April 20, 2018

In 1998, when I was a writer for Vibe magazine (which was the leading black culture journal), I went to London to interview the trip-hop kings Massive Attack. They were preparing to release their third album, the beautifully complex and brooding Mezzanine. Although they collaborated with other singers and musicians, the core Massive trio consisted of Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, Andy “Mushroom” Vowles, and Robert “3D” Del Naja. Del Naja penned most of the Dadaistic lyrics on Mezzanine and thought of its title.

As a pop journalist, I had already covered their contemporaries Portishead and Tricky, so of course I felt it was my duty and destiny to fly to London to cover Mezannine. I had to beg the cornball editor in chief to send me, and in the end, the story was never published. But I never forgot the experience of sitting with Massive, trying to refrain from being too much of a fanboy. The year before, when I’d visited Paris, I’d taken Blue Lines along to serve as my soundtrack of the city. Me and my beautiful homegirl Wendy Washington rode out to the Palace of Versailles as Massive’s remake of the soul classic “Be Thankful for What You Got” blared from the speakers.

“Mezzanine is that place in between, when you’re not sure if it’s yesterday or today,” Del Naja told me at Olympic Studios in London. “That little space where it’s quite scary and erotic.” Also known as an excellent graffitist and painter (inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat) and rumored to be the mysterious street artist Banksy (a claim he denied), Del Naja had seemingly become the leader of the group. He was its resident auteur, and his Francis Bacon view of the world was visible in the band’s videos, album designs, and stage lighting.

The band first came together in their hometown of Bristol. Though Del Naja was shorter than the lanky Daddy G or the equally tall Mushroom, who were both somewhat reserved, his presence towered over the group, and it caused an earthquake break between the brotherhood. “When we got together to record, we realized the amount of creative friction between us,” Mushroom would confess later. “In fact, we wound up recording in separate studios.” The producer Neil Davidge later described the process as “messy,” but from that angst, tension, and messiness, Massive Attack delivered a masterpiece. Read More

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April 19, 2018

On Music

Seven and a Half Short Notes on Sandy Denny

By Brian Cullman

Sandy Denny
(January 6, 1947–April 21, 1978)

1) I just finished the recent Sandy Denny biography. I was very disappointed by it. In the end, she dies. In the bio that I want to read, she’s now living in a cottage in Wales and drinking only on Thursdays.

2) In 1968, Sandy Denny joined Fairport Convention, a new British band modeled on the sound of the Byrds and on American folk rock. She was twenty-one and had spent time at university and worked briefly as a nurse but was happier staying out all night at folk clubs. Fairport had already recorded an album and were modestly successful, but Sandy upped their game exponentially, not just with a voice that could stop time with a whisper but with original songs as rich and strong as the traditional ballads the band were exploring. The three albums she recorded with them in 1968 and 1969 are breathtakingly beautiful and mysterious, digging deep into British traditions and dragging them into an ecstatic and electric future. When she left to go off on her own in late 1969, first with her own group, Fotheringay, then solo, she was at the top of her game and was lost. Read More

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April 18, 2018

On Music

It’s Strange the Way the Lord Does Move

By Drew Bratcher

The other night, up late again listening to old records, I came across a song by the country singer Lefty Frizzell that, so far as I know, I had never heard before. It was the title that got my attention: “There’s No Food in This House.” I imagined Lefty, in his most vexed falsetto, leveling the words at a cheating lover who, in a final act of defiance, blows the week’s grocery money on a trip to the salon. He had other songs to this effect: “You’re Humbuggin’ Me,” “Always Late (With Your Kisses),” “Run ’Em Off,” “You Want Everything But Me.” Merle Haggard called Lefty “the most unique thing to ever happen to country music.” He was, among other things, a kind of hillbilly Falstaff, Nashville’s great minstrel of aggrieved accusations.

Lefty was a leading figure in the country movement called honky-tonk, which adapted the genre—previously the province of barn dances, bandstands, and festivals—to the beer hall. Rock ’n’ roll was an influence. Hollywood was too. Lefty’s publicity photos for Columbia Records in the early fifties channel black-and-white film stills. In a classic shot from 1951, he wears a fringed western shirt and a bandanna scarf, looking like Edward G. Robinson doing his best Davy Crockett.

Honky-tonk music could, at times, be scandalous. Heavy drinking and infidelity were recurring themes. Webb Pierce, one of Lefty’s contemporaries, had big hits with “There Stands the Glass” and “Back Street Affair,” the former an ode to the cathartic powers of whiskey, the latter a sentimental defense of sleeping around that led Kitty Wells, the queen of country music, to answer with a song of her own. “You didn’t count the cost,” she sang in “Paying for That Back Street Affair.” “You gambled and I lost / Now I must pay with hours of deep despair.” Read More

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March 5, 2018

On Music

The Soundtrack of ‘Phantom Thread’ Will Outlive the Oscars

By Paul Grimstad

Still from Phantom Thread.

