Music

Heat and Light (Hearing Playboi Carti in “First of the Month’s” 25th Summer)

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I’m in thrall to chaud bonheur – hot happiness? – a phrase I just learned from Stanley Corngold (who uses it near the end of his post in this batch). The burn flashed me back to my twenties when I locked on promesse de bonheur from Stendhal’s passionate NO to Kant’s el blando Germanic aesthetic: “That is beautiful which pleases without interesting.” Oh, please, please, please…

The rag you’re reading has always hoped to cultivate instincts for happiness. (When I recall my crew’s gone good times in the 80s and 90s, it seems sadly apparent to me that First has served as a sort of substitute for all yesterday’s parties.) First’s fun had never been tuned to disengagement. In our time your editor has invoked C.L.R. James’ “struggle for happiness” and Arendt’s “public happiness.” You can trace the stages of First’s happiness in the About section of this website where there’s an archive of mission statements. What you’re reading here may end up there since I’ve found myself looking backward in this summer of our 25th year in the game.

It’s Playboi Carti’s “Sky” that’s put me in retrospective mode. Carti repurposes a melodic line from a hip hop track by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony that gave First of the Month its name.

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“Every Brain Needs Music” (Ren & Professors)

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The camera shows an apartment with cracked and peeling walls, empty except for two old lamps that flicker, only deepening the gloom.

A masked figure pushes a wheelchair into the center of the room, then leaves. In it sits a young man dressed in a hospital gown, hunched over an acoustic guitar. A title card flashes: “Hi Ren.” Looking up, the guitarist begins to pluck out a flamenco-style tune, which, after a few bars, lingers on a bended note before sputtering into a series of dissonant arpeggios that climb the neck. The melodic line pivots again—now to a simple round of harmonious chords, the stuff of countless folk songs. And then the performer begins to sing …

The next eight minutes defy genre labels, although the song contains elements of hip-hop and punk, plus a little yodeling. It is a piece of one-man musical theater featuring two characters, both called Ren. (The artist is a young Welsh singer-songwriter named Ren Gill.) One of them is a musician, just barely back on his feet after years of a debilitating illness. The other is a personification of his anxiety and self-contempt, with a raspy voice full of needles and poison, who gets the best lines. The characters have contrasting demeanors and even play the same tune differently. Clearly they have been fighting for a long time. The healthy Ren wants to escape his doppelgänger, or even destroy it, but he remains at a profound disadvantage: you cannot escape your own shadow.

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Ren & Band

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“Hi Ren,” per Scott McLemee above, might be the best intro to the range of talents that’s made virtuoso Ren a trauma-stomper for his own gen and plenty of elders. (McLemee also twigs to Ren’s rap.) Right now, though, I prefer hearing our Rennaisance boy-prodigy play with Big Push, the band he’s busked with in recent years. Their live performances are shot through with plain joy in musicking. When they do “Paint it Black” or “Johnny B. Goode” or “Guns at Brixton,” I flash back to mid-60s battles of bands. Ren and Big Push haven’t covered “Gloria“ yet but I’m sure it’s in their future…

A couple videos of Ren and friends pushing the feeling:

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“Love…Thy Will Be Done” (& Jody is a