March 27, 2017

Harriet Tubman’s new album Araminta has a joyous aura of creative destruction.

Harriet Tubman

In 1967, Thelonious Monk wrote his only waltz: a slow, sweet, faintly melancholy tune he called “Ugly Beauty,” which appears on his album Underground. The title is probably Monk’s translation of jolie laide, a French expression for a woman whose less pleasing features somehow make her more attractive—though I suspect that Monk had more gnomic intentions in deploying the phrase. The idea that beauty might arise out of asymmetry—out of irregularities, imperfections, and apparent flaws—would no doubt have appealed to the composer of “Off Minor,” with his predilection for dissonant intervals, altered chords and rhythmic displacement. Monk’s music was a world of ugly beauty.

The story of musical modernism could also be told as a story of ugly beauty—of the steady triumph, in the face of critical resistance, of deviation, dissonance, and rupture. Many of the sounds we now consider beautiful were at first experienced as strange, unsettling, even frightening. In the feverish rhythms of The Rite of Spring, Adorno detected a fascist call for obedience. Philip Larkin accused John Coltrane of trying to be “ugly on purpose” with his severe, probing improvisations. Some American supporters of the war in Vietnam are said to have heard sacrilege, if not treason, in Jimi Hendrix’s electrical rewiring of the national anthem at Woodstock. The reasons for such resistance are as much political as aesthetic. As the philosopher Jacques Attali put it, “noise is violence: it disturbs.” The struggle to create new sounds, Attali argues in Noise: The Political Economy of Music, is usually received as a “simulacrum of murder” because it challenges the existing musical order. Read More

March 21, 2017

On Music

Mr. Berry and Mrs. Blavatsky

By Brian Cullman

From the cover of Chuck Berry in Memphis, 1967.

My first girlfriend grew up in Saint Louis and, as a young girl, would sneak over to Chuck Berry’s house and sit by his guitar-shaped swimming pool. There were always a few little blonde nymphets lounging by his pool, and if you were clever, you could get there by slipping around one of the hedges—you never had to go near the main house, which was, so I hear, out of bounds. But the pool was open, and this would’ve been in the late sixties, back when his songs were part of our national currency but no longer on the radio: before “My Ding-a-Ling” became a number one record, swelling his bank account but degrading his currency precipitously, turning a national treasure into a dirty joke. Imagine if the Beatles’ biggest hit was “Octopus’s Garden.” It’s worse than that.

“Look, I ain’t no big shit, all right,” Berry told Rolling Stone in 2001: Read More

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

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

Advertisement

Category Archives: On Music

On Music

Blues to Come

Tags

On Music

Mr. Berry and Mrs. Blavatsky

Tags

On Music

This Is Ourselves

Tags

On Music

Miami 2017

Tags

On Music

Quiet Fire

Tags

On Music

Gotham Lullaby

Tags

Sign In

Advertisement

Tags

Tags

Tags

Tags

Tags

Tags