Not often does a film score stand out as a work of art independent of the movie it embellishes, but there are the rare exceptions. Everyone remembers the zither tune in The Third Man, Howard Shore’s ominous counterpoint clocks in After Hours, or Stanley Kubrick’s counterintuitive needle drops in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Other scores meet the film on a plane in which the photography and music cannot be disentangled: Ryuichi Sakamoto’s title cue for The Last Emperor; Jerry Goldsmith’s recurring, melancholy muted-trumpet line in Chinatown; Philip Glass’s winding synth fractals heard over a time-lapsed New York City in Koyaanisqatsi.

Jonny Greenwood’s score to Phantom Thread—Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie about a maniacally fussy dressmaker named Reynolds Woodcock—is of the latter type. The music has a sinewy, ductile curvature that folds itself into the piles of fabric, weaving its way into the lining as the cloth becomes a dress. The main theme is a tense piece played by a string section in its upper register, where things cease to sound sweet and become eerie and diaphanous. Other cues are full of wide, warm major-ninth chords that flutter around like pastel ribbons. There are voicings that remind one of Bill Evans at his most fragile; instrumental color that brings to mind the Ballet Russes; airy chromaticism à la Miles Davis circa Nefertiti. Solo piano lines pick out patterns in the music like animate glowing lace. All of it is impeccably recorded. It is perverse that it didn’t win the Oscar for best score this year. Read More

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February 22, 2018

On Music

The Agony and the XTC

By David Yaffe

On Andy Partridge, punk, beauty, madness, and our secret sounds.

There was a time when you thought you could bury your secrets in a music collection. You were young, you were sensitive to judgment, and you weren’t sure how all of it would stack up in the eyes of a potential romantic partner or in the eyes of the mature, sophisticated self you aspired to become. Were you really that needy? That desperate? And would you be crushed if someone else didn’t get it? Music got to places that were so private and strange, it was hard to put them into words, at least until you got older. You supposedly now live in a less lonely world. Now you could find refuge in social media, on a fan site, and discover that your little aural secret belongs to other people too. And if the repressed is returned and you reexamine where those sounds came from, you could find that some of those grown-ups who made the music you hoarded were even less stable and sure of themselves than you were. The band I am speaking of is XTC, who are now, despite their general absence from the conversation, the subject of the recently aired Showtime documentary XTC: This Is Pop. They were perhaps best known for their accidental 1986 hit, “Dear God,” a manifesto of unbelief initially buried on a B side before disc jockeys at college radio stations flipped the record and discovered something that hit a nerve among the young. And yet what was truly terrifying about the song was its harmonic beauty, the way those descending notes and glorious extended vocal lines followed the chords and made its blasphemy somehow numinous and sublime. By the time the record came out, those of us who were following its singer and author, Andy Partridge, knew that while he sounded invincible on the record, he had in fact stopped performing a few years earlier, in 1982, due to a kind of incurable stage fright. This was long before the Internet, and we had to search hard for the information. That voice, filled with angst or tenderness or both, just couldn’t make it to the concert stage anymore. The music that was the most precious to Partridge was also somehow unbearable. A few years ago, he appeared on a BBC documentary singing the praises of another head case, the mighty Judee Sill. But when he began to play her song, “The Kiss,” he had to stop it. “Those notes climbing under her voice … Sorry; I can’t do it … It’s just too beautiful.” Read More

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January 24, 2018

On Music

When Jazz Was Dangerous

By Nathaniel Rich

“Robinson’s Band Plays Anything,” F. Bildestein, 1890. From the cover of the New Orleans newspaper the Mascot (November 15, 1890).

Musical forms have the life cycle of carnivorous beasts: clumsy in infancy, terrifying in adolescence, fearsome in maturity, fangless in old age, and pitiful in senescence, before the inevitable silent death. Their life spans tend to be longer than ours, so it can be difficult to recall that some of the more geriatric genres were once vital and fierce. But even Baroque music had a caddish streak—“a most dangerous reef,” in the words of a prominent seventeenth-century German rector, “along which many a young soul, as if called by Sirens … falls into dissoluteness”—and polka, in the 1840s, was a venal Bohemian menace (in 1844, the Illustrated London News wrote that polka “needs only to be seen once to be avoided forever!”). Jazz, now well advanced into its second century, had an especially violent youth. It was more than merely dangerous—it was homicidal.

Jazz, to be precise, was never extraordinarily ferocious. “Jass” was. The soft sibilant turned heavy at around the same time—a century ago—that the music crossed over in the national consciousness, rumbling north on steamboats up the Mississippi and on the northbound Illinois Central to Chicago, then to New York and California, where it swiftly gained popularity, social acceptance, critical esteem. To do so, it had to leave New Orleans, its native home, behind. This was understandable, given the treatment it had received. Read More

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Category Archives: On Music

On Music

Twenty Years Later: On Massive Attack and Mezzanine

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On Music

Seven and a Half Short Notes on Sandy Denny

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On Music

It’s Strange the Way the Lord Does Move

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On Music

The Soundtrack of ‘Phantom Thread’ Will Outlive the Oscars

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On Music

The Agony and the XTC

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On Music

When Jazz Was Dangerous

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