From the tippy end of the Very Long Tail comes this morsel of immutable baritone joy, apparently culled from the set of an obscure entertainment programme aired only in Russia in the early 70s.
The full title is “Я очень рад, ведь Ñ, наконец, возвращаюÑÑŒ домой,” which I believe translates into something like “A Gleeful Prayer From The Soaring Alter-Ego of Lurch the Butler.”
My seven year-old girl loves a book called Math Curse, which begins when a girl’s teacher, Mrs. Fibonacci, notes that “you can think of almost anything as a math problem.†The girl starts seeing crazy patterns and cruel fractions in everything from schedules to snacks. Later she conquers fear and makes peace with her semi-irrational world…at least until Mr. Newton, her science teacher, tells her everything is also a science problem.
Mrs. Fibonacci came to mind when I found Indian-American pianist Vijay Iyer’s recent essay, Strength in Numbers—which followed and partly explained his trio’s fascinating 2009 album, Historicity. Iyer’s graceful essay is a great read even though its subtitle, “How Fibonacci Taught Us to Swing,†brought back uncomfortable memories of math majors at school dances. The real-life Fibonacci (Leonardo of Pisa) was a rabbit breeding-obsessed 13th century Italian mathematician. His signature sequence starts with 0 and 1 and gets each remaining number from the sum of the previous two ( 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc.)
The ratios of consecutive Fibonacci numbers approach the golden ratio (i.e., 1.6180339887 and change). That number (phi in Greek and geek-speak) has captivated everyone from Euclid to Le Corbusier and Dali–as well as conspiracy theorists, sellers of bad stock market tips, readers of Dan Brown novels, and people who’ve spent too long playing Dungeons and Dragons or Spore.
Iyer’s essay describes the recurrence of the golden ratio in settings ranging from the architecture of the Parthenon to the opening chords in “Billie Jean.†But he isn’t some boneheaded numerologist. Having grown up with American R&B and the karnatak music of South India, Iyer makes music for the body as well as the brain. Iyer argues that the golden ratio also appears in the rhythmic durations and pitch ratios used by Bartók, Debussy, and Coltrane, as well as his former collaborator Steve Coleman.
Historicity includes a cover of Ronnie Foster’s seventies soul number Mystic Brew, a song some will recognize from its sample in A Tribe Called Quest‘s “Electric Relaxation.” Iyer gives “Mystic Brew” a Fibonacci-inspired makeover, getting surprising warmth out of a pair of asymmetric chords (three beats followed by five)—and I can almost hear Beavis and Butthead snickering at this sentence. So let me be more direct: Historicity rocks, dude. Bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Markus Gilmore are fierce and fluid throughout; the pulse swirls around but never relents on the title track and numbers by the likes of Stevie Wonder and Andrew Hill.
Two other knockout covers on Historicity deserve special mention: the slow-building, smoldering funk of Julius Hemphill’s early cult classic “Dogon A.D,†and a blowout version of M.I.A.’s amazing “Galang.†For the three minutes of “Galang,” Iyer seemed more magician than mathematician, since he fooled me into into thinking that my favorite rhythm track of the Zeroes may really have been written for a piano trio of math majors.
Since all post-1963 speculation about J.D. Salinger’s state of existence is more or less a blank slate, save for the occasional lurid detail you wish you didn’t know, I’ll share my pet theory that he spent the years since 1989 preoccupied with endless repetitions of the Biblically dense, ridiculous, outrageous and uplifting scavenger hunt that is the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique album. Teenage angst paid off well, but when Salinger got bored and old, I can imagine him on a Pilgrim’s quest through the far reaches of Paul’s Boutique, with “Shadrach” captivating his mind much as the Jesus Prayer did for Franny Glass. Well, do you have a better theory?
I got more stories than J.D’s got Salinger
I hold the title and you are the challenger.
Beastie Boys, “Shadrach”
Franny took in her breath slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers.
Coastal California in January is a setting for unpredictable bursts of melancholy and joy. Scandinavians or Minnesotans would barely recognize “winter” here, but we have impossibly thin skins for ours. We have too many sunlit summer teaser days to steel ourselves for the bleakness, and when the big storms hit the Bay Area, you might as well be walking through an Ingmar Bergman movie or a Leonard Cohen album. This makes January the perfect time to listen to Neko Case‘s weather-obsessed 2009 album, Middle Cyclone.
