Following up on "The Minneapolis Vulgarian"

In the interest of presenting some more complications (actually, some more he said/she said), I wanted to include a bit of the reaction from Prince's apparent denunciation of homosexuality. This caused quite a bit of consternation across the internet (not the least, from me). Enough consternation that one of Prince's people started putting out the word that Prince was misquoted. Claire Hoffman, the writer of the piece, claims otherwise (hardly surprising) and also says that she wasn't allowed to bring a taperecorder to the interview. So for a summary of some of the developments from Prince's camp, click here. For some further information from The New Yorker's Claire Hoffman on the experience of interviewing Prince, go here.

PS: "The Minneapolis Vulgarian" is Stanley Crouch's description of Prince from his classic polemical take-down of Miles Davis, "On the Corner: The Sellout of Miles Davis." You can find it here. I don't really agree with anything that Crouch has to say about music, but I do have to admit that he pushes a mean pen, as the kids say. On the same page that features that pithy description of Prince, he also has a pretty wild description of Miles Davis's late-career fusion, describing it as a "sound so decadent it can no longer disguise the shriveling of its maker's soul." I hope one day that I do something so objectionable to a man like Crouch that it warrants that kind of phrase.

All We Are Saying

There's a lot to write about the last month I've spent here in Argentina. Overall, Catharine and I have been very happy here: good food, nice weather, the people are friendly (though they generally speak in a variety of Spanish that is still fairly incomprehensible to us), and there are a ton of concerts. In fact, somewhat to my surprise, there are a TON of tribute bands in Argentina. No doubt you'll all hear me spin out some eleaborate pontifications about tribute bands in Argentina for my dissertation (especially since I've been able to do interviews with three tribute band musicians over the last week), but I just wanted to mention a couple of things now.

Last week, I saw The Beats at the Teatro Gran Rex. Lots of interesting things happened at the concert (again, which you'll get to read about in my dissertation), but one particularly interesting thing happened during the performance of "Imagine" at the concert. First of all, this is not technically a Beatles song, but it is performed fairly often at Beatles tribute band shows, so I wasn't too surprised to hear it. More interesting was the manner of its performance. The "John" in the band was onstage alone, not playing any instruments, and accompanied essentially by a karoake tape background. I don't quite know why he just didn't have his bandmates accompany him, but the background sounded pretty good, in fact, it could have just been Lennon's recording with the vocal stripped from it. While he was singing, they showed video images on a huge screen above the stage and had Spanish subtitles for the lyrics. This was interesting, because while the audiences here are really into tribute bands and usually sing along quite strongly, I have suspected for a while that most of the audience doesn't actually understand the English lyrics in these songs (and Alex, the bassist I interviewed yesterday from the Pink Floyd tribute band Umma Gumma, seconds this view). (We'll also pass over here what "understand" means--clearly different things to different people.) But, evidently, The Beats decided that the lyrics were too important just to wash over the crowd, so they provided a translation for the non-English speakers in the audience. And they showed video images of--to put it plainly--deprivation, hardship, and misery: refugee camps, starving children, war footage, and a video of one of the planes hitting the World Trade Center. Mostly, the crowd was silent or singing along softly. For myself, I still don't really know what to do when I see video from 9/11. Usually, I just sort of stare at it unblinkingly with my mouth half open. 9/11 is probably the most talked-about event of the last 50 years, but what can you say about it? I think Vonnegut had it about right when he says in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five that in fact there isn't anything to say about a moment like that. All that's left is for the birds to sing, "Poo-tweet-tweet."

But anyway, they also showed some video of, if I remember correctly, the IRA, Israeli settlers, prison camps, people throwing rocks at tanks: relatively standard stuff. They also briefly showed someone holding a sign that read: "Las Malvinas son Argentinas." (The Falkland/Malvinas Islands are Argentinian.) And inxeplicably, the crowd, which had been silently contemplating or singing along, gave out a hearty cheer for that. Now, I assume that the image was chosen to go along with the line in the song, "Imagine there's no countries . . . nothing to kill or die for," and that the picture was supposed to represent the sort of doomed, futile, and destructive nationalism that caused two countries to go to war and lose many lives over a few sparsely populated islands. "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" is something of a rallying cry here, but Lennon's song, and the performance of it in this context by a tribute band with all of these other images, seems to be directly against the usual sentiment that "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" carries. I don't quite get how people could be so receptive to the song and its performance here (which, let me assure you, they were) and yet applaud a symbol of jingoistic nationalism. "Strange days, indeed."

