I could not stop thinking about that fucking Saafir song.
A couple years before, I???d read some book about boxing, and one of the trainers was talking about how even the best heavyweight fighter could lose to some untrained flyweight yokel: Boxing, he said, has an accepted kind of timing, its own particular grammar, that creates a zone where trained, experienced fighters unconsciously but consistently operate; and all it takes is for the yokel to step slightly outside of that timing, and anything could happen.
I???m not saying I was some heavyweight, and I???m sure not saying that Saafir was some yokel, but this was definitely outside of whatever sense of timing and grammar that I had at the time. I fucking hated it, but I knew I needed it, and it stands as one of the formative instances of my buying a record not in spite of not understanding it, but buying it because I didn???t understand it.
I have a little more of a handle on it now, twenty years later, but it???s still a slippery, amazing record to me. Probably about fifteen percent of it is battle-MC flimflam--you know, that shit that rappers of a certain pedigree use just to get from Point A to Point B (calling it a ???mic device,??? saying ???I???m lyrically [verb]ing,??? etc.)--but the rest of it is a master class in how a really great MC can make so much hang together on so little, can hold up a skyscraper with just a couple thumbtacks. Dude???s flow is so dense, and his rhyme scheme so disjointed, and there???s a lost weekend???s worth of unintelligible phantom shit going on in the background, and the track has this flabby, slabby, sunken-submarine-bell, thrice-dubbed-tape fog to it, but???but???it???s also got those two little sung parts (the ???I???m just a roustabout??? part, as well as the evergreen real-head Successory that is ???I don???t need psychology to see the dichotomy in me???), and even though I like those far less than I like the murky parts, I can???t deny that they???re the two perfectly placed, perfectly delivered, and perfectly oxygenated pin-pricks that somehow crystallize the whole thing. Beautiful.
I think I also own this on double promo vinyl somewhere, but this cassingle was what I was working with back then, so this is gonna have to be okay with you.
The Fans
???Deathwish???
(Blue Beam 1980)
My dear friend Hopkins is an Atlanta native, and he put me up on this record at a listening session a number of years ago. My grip on punk and new wave is limited, but this record had me going all kinds of apeshit in pretty short order. The opening is the kind of anxious, angular gallop that will be familiar to Southern-college-rock witnesses of a certain vintage; to the rest of you, it will just sound like ???Runnin??? Down A Dream.??? Once the vocals come in, though--gothic and overwrought, but also heavy with real threat--the song turns pure idea-bomb, every line a manifesto: ???Give me just real vision,??? ???Go on and take / ???cause I don???t need what I make,??? and my favorite, one of the few lines that can challenge Kool Keith???s ???I just need what I need??? as a near-perfect distillation of my worldview: ???What do you mean, ???personal????! EVERYTHING???s personal!!!??? The music is nothing too unhinged for about the first two-thirds, but then everything parts for a weird hard-panned ???one!???/???zero!??? count-off, with the competing voices getting progressively more frayed. After an absolutely hope-devouring scream, the music slams back in for the final sixty seconds, this time all wiggy radar-scramble guitar and lacerating synth scree. The title phrase hisses out of and into the green ether, then a single, stentorian ???ONE!??? brings the gavel down on everything forever.
The last I heard, lead singer and chief idea man Alfredo Villar was working at the library at Emory, but refused to talk about The Fans, or about anything else, for that matter, with the exception of the political situation in his native Cuba.
The multifoliate packaging for this record is scrappy and gorgeous in the finest 1980 DIY tradition. My copy would be perfect except for I gave the lyric insert to Hopkins because his copy was without.
Larry Dixon
I???am So In Love
(LAD, 1980)
I have a soft spot for this record probably for two particular reasons: One, it was recorded just a stone???s throw away, at the wonderfully/appallingly named Copherbox. And two, it???s the last good record I pulled out of the original location of Dr. Wax, a store that taught me a great deal about my own city (and where I once saw a Camaro parked outside with vanity plates that said ???GDKNGBD???--George Benson still gets it in around here, believe it).
Moreover, it???s just a great local record, you know? Ramshackle, a little confused, but charming as hell. The best fast song on this record and the best slow song on this record both have the same first line--???Hey you, over there??????--and because this is Chicago, you get bongos under everything, no charge. Inner life, inner limits, equal measures. My kind of???record.
The Arms Of Someone New
Burying The Carnival
(Office Records 1984)
Midwestern dolmen music, colonially homebrewed Pink Floyd, a drum machine recorded with unusual crispness punctuates dragged parlor organ to create nervous flicker and thick strobe, while some weird processing gives the sound a reversed, sucking quality, the kiss gone wrong. The voice reaches out in reclusive half-harmony, singing against someone who is there only in moments.
On the lyric sheet, almost none of the songs is transcribed accurately: some songs are printed with verses they don???t actually have, some songs are printed with verses missing, and some songs have unrelated poetry printed in place of their lyrics. It becomes hard to tell whether the words are calling into question the existence of the songs, or vice versa, and thinking about what???s added and what???s left out and what???s transformed slowly pieces together in the mind this little shadow country that hovers somewhere between the page and the ear.
