January 11, 2017 On Music This Is Ourselves By Dave Tompkins Photo: Dave Tompkins The Trump sign stood offscreen in the scrub, appointed to an unfinished home on Tingler Avenue in Marathon, Florida. No roof, just scudding clouds framed by crossbeams. It was as if the stake had been pounded into the lot before the slab had even been poured. First things first: get it on cheap paperboard. On the beach nearby, four men talked over one another about the electability of real estate. They’re deep in their tans and cups, buzzing about their candidate’s ground game. It was only February but the heat pressed for summer. Down by the water, the landscape itself screamed: faces in the oolitic rock that had been there all along, terrified by history. You didn’t have to look too hard—see one and the others join its hysteria. Their features are produced by erosion and rock-boring sponges, “solution holes” that form eyes and mouths. Inside the mouths, armored chitons read the sky with eyes of stone, their shells composed of hundreds of crystalline aragonite lenses, hundreds of views, each perspective also eroding. In the beach chairs, the conversation grew more animated, accumulating property. The water gurgled. Bubbles popped. You hear what you want to hear, or you try to drown it out with something else. Two days and several worlds later, I’m in Miami, home of the empty home of Steve Bannon, where he was illegally registered to vote for his future employer. Also home to 2016’s best film Moonlight, which stands for what Trump’s chief counselor wishes to silence. As Samuel R. Delany once wrote, “There are times when all the yellin’ and the hellin’ can’t fill the lack.” The scream is digitally transferable, from master tapes to a computer in a small studio owned by Andrew “Le Spam” Yeomanson. Recorded in 1993, by Palm Beach County’s Splack Pack, the scream is a stem, a part of a song disbanded into its constituents. Alone, it’s merely trying to tear the room in half. Or maybe it’s just trying to holler at Ozzy (circa “Crazy Train”) and a man from Broward County identified as Sir Knight Slime Nasty. Using indoor voices, this could be a simple “hi.” Then it sits on a thumbtack. Throw in some congas getting their hide tanned and a massive pressure wave of tropically warm feelings. It sounds so good that you almost forget what you’re not hearing: the other stems that made “Scrub Da Ground” a hit in the clubs, where women could reclaim themselves from the title’s kitchen-floor grind, owning dance floor and the song. Recalled one YouTube viewer, “I remember letting it be known this WAS my song. And refused to dance with anyone because I needed this one ALONE.” Read More
January 4, 2017 On Music Miami 2017 By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Turnstiles, on which “Miami 2017” appears. Something I’ve noticed about the years: each one has a number, and the numbers are consecutive. It’s a reasonable enough system, I guess, but it has its drawbacks. When you’re keeping count, every new year marches in with an aura of grim inevitability. Hardly anyone was surprised when 2017 came along. We’d suspected it would show up eventually—very likely after 2016. It’s a fact that some years are just catchier than others. Like brand-name drugs, their numbers vibrate with potential energy, the hale assurance that big things are in store. Think of 2020: what a sleek, hard oval of a year, summoning perfect vision, effortless duplication. You can chant 2020. You could found a religion around it. Or 2000, the perennial favorite—always and forever the year of the future, of slimming jumpsuits in flame-retardant synthetic fibers. Read More
December 12, 2016 On Music Quiet Fire By Adam Shatz On Frank Kimbrough’s album Solstice and the late Paul Bley. From the cover of Paul Bley’s Open, to Love. As a journalist, I have often had to explain to an English-speaking audience the rise of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant prejudices in France. But on election night, I found myself in the temporary offices of the radio show France Culture in midtown Manhattan, explaining to a French audience the triumph of the same prejudices in my own country. Struck by (though far from relishing) this irony, I was reminded of a novel I’d reviewed for the London Review of Books last year, Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian Submission, in which a demoralized France elects an Islamist presidential candidate backed by the Gulf states. In the final pages, the hero, a pathetic white male academic named François, converts to Islam because he fears being deprived of a future in a country where darker-skinned worshippers of Allah have taken over. Our president-elect is a Muslim hater, not a Muslim, but he, too, was catapulted to power with help from influential friends abroad, and his millions of supporters were driven by related fears of finding themselves without a place in an increasingly multicultural society—victims of what the French fascist theorist Renaud Camus has called “the Great Replacement.” Read More
November 18, 2016 On Music Gotham Lullaby By Adam Shatz Meredith Monk at the National Sawdust Theatre. Photo: Julieta Cervantes Maybe it’s a post–11/9 condition, a porousness to emotion, but whatever it is (or isn’t), Meredith Monk, who performed last night at the National Sawdust Theatre in Williamsburg, spoke to me as no other performer has in a while. By the simplest of means: made-up words (from the Monkian lexicon) and a handful of minor chords at the piano. I guess this is what the critics mean when they talk about the “transfiguration of the commonplace.” She faced us at audience level, on a stage barely larger than a living room. “I think we’re all in need of lullabies now,” she said as she sat at the piano, and played her “Gotham Lullaby” from Dolmen Music: her cries, hesitations, and pauses nearly brought me to tears. I was not alone. Read More
November 15, 2016 On Music Love Saves the Day By Dan Piepenbring David Mancuso When I moved to New York I wished that its legendary dance scene, the one from the seventies and eighties that people never shut up about, was still alive—that I could pop in at Paradise Garage or The Gallery or The Loft, maybe wearing tan polyester poplin leisure pants or something pleathery with lots of studs in it, and writhe the night away. I don’t know why I wanted this. It takes three drinks to get me to look at a dance floor with anything other than fear. But I’d listen to the music from this era on my 160 GB iPod Classic (still ticking, thanks be) convinced that I’d been born too late, dreaming up names for twelve-inch house and disco tracks while I walked around. “Susurrations of the Heart.” “Avenue Days, Boulevard Nights.” “Our Ribbon Cutting (Snip-Snip Vocal Mix).” There were other even stupider ones, I don’t know. I’d pass by the old locations of these clubs and think, Well, Dan, that’s where it all happened, alright. I was a disco tourist, guilty of romanticizing a New York I never knew: one that wasn’t made for me, one whose return was made more impossible every day as people like me (straight, white, male) moved here in untenable droves, and I knew that. But I forgot it whenever I put on Dexter Wansell’s “Life on Mars,” or Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face,” or Ashford & Simpson’s “Stay Free.” Those tracks are all on David Mancuso Presents The Loft, a two-disc compilation that I kept in heavy rotation the first year I lived here. Mancuso, the impresario behind The Loft and thus someone who can legitimately claim to have thrown some of the best parties ever, died this week at seventy-two. Read More
October 6, 2016 On Music Leave Alexa Alone By Paul Grimstad Listening to Steely Dan’s Gaucho. 1. The cover of Steely Dan’s 1975 LP Katy Lied shows an out-of-focus praying mantis floating amid bulbous plants. I used to stare at it as a kid, listening to the record in my dad’s leather reading chair and wondering who this “Steely” was. He sounded sort of like Bob Dylan, if Bob had just been defrosted out of a block of carbonite. (I was intensely devoted to The Empire Strikes Back, so carbonite was almost always on my mind.) Other Steely Dan records like Countdown to Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic, The Royal Scam, and Aja opened onto a strange and ominous world: double helixes in the sky, Haitian divorcées, the rise and fall of an LSD chef named Charlemagne, someone who drinks Scotch and then “dies behind the wheel.” The photo on the inside gatefold of the Greatest Hits showed two nasty-looking guys standing in what appeared to be a hotel dining room. Read More