My Name is Prince and I am . . . a Homophobe?

I'm not necessarily saying that Prince has a coherent set of political and social views (that any of us mere mortals can understand), but this tiny article in the "Talk of the Town" section of the New Yorker doesn't do him any favors. After a brief discussion of Prince's new house in California, we get what the article's author, Claire Hoffman, must think is the money quote. Quoth Prince:

"So here’s how it is: you’ve got the Republicans, and basically they want to live according to this.” He pointed to a Bible. “But there’s the problem of interpretation, and you’ve got some churches, some people, basically doing things and saying it comes from here, but it doesn’t. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum you’ve got blue, you’ve got the Democrats, and they’re, like, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ Gay marriage, whatever. But neither of them is right.”

When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion—Prince tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”

The article then concludes with a short anecdote about a visitor to Prince's former residence in Paisley Park. And that's it. Now, I know that Prince can be elliptical and mysterious and all, but come on. If you're going to have an article about Prince in which he says something fairly controversial, you have to at least follow-up with it. Does this mean he is against gay marriage? Against homosexuality in general? Come on, Claire. One of the most sexually-provocative performers in popular music just said some pretty damning things about the sexual activities of 10% of the population (and likely a sizeable percentage of his own audience). You're the one with the New Yorker byline, Claire. I would ask him myself what exactly he means by that, but he's unlikely to answer my phone calls. You're taking a page out of Prince's own book by putting something suggestive out there and not fleshing it out completely. It works for him. Not for you.

And yes. As a Prince fan, I am slightly disturbed to hear him express what (possibly could be . . . again, I don't know because Hoffman doesn't do any real investigating for me) pretty intolerant views about homosexuality. But. Oof. Can I just reference all the hand-wringing that happens around modern-day Wagner reception and be done with it? My own cultural studies/audience studies/ethnomusicological stance is that Wagner, Prince, or whomever (lots of musicians throughout history and the world have held views that I virulently disagree with) may have some manner of control over their own beliefs and political stances, but that certainly doesn't limit what meaning their music has for me or what use I can make of it.

Books

Eileen Southern has made it to Buenos Aires. I haven't seen any other musicological books here, yet. I'll keep you posted.

Papa's Got a Brand New Bag

These cell phones are rocking out, man. Also, you maybe can't tell in the photo, but this band evidently has two bassists, a drummer, and a singer. Those cell phones like it HEAVY, I guess.

What Do I Know?

There's a discussion happening over at Wayne and Wax about Ne-Yo's song "Miss Independent." I didn't know the song before Wayne originally posted the video and his thoughts about it, so my contribution was limited to one dazzling, highly original thought: that the synth in "Miss Independent" reminded me quite a bit of the synth in Kanye West's "Flashing Lights." Sure, the timbre (the original topic of discussion) was very similar, but something else made the linkage in my enfeebled brain. They also use a very similar rhythm. Please allow me my first foray into index card analysis.

Above shows the basic rhythm of the synth in the two songs. The rythm in "Miss Independent" is just a kind of compression of the rhythm in "Flashing Lights." "Miss Independent" is only a 2-beat long pattern, while "Flashing Lights" is 4 beats long. So, "Miss Independent" just takes the first and last beats of "Flashing Lights." They're also very similar tempos--"Flashing Lights" is a couple of clicks faster, but they're both around 90 beats per minute, which means that they're essentially the same tempo in my head, when I'm not comparing them directly side by side with a metronome.

So anyway, that's my thought about that.