Calling a musician a “force of nature” is a tiresome cliche, because who isn’t? We humans are a bunch of animals, and the “artificial” music of Kraftwerk and Gorillaz comes from nature just as much as Delta blues. (I’ll exclude Coldplay and Sting, since they appear to be pure cylon.) But I digress. What matters about Neko Case isn’t that she’s “natural,” but that she has such a fluid force. Galvanizing calm and rage, she can take a phrase lesser lights would turn into mushy prattle (“I’m a man-eater” or “never turn your back on Mother Earth”) and make you believe her life and your life depend on it. She doesn’t just sing about stormy weather, she is the weather.
On “This Tornado Loves You,” perhaps Neko’s best song yet, she is the speed of sound, stalking lost love like a funnel cloud ready to strike. She is the force of love and danger spinning out of control. She’s the perfect soundtrack for a continent hanging on to hope while flirting with impending doom. She’s even the cool hood ornament on a 1967 Mercury Cougar. For those of us who emerged from the Zeroes with our attention spans twittered into submission, it’s a revelation to hear in Neko’s “Tornado” a rock musician with an ace geologist’s sense of timing:
I have waited with a glacier’s patience
Smashed every transformer with every trailer
’til nothing was standing
65 miles wide
Still you are nowhere
Nowhere in sight
I’ve played Middle Cyclone repeatedly while reading Dead Pool, James Lawrence Powell’s gripping account of how decades spent denying the forces of nature have left the western landscape vulnerable to climate change, potentially turning places like Phoenix into dusty, uninhabitable ghost towns. The rivers whisper and scream with the violence of lost love, but still we are nowhere in sight.
In the first clip below, Neko Case performs “This Tornado Loves You.” In the second, she chats with a Canadian talk show host about mesocyclones and animal instinct, Goethe and Harry Nilsson, Loretta Lynn and PMS. At the end, she hallucinates about George W. Bush visiting a taco wagon dressed in a grimy tank top.
Despite a lifelong obsession with politics and music, I only really learned about Victor Jara because of Professor Joe Strummer. “Please remember Victor Jara, in the Santiago stadium,†the late, lamented Clash bard quietly intoned in “Washington Bullets,†and I had to find out what he meant. Jara, the Chilean singer-songwriter and pioneer of the nueva cancion movement, was tortured and murdered with many others following Pinochet’s CIA-supported 1973 military coup on September 11, 1973.
Earlier this month, 36 years after his death, thousands convened in Santiago to give Jara a proper funeral, following a new autopsy that confirmed his torture and murder. Attendees included Jara’s widow, Joan Turner, and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, whose own father was among the junta’s victims. It’s belated poetic justice that Pinochet died in infamy as one of the world’s most disgraced public figures, while the boxing stadium where Jara lost his life is now known as Victor Jara Stadium. The next time you’re looking for a profile in courage, consider the poem fragment Victor Jara penned in the boxing stadium moments before his execution, and after his hands had been broken:
To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel
Will give birth to the moment…
Because Victor Jara’s recordings aren’t widely heard in this country, his role in progressive iconography has long eclipsed his earlier fame as a singer-songwriter. But as his discography and a handful of video clips confirm, he had a wonderful voice. A couple of his better-known songs are in the clips below. After the click-through are just a few of the songs he’s inspired, featuring Calexico, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Claudia Acuna, Inti-illimani (and, please remember, the Clash).
Since Thanksgiving weekend gives us all the chance to dwell on the huge chasm between the Norman Rockwell expectations and Jackson Pollock realities of our everyday lives, it’s all too easy to make it an occasion to break out the Schopenhauer and wallow in self-pity. That’s what makes it the perfect time to pay homage to one of the unsung heroes of Western philosophy, Ian Dury. A new biography and forthcoming film may signal a Dury renaissance as we near the tenth anniversary of his passing.
But Dury never played the victim, since he was too busy finding little sources of delight in the surreal and debauched spectacle that is real life. As the missing link between Benny Hill and Bertrand Russell, Dury had ingenious ways to find the sublime in the ridiculous. His backing band, the Blockheads, stayed tight and funky in an era better known for its sloppy chaos. His manifesto, “Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3” finds all sorts of wonderful reasons to keep on keeping on. No Thanksgiving toast I could devise could compete with that song’s “Too short to be haughty, too nutty to be naughty/ Going on 40 – no electric shocks.” And the reasons keep getting better from there:
Bantu Stephen Biko, listening to Rico
Harpo, Groucho, Chico
Cheddar cheese and pickle, the Vincent motorsickle
Slap and tickle
Woody Allen, Dali, Dimitri and Pasquale
balabalabala and Volare
Something nice to study, phoning up a buddy
Being in my nuddy
Saying hokey-dokey, singalonga Smokey
Coming out of chokey
John Coltrane’s soprano, Adi Celentano
Bonar Colleano
The BBC, which once upon a time was known to ban the occasional Dury ditty, now features a glossary of all Dury’s reasons to be cheerful. The song also inspired Dave Gorman’s one-act play, which supposedly presents research testing the validity of Dury’s reasons.
Need more reasons to love Ian Dury? He had the opportunity to adapt the lyrics for the musical Cats and turned down Andrew Lloyd Webber. As Dury explained while terminally ill: “But I said no straight off. I hate Andrew Lloyd Webber. He’s a wanker, isn’t he?… Every time I hear `Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ I feel sick, it’s so bad. He got Richard Stillgoe to do the lyrics in the end, who’s not as good as me. He made millions out of it. He’s crap, but he did ask the top man first!”
Felt a bit less oblivious than usual the other night when I discovered that one of Stuck’s contributors had never heard of auto-tune, nor had an accompanying Music Head who doesn’t happen to be a Stuck contributor. I’ve been seeing the term “auto-tune” thrown around (mostly derisively) on Twitter for a year or so, but had not been able to divine its meaning from context. OK, so we all apparently live under a huge Dad Rock, despite best efforts to stay relevant.
By sheer/mere coincidence, just stumbled across rocketboom‘s excellent hagiography on the history and mystery of auto-tune, which amounts to the use and abuse of an audio-editing software plugin in genres of tunage to which I have no exposure. The sound is pretty cool, but beware – the meme is apparently now so old that it’s already dead, so this confessional post is definitely uncool.
Begrudging thanks to Weird Al Yankovic for helping to illuminate.
In the 30 years since the Stooges recorded “I Wanna Be Your Dog,†the song has been covered by a variety of other artists, including Uncle Tupelo, Joan Jet [sic.] and Sonic Youth (“Weird Al†Yankovic even paid tribute, with the parody “Let Me Be Your Hogâ€). But perhaps the most unexpected—and entertaining— version is this short film by Georgie Greville.
Good grief. As usual, the Great Pumpkin failed to show up in the most sincere pumpkin patch I could find. To keep the faith during my annual existential crisis, I compiled an impromptu playlist of Halloween favorites from the last six decades or so (clips and commentary follow). I did this while trying to decide from my short list of Halloween costumes for next year: hedge fund manager, claims adjuster, reorganization specialist, water baron, Feng Shui consultant, music critic.
Bauhaus, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”
Frightened Rabbit, “Head Rolls Off”
Cramps, “I Was a Teenage Werewolf”
Austin TV, “Shiva”
Parliament, “Dr. Funkenstein”
Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil”
Tom Waits, “Cemetery Polka”
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put a Spell On You”
Sun Ra, “Space is the Place”
Dream Syndicate, “Halloween”
Philly Joe Jones, “Blues for Dracula”
Bauhaus: “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”
Dear Bauhaus,
Please be advised that Bela Lugosi has now been dead for 53 years. Time to move on with your lives.
Sincerely,
Stuck Between Stations.
Frightened Rabbit: “Head Rolls Off”
Like the proper Scotsmen they are, Frightened Rabbit charms schoolchildren everywhere with this cheeky ode to decapitation.
Cramps: “I Was a Teenage Werewolf”
RIP Lux Interior, who lost his exterior this year. This one’s from the aptly titled Songs the Lord Taught Us, although the teacher may have been the other guy, the one with the horns. That is, Alex Chilton.
Despite a lifelong obsession with politics and music, I only really learned about 
Since Thanksgiving weekend gives us all the chance to dwell on the huge chasm between the Norman Rockwell expectations and Jackson Pollock realities of our everyday lives, it’s all too easy to make it an occasion to break out the Schopenhauer and wallow in self-pity. That’s what makes it the perfect time to pay homage to one of the unsung heroes of Western philosophy, 
Good grief. As usual, the Great Pumpkin failed to show up in the most sincere pumpkin patch I could find. To keep the faith during my annual existential crisis, I compiled an impromptu playlist of Halloween favorites from the last six decades or so (clips and commentary follow). I did this while trying to decide from my short list of Halloween costumes for next year: hedge fund manager, claims adjuster, reorganization specialist, water baron, Feng Shui consultant, music critic.