{"id":106528,"date":"2017-01-11T13:00:26","date_gmt":"2017-01-11T18:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=106528"},"modified":"2017-01-13T11:13:31","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T16:13:31","slug":"this-is-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/11\/this-is-ourselves\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is Ourselves"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo: Dave Tompkins<\/p><\/div>\n

The\u00a0Trump 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\u2019re deep in their tans and cups, buzzing about their candidate\u2019s 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\u2019t have to look too hard\u2014see one and the others join its hysteria. Their features are produced by erosion and rock-boring sponges, \u201csolution holes\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Two days and several worlds later, I\u2019m in Miami, home of the empty home of Steve Bannon, where he was\u00a0illegally registered to vote for his future\u00a0employer. Also home to 2016\u2019s best film Moonlight<\/em>, which stands for what Trump\u2019s chief counselor wishes to silence. As Samuel R. Delany once wrote, \u201cThere are times when all the yellin\u2019 and the hellin\u2019 can\u2019t fill the lack.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scream is digitally transferable, from master tapes to a computer in a small studio owned by Andrew \u201cLe Spam\u201d Yeomanson. Recorded in 1993, by Palm Beach County\u2019s Splack Pack, the scream is a stem, a part of a song disbanded into its constituents. Alone, it\u2019s merely trying to tear the room in half. Or maybe it\u2019s just trying to holler at Ozzy (circa \u201cCrazy Train\u201d) and a man from Broward County identified as Sir Knight Slime Nasty. Using indoor voices, this could be a simple \u201chi.<\/em>\u201d 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\u2019re not hearing: the other stems that made \u201cScrub Da Ground\u201d a hit in the clubs, where women could reclaim themselves from the title\u2019s kitchen-floor grind, owning dance floor and the song. Recalled one YouTube viewer, \u201cI remember letting it be known this WAS my song. And refused to dance with anyone because I needed this one ALONE.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Chiton face. Photo: Laura Harmon<\/p><\/div>\n

Compartmentalized into just scream, congas, and low end, what I heard wasn\u2019t a song (stem, seeds, and all) but a release in itself. Working parts, bodies yet to be commodified. This version only lived in the moment\u2014twenty seconds of reverse engineering played live by Spam sliding faders on the console. It may have been the best thing I heard in 2016. It was certainly the best\u00a0thing\u00a0I heard all year while drinking from a\u00a0coconut that fell\u00a0from a tree in Spam\u2019s yard while I stared at Man Parrish\u2019s old 808<\/a> on the studio rack in front of me. The best thing\u00a0I heard until Spam played the next thing: an unreleased Debbie Deb\u2013Pretty Tony track, vocoded in 1984. Pretty Tony: first in Miami to have an Atari hooked up in his car, once recorded himself smashing champagne bottles in the studio. Debbie Deb: stood me up at Club Spinnaker in Panama City, Florida, one spring break after I drove ten hours to see her do \u201cWhen I Hear Music.\u201d Perhaps some kind soul will release this freestyle-electro monster thirty-three years later. (Subject heading: \u201cWhat the world needs now.\u201d) Freestyle is a dance genre known for living in the moment, falling in love and apart before the next hook. Remixes were often done late night, alone in the studio with a box cutter and recording tape, when the clubs were emptying out.<\/p>\n

The next time\u00a0I\u00a0visit\u00a0the studio in North Miami, it\u2019s early December and Trump is president-elect. Solution hole becomes sinkhole, the collapsing world. Since I last saw Spam, he\u2019s been sorting\u00a0through master tapes from Arthur Baker\u2019s peak of producing and remixing dance music in the early 1980s. After me, he will be visited by Miami funk musician Lang Cook, creator of \u201cLiberty City Jam\u201d (from the 1984 album She\u2019s Hot with 2000 Watts<\/em>). This is Spam\u2019s job: listening to and digitizing unheard treasure, which also includes baking the tapes at 130 degrees inside a Snackmaster jerky dehydrator. My job, I suppose, is to quietly freak out. This is easy when you\u2019re holding a reel labeled \u201cSmurf Rock<\/a>,\u201d the first song, to my knowledge, that uses farm<\/em> and bass<\/em> in the same thought.<\/p>\n

\u201cSmurf Rock\u201d may have been my ride to school in the backseat of Mustang SVO, but the Arthur Baker haul was another story, blowing my wig back further. There\u2019s a demo of Biz Markie beatboxing the \u201cHey what\u2019s up, brother\u201d part from Harlem Underground Band\u2019s \u201cSmokin\u2019 Cheeba Cheeba,\u201d basically having a conversation with himself between two other people. On beat, no big deal. There\u2019s the Fat Boys\u2019 first demo, where Buffy, the Human Beatbox (nabbed for selling weed to Tubbs in an episode of Miami Vice<\/em>, d. 1995), is getting clowned by the others for what would become their signature noise (\u201cWhat the fuck is \u2018bbbbllllllllllllllllll\u2019??\u201d). There\u2019s an unreleased electro track called \u201cSOS\u201d that I really want, followed by \u201cNo Need for Greed\u201d by FREEEZ. Then a disturbing two minutes of Stevie Nicks trying to punch her way out of an emulator, in a flurry of pitches. Then a bass version of New Order\u2019s \u201cConfusion.\u201d And Blowfly (d. 2016) doing a perversion of \u201cBurn Rubber On Me.\u201d (Oops! Wrong session.) Then another a cappella: some kid rapping about studio techniques (flange overdrive!) and burning drum-machine chips, as if he\u2019d just walked in on all this new technology, including a drum machine that won\u2019t stop playing \u201ctil the world is gone.\u201d This warranty is somewhat apocalyptic but still encouraging for all you DMX owners out there. Turns out the kid is Adam Yauch (d. 2012). Then \u201cLove Will Tear Us Apart.\u201d Vocals only at first. Add guitar. Fishbowls.<\/p>\n