SPF 2008

Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy, just referred to Barack Obama as "young, handsome, and suntanned." Frankly, I'm glad he said it. At least, I'm glad he said it now. I think everyone needs to get all of this stuff out of our system now, before Obama actually takes office. The interesting thing for me, though, was the prior history of the word "suntanned" to refer to people of color. In fact, Duke Ellington's musical "Jump for Joy" prominently uses the word "suntanned" to refer to African-Americans, but with positive connotations. "Jump for Joy" Ellington's short-lived "social significance" musical from 1941 features, among other things, a stricken "Uncle Tom," surrounding by black performers singing about letting him die, he had lived a long life, while Broadway and Hollywood producers try desperately to keep him alive. The show opens with a number called "Suntanned Tenth of the Nation," which at leasts suggests that earlier in our history, "suntanned" was used comfortably by African-Americans. Then again, that was nearly 70 years ago. And we don't quite use the term "high yaller" anymore, either.

M.I.A. (a few ways)

Slate takes the occasion of the upcoming release of Queen Latifah's latest album to speculate on the current paucity of female rappers. While it may be true that are aren't any prominent female rappers per se out there right now, there is certainly no shortage of interesting female artists in contemporary popular music today, many of whom are strongly influenced by hip hop, if they are not exactly card-carrying "rappers." (Where does one get such a card, by the way?)

Chief among these, as the article mentions, would be the fabulous M.I.A. I saw her this past summer at something called the 33rd Street Armory in Philly, which was a giant open building resembling an airplane hanger. The sound was deafening and the crowd was full of Drexel undergrads (if they weren't, in fact, actually high school students), but I dug it anyway. I hope that someone smarter than me is busy writing about her, figuring out the taxonomy of her influences and sources, and putting her in the context of the new world music movement, a movement very different from the tired Peter Gabriel/Paul Simon/LBM/Youssou N'Dour one of the 1980s. (At least, I'm tired of talking and teaching about that movement--interesting as it is. I can't imagine my students, most of whom were born 1989 or later, are interested in hearing much more about it, either.)

I wanted to teach M.I.A. in my world music survey class this past semester, but I realized I wouldn't have anything interesting to say other than, "Wow, isn't this song cool?" There's a time and a place for such unnuanced enthusiasm, but it probably ain't the classroom. However, I do think it's important that academics get hip to people like M.I.A., if for no other reason than, particularly at the universities I've been at, a sizable percentage of the student body is of South Asian descent. I was definitely conscious of the fact that the world music class that I taught focused very heavily on Africa and the African diaspora. Which is great. But it seems like we're missing out on teaching a huge part of the world (umm, the entire continent of Asia that isn't Tuvan throat-singing or karaoke)--and a huge percentage of our students. Of course, it's easier this way. There's material for teaching Umm Kulthum. There's material for teaching Graceland. There's material for teaching Youssou N'Dour. There's material for teaching the Pygmies. But too many of us who teach "world music," myself very much included, do not know enough about the contemporary music from around the world that our increasingly worldly students are grooving on. No more excuses. It's time we did something about that. But in the meantime, check out M.I.A.'s track, "Sunshowers."

M.I.A. - New Music - More Music Videos

"R" is for "Rhythm"

Anyone at the AMS/SMT shindig this weekend would do well to check out my friend and colleague Roger Mathew Grant's paper on Friday night. It's a brilliant usage of Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy (specifically his newish book Listening) to problematize and expand our conception of rhythm. It's part of SMT's Music and Philosophy Interest Group session. I've had the privilege of reading Roger's paper (since I'm still in Buenos Aires and don't usually go to AMS anyway), and it's great. Well worth seeing before you hit the bars on Friday night.

Yeah! Obama!

Hey man, it's been 8 years. I think we should get to celebrate at least one more day. In that spirit, there's a song that seems particularly appropriate. Every time I hear the little instrumental hook for this song, I just can't stop laughing. Which is hard, since that hook pretty much repeats about 150 times.




As a postscript, I should also note here my intention to (someday) make a mash-up of this song and "Yeah" by LCD Soundsystem. I'm going to have monkey around with tempos quite a bit, but I think it can be done. More than that, it has to be done.

Heard the News Today, Oh Boy

Yeah, we can.