This record has what I think of as a particularly Midwestern feeling: on the one hand it sounds visionary and aspirational, a hopeful if challenging transmission, but it also sounds irrevocably entombed in the everyday. There is always a tomorrow, yes, but tomorrow is always a work day.
My first exposure to this band was via a worked copy of their excellent first seven-inch--???The Holy Dance??? / ???Whitefriars??????that was part of a foot-high stack of sleeveless beaters I blind-bought at X Records in Greenville, South Carolina in a ???I???ll sell ???em to you cheap, but you gotta buy the whole box???-type deal from my man Ted. I lost that copy in a heater accident a few years later, but over the following decade managed mint up incrementally, and now I have a nice copy with all the pieces. Anyway, The Arms Of Someone New have a few seven-inches, a couple full-lengths, and a lot of loosies on tapes and compilations, but to me, this EP is thee one.
In a side note: This record???s title and cover image have to do with a storied cemetery in neighboring Forest Park.
Lee Jones & The Sounds Of Soul
???This Heart Is Haunted???
(Amy 1968)
A teacher of mine used to say that a well-written persuasive sentence is like a basketball game, where a poorly-written persuasive sentence is like a love affair: You know when a basketball game starts, you know when it???s going to be over, and it proceeds in regular, measured beats toward an anticipated end; with a love affair, by the time you realize it???s over, it???s been over.
One of the only soul records that can compete with this one is Eddie Holman???s towering ???I Love You,??? both being records of the dark freefall that occurs upon realizing that it???s over. ???I Love You??? is a deeply, deeply masterful song, constructed with an interlocking perfection that underscores how immovable its anguish is. ???This Heart Is Haunted,??? though, sounds more truly broken. It only really comes together in the sad bloom of the chorus; the verses are all just strings of awkward wording, fumbling diction, phrases that seem as though they were chosen mostly to occupy a certain number of syllables. It doesn???t sound like a well-written song, or a well-written anything--it sounds halting and devastated. Eddie Holman at least knew. Lee Jones did not. Hear one man???s entire life emptying like a dumped grail: ???One day I found myself alone / and my love was a superstition.??? My god.
Melvin Bliss
???Synthetic Substitution???
(Supreme 1974)
I read a lot of music writing, but one of main music books that, as the kids say, changed my life didn???t really have any writing in it at all.
I started actively buying old records sometime in my late teens, and by early college was in full-on ???Breaks, Yo??? mode. Having pored over stuff like Rap Sheet???s World Of Beats,??? the first issue of Grand Royal, and whatever stems and seeds were to be had in The Source, Spin, Rolling Stone (shudder), and the back pages of assorted mid-80s rap/breakdancing cash-in books (many of which were published by Scholastic--elementary-school heads know the deal), I was left with this ridiculously lofty idea of the bookish rap-production enthusiast (that is, myself) as noble musical archaeologist--finder, rememberer, and protector of otherwise forgotten records, records forsaken by a general populace that was too blind, nay, too ignorant to recognize what divinity these slabs (slabs, money!) of dusty vinyl held in their grooves. God, I threw up in my mouth a little just typing all that.
And you know, I???m not too too regretful of any of that; I consider that kind of insufferable but earnest romanticism an important rite of passage for record dudes of my age and type (for record dudes of any age and type, really). But I also think that just as important is getting oneself thoroughly disabused of all that bullshit. And for me, that happened when I was like nineteen and checked a book out of my college???s music library--plain grey hardcover, no dustjacket, worn block type on the spine in blue ink--that was basically just a three-hundred-page index of the top hundred songs on the black music charts between nineteen-sixty-something and nineteen-eighty-something. That???s it. No commentary, no analysis, just page after page of numbered, chronologically ordered, sales- and airplay-data-based lists. As I spent however many days or weeks going over it with Talmudic focus, I was repeatedly shocked at how many records that I???d previously considered hopelessly obscure and utterly unknown had in fact dented the charts, had not only actually existed before this doughy white suburban had read about them, but had actually been, for at least a week or two, popular. You mean real live people knew about ???Hook And Sling????! There are actually sales figures for LTD???s ???Cuttin??? It Up????! Enough living, breathing people walked into honest-to-goodness record stores and paid actual money for motherfucking ???Impeach The President??? that somebody somewhere wrote it down?! Holy fucking shit.
All of which is just to say that it???s impossible to overstate the impact of my realization that the sampling culture surrounding rap is really an extension of black popular-music culture. I know that???s some real entry-level shit, but even in 2014 I???m surprised and disappointed at how often I detect the whiff of White People Saving Black Music From Black People Who Can???t Love It Like White People Can. Or if you???d prefer not to think about it in terms of race (between you and me, though, at some point you really oughta do that), you can call it the whiff of Smug Obscurantists Who Think They???re The Only Ones Who Get It.
It is in the spirit of all that that I present to you this record, a cut that for so many years I believed to my soul must be--had to be--hyper-obscure, borderline nonexistent, and, as a dystopian nightmare delivered in a challenging warble, naturally unlovable to everyone except sensitive, thoughtful, complex Me.