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Arthur Baker with his tapes. Photo: Andrew Yeomanson<\/p><\/div>\n

So many deceased passing through. Separated from their songs\u2014and from how we\u2019ve always known them\u2014their isolated voices added a presence to the room, and thus absence, as if they had been just right there<\/em>, losses that mark the past like any other year. We go to pieces. The session could only end with Planet Patrol\u2019s \u201cPlay at Your Own Risk.\u201d The perils of nostalgia for an era that was often cruel to the marginalized who danced and freaked to this music, the \u201cTale of Plagues and Carnivals,\u201d fully broken down in a present where fifty people are murdered in a club for living in their moment.<\/p>\n

For now, these tracks remain in the studio. It was a comfort hearing these alternate realities, returning to the first of times but with certainty. I knew what was going to happen. I knew I would love it, a feeling amplified by the fact that I may not hear it again. And that I couldn\u2019t take it with me. No dubs, no zips, no shares, no clips. No running down the street screaming about Splack stems in rush-hour traffic. No Farm \u2019n\u2019 Bass. All I could do was entrust it all to memory (and to the lunatics trying to reissue everything, leaving no chiton unturned) and walk out with an empty coconut, the smell of hibiscus in the yard, in a place without season, as if a false sense of timelessness could forestall the future. A bird of paradise bloomed on the stoop, a perennial shouting in bright orange.<\/p>\n

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Photo: Dave Tompkins<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cMy Everyday Shit, Every Night Shit\u201d: Songs That Actually Came Out This Year That I Listened to the Most<\/strong><\/p>\n

Frank Ocean, \u201cNights\u201d<\/p>\n

Yves Tumor, \u201cThe Feeling When You Walk Away<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Karen Gwyer, \u201cYou Big<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

King, \u201cThe Right One\u201d<\/p>\n

Country Florist, \u201cVintage Whispers<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Steven Julien, \u201cOshun\u201d<\/p>\n

Abra, \u201cCrybaby (Rom\u2019s Duct Dub Breakdown Edit)\u201d<\/p>\n

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, \u201cArthropoda\u201d<\/p>\n

Blood Orange, \u201cEVP\u201d\/ \u201cBest to You\u201d<\/p>\n

Danny Brown, \u201cHell For It\u201d<\/p>\n

Frank Ocean \u201cPink and White\u201d<\/p>\n

Cousin Stizz, \u201cEvery Season\u201d<\/p>\n

Demdike Stare, \u201cAirborne Latency<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Crooked Man, \u201cComing Up for Air\u201d (album edit)<\/p>\n

Nicolas Jaar, \u201cThree Sides of Nazareth\u201d<\/p>\n

Jessy Lanza,\u00a0\u201cCould Be U\u201d\/ \u201cI Talk BB\u201d (Morgan Geist Remix)<\/p>\n

Mark Pritchard, \u201cHi Red<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

DJ Shadow, featuring Nils Frahm, \u201cBergschrund\u201d<\/p>\n

French Montana and Kodak Black, \u201cLockjaw\u201d<\/p>\n

Radiohead, \u201cFul Stop\u201d<\/p>\n

Africaine 808, \u201cNation<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Andre 3000, \u201cSolo (Reprise)\u201d<\/p>\n

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Record I Sold So I Could Afford Blond<\/em> on Vinyl Until MF***Kers Jacked the Price Up<\/strong><\/p>\n

Folkways, Speech After Removal of the Larynx<\/em><\/p>\n

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Strings That Got Me Like Family Stand\u2019s \u201cGhetto Heaven\u201d in a Song Requested by FLOTUS for the White House Farewell Party<\/strong><\/p>\n

Solange, \u201cCranes in the Sky\u201d<\/p>\n

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Song I Was Listening to When Attacked by Two Fortunately Nonrabid Dogs Near the Polk County Line<\/strong><\/p>\n

Juan Atkins and Moritz von Oswald Present Borderland, \u201cZeolites\u201d<\/p>\n

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Best Xmas-Morning Gift Not Unrelated to the Phantasm<\/em> Silver-Ball Brain-Driller Ornament I Saw Online <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Run the Jewels 3<\/em><\/p>\n

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Favorite Event That Projected Zoanthid Coral Polyps onto Subwoofers Attached to a German-made Mobile-Sound Panzer<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nik Nowak\u2019s Soundtank vs Bass Mekanik<\/p>\n