We’ll be back in Hawaii August first at long last! Come celebrate at Anna Bananas, where I’ll be playing as BeepLab (Bengali for revolution!). I’ll be going on some time after 10:30. It’ll be all instrumental from me. Here is some of the stuff I’ve been playing lately:
. . . and below is the poster with the details. I hope you all who are in Honolulu can make it!
My woman of color partner had an allergic response to Wilco live the other night and claims chronic ankle pain from standing around all night to add injury to her insulted ear drums. She more or less agreed with the Village Voice’s recent savaging of the band as insipid white suburban angst, with no edge or danger — “nice” and safe. Admittedly, her presence accounted for about a third of the people of color we saw at the concert, but I think the Voice mistakes suburban and white for actual rather than discursive safety. While the two-kids-two-cars-and-a-dog-go-to-college-get-married-get-a-job types do more or less prevail, there are a whole range of folks who fall through this seive-like stereotype that few hear or talk about.
Let me demonstrate with some examples from the suburb I cleared the hell out of the moment I turned 16. In the family a few doors away, one went to jail, one is a quadrapalegic from a car accident, one committed suicide. Down the street, “Joe” flipped his souped up Charger, killing himself and injuring as well as traumatizing his girlfriend who was sitting next to him. “Mike” used to like to park his car on the railroad tracks and party. One night he went by himself and got hit. I could go on, and myself, I’m lucky to have survived my teens. I could also recount the quiet desperation many of those outsiders live in as adults.
Not much in the way of guns and gang-banging and urban “dangerous” rap fodder like I guess the Voice author respects, but still pretty lethal. A few of us get out somehow, becoming rock stars or college professors, in spite of long odds. And white privilege certainly offsets the loss of more marketable urban survivor stories (no one wants to admit that there is an underside to suburbs any worse than a little anomie and boredom, part and parcel of the denial and empowered ignorance that makes whiteness so weird and powerful). So when Tweedy sings about ghosts being born and other more or less veiled references to lethal suburbia it only seems safe if you pretend it is all symbolic and mere angst. In other words it seems safe if you never lived there.
I was going to write a review of Yo La Tengo and Wilco at Coney Island the other night and I guess I sort of will but I think a theme will emerge and take over.
Let’s start with Yo La Tengo, the Hoboken three piece noise pop outfit. I love their recorded work, and I discovered why: I can pick which pieces to listen too. When they manage to balance the noise with the pop, doing both, they are incredible. But the pop just by itself is just pop, no bite or edge. It’s — nice. And the more experimental noise pieces lapse into self indulgence. Sonic Youth have made a career of occupying the noisy side of the street and in recent years have developed a vocabulary — even a language — of noise through which they talk to each other and us. Ira Kaplan just wailed when he went off on noise excursions, supported –but not really in conversation with — YLT’s great rhythm section. But he wasn’t really talking. And when the pop happened it was good and fun, but it didn’t really engage with their experimental side. The two aspects met and passed each other by without much in the way of engagement. I feel bad saying it cuz I really like the band.
Wilco tries the same move but coming from a different place. Starting out as alt country pioneers in the late nineties, they developed an edgier sound as they grew. At a crucial juncture, after firing the late and talented Jay Bennett, they could have retreated and consolidated, like the Replacements did after having to fire Bob Stinson and that would have probably finished Wilco same as it did the ‘Mats. Instead they took on experimental guitarist Nels Cline and asked him to play as a band member, not just a lead guitar dropping in every four or five minutes from space. This unlikely match produced the album — or more particularly, the song — that hooked me on Wilco. Along the way I discovered Jeff Tweedy’s fairly poetic songwriting, in the reverse order to what I suppose is the usual route of discovery.
The album, A Ghost is Born, is uneven, largely marred by a pointless, formless fourteen minute excursion into hum and static. But on there lay a gem of a song, “Handshake Drugs,” with its wonderfull pre-recovery lyrics like “if I ever was myself I wasn’t that night.” But the hook for me was the way it started out as a catchy but standard piano, bass, and drums song only to be gradually, almost imperceptibly, invaded by Cline’s insect buzz guitars taking over and consuming the song, transforming it into something wild and altogether other by the end without the listener ever quite knowing how it happened.
“Handshake Drugs” is a version in miniature of what my favorite radio show, Boston’s “Eric in the Evening” does with jazz. We would often times flip through the stations in Boston before dinner and land on some cosmopolitan sounding bebop to eat to only to land somehow invariably in Ornette Coleman/Sun Ra territory before dessert, moving there so sneakily as to never notice until it was too late to ever go back. Unfortunately, the subtle takeover was lost live as Cline dive bombed with squall right at the start of the second verse.
I have to admit I still liked some of the music, especially the guitars, both Tweedy’s and Cline’s, not to mention the occasional third one from one of the keyboard players. And the band is at the top of its game. And Tweedy writes compellingly. But still…
Caught the end of Fucked Up at East River Park in Brooklyn. Suitably fast and loud with lots of mosh action and crowd surfing. They have some pretty nihilistic politics and a history of wild shows but nothing too outrageous today. I’ not too sure what to think of them politco-punkwise. They used some Nazi shit on a split release but then Jello Biafra, author of “Nazi Punk Fuck Off,” came onstage to join them for an encore at one show. Still poking around teh interwebs for their 2004 “clarification” concerning the Nazi crap. Maybe Jello’s gone soft?:)
Waiting for Mission of Burma to come on, Boston’s seminal contribution to postpunk. Never fails — the two tallest people at the show walk up and stand right in front of us. They were actually cool and when I asked they swapped spots with us (otherwise there would be a pic of a hairy back below instead of MOB).
I know MOB are pioneers in bringing interesting rhythmic changeups and tape looping to punk, but I never really got into their records the first time around even though they sounded interesting on paper. It all seemed a little busy and noodly, kind of the antithesis of the punk aesthetic.
Live is a different story though. They were incredibly tight as a band in a way that only people who are quite serious about their music and have been playing together for thirty years can be. And loud. And fast then slow then fast. All in all, they were way more musical than the last seventies vets I caught, the Damned, who were sloppy as hell but still fun. MOB reminded me of a guitar-driven punk-fueled version of XTC. The effects were seamlessly woven into the music. The guy doing the effects is the only non-original member I think, and he was back at the sound board, but he fit right in.
I really enjoyed the show but Monisha put on headphones and listened to Ozomatli on the train ride to Queens to wash the noise out of her head. She appreciated that they were technically very good but they were just not her cup of tea even though she quite liked Sonic Youth when we caught them last summer I’ll have to go back and give MOB’s recorded work another spin.
Ambient/found sound at the fake palm hothouse that is Winter Garden at one Financial Center in NYC…
Caught the last note of the Mountains‘ set. That note lasted about ten minutes. I’m sure it was meaningful in context.
Scanner started with a John Cage silence joke. Then some swirly organish synth string fairly cheesy with some perhaps backwards operatic singing, voice ehoed and reverbed a bit. Second piece: one note guitar with scanned voices. Acid washed b&w film bass clicks — dah da da dah vocal refrain thru harmonizer set off kilter. 3rd piece. Film now in color. Abstract patterns from real life. Pounding drums peeled back reveal gentle acoustic beat underneath. Phone machine messages, almost a cliche by now. Equipment malfunctions. Intended? Film laterally along some coast from above. Cobalt water: beautiful. polluted? Beside blue, bands of tan sand, green forest. Bluetanyellow bands pass by like typewriter ribbon or magnetic tape. Rest: more but different. Minimalism fun.  More here. Next.