And yet, here it is, somehow fully existing, in one its four original-era issues.
In a picture sleeve.
From fucking Belgium.
Labeled ???Especially For Discotheques.???
I am saying.
Inc.
???Swear???
(4AD 2011)
Amidst the fizzy and dynamic black pop and r&b of the eighties and nineties, I remember how singers wanting to be taken seriously would kinda have to drop a slower, heavier cut, just to show that they could, you know, Really Sang. These days, though, with so many hipster whiteys with too many Jodeci CDs and too much internet all doing mopey six-minute slow jams and tryna prove they can tell you what the 80s like, I find that in my head an inversion has taken place: it???s hard for me to take any of these dudes seriously until I hear them kick something uptempo. It just is. Until I hear them do something with some nice little popping snare in it, it???s tough for me to go all the way (girl).
So when this record came out a few years ago, it won me over. It dares to swing, has a real nice bass presence, and genuinely rich production that sounds great out loud but also rewards the headphone listen (the claves that drop in just before the three-minute mark are the ice in your drink). The Inc. dudes themselves are twin brothers who, for all their talent, tend toward some very awkward visual presentation, one that I???d recommend missing if you can. They make real good records, though. And though it seems to have since been swallowed by the internets, there used to be a cool ninety-second studio-footage teaser video for this song that showed their Billy Preston-esque organist going the fuck off???freaking the stops, I mean just hammering shit. (Also, nothing to do with nothing, but I get a little chuckle out of the fact that a song so heavily indebted to Prince--who is a Jehovah Witness and is therefore forbidden to use profanity--has as its hook ???Do you swear????)
Anyway, this isn???t a deep cut or rarity anything, just a great recent-ish record that I think mostly got missed. It is, as the one Terry_Clubbup used to say, like a prison mattress: criminally slept-upon.
Matrix Metals
Flamingo Breeze
(Olde English Spelling Bee 2009)
I go through periods where I listen to music that reflects the kind of mind I???d like to have, and I go through periods where I listen to music that reflects the kind of mind I actually have. When I was a late teen and felt like my head was getting overcrowded, I spent pretty much a whole summer listening to Booker T. & the M.G.???s.Their music had a neighborly perfection to it, but also a milky, yearning quality???a spaciousness. It sounded like what I wanted my head to feel like. In my late twenties/early thirties, I found the same effect in Arthur Russell.
The mind I???ve had for this last good while, though, has been heavily occupied--swampy, chaotic and, except on occasions, somewhere past the reach of those ideal records. When I heard the Matrix Metals record in 2010, I locked into it immediately. It had a refracted 80s veneer that seemed to have a lot to do with my memory, it had the kind of utter disregard that always feels a little futuristic, and it had a migraine-inducing density that spoke very much to my present. It???s this endless, repetitive churn that, despite a faint insanity underlying, does acquire its own rhythm, and from which I can pull affirming little fragments of variation.
I???m very easily distracted, and thus usually can only have music on in the background when I???m doing the most menial, mindless shit, but this is one of a very small handful of records--Trouble Funk Live, those first couple Suicide records, and that might be it--that so closely parallels my own mindstate that I can pretty much do anything while it???s playing. And that???s not because it???s so numbing that I can think over it or around it, but because it???s so in-tune that I can think through it and with it.
The guy behind this is Aussie-American Sam Mehran, who used to be in a punk band with critical darling/purveyor mostly of shit I don???t like Dev Hynes. If you proceed with caution, Sam also has a lot of worthwhile stuff under the name Outer Limits Recordings/Outer Limitz.
Sly & The Family Stone
???Family Affair???
(Epic 1971)
I think a lot about words, music, words and music, and words in music. I???m a close reader, a close listener, and I???m real picky and bitter and hard to please. And most days I think ???Family Affair??? is the best ever--the best sound, the best writing, the best song. There are so few words in it, but they all mean so much. Does ???blood is thicker than the mud??? mean that your loved ones will love you even when you fuck up, or does it mean that in 1971 Sly Stone was choosing his bloodied black audience over his mud-streaked Woodstock-won white audience? Yes. Back when VH1 was the baby boomer channel, they used to play a video for this that was all footage of Nixon and Watergate and assorted governmental fuckery, and I knew it meant that, too (knew it even before I knew about Avedon???s The Family). I knew that the certainty of mud meant that you???d always need blood to rely on; and that the entanglements of blood would in some way guarantee that you???d keep finding yourself mud. As old as I???ve gotten and as much as I???ve learned and as much as my life has changed, I haven???t yet known anything that this song can???t contain. I???ve been listening to it all my life, and still haven???t gotten near the bottom of it.
My copy has written on the company sleeve, very small, in delicate ballpoint, ???for Momma.???
As I???m sure is awfully clear by now, I could go on all day. But that???s ten, and anyway, I???ve been re-telling this same dream for a while now. ???Family Affair??? is as deep a record as you???ll find anywhere, but it???s also common to us all, and seems to me like it would be, as David Letterman said to Sam Phillips, ???a real nice way to say goodbye.???
Comments
bring back the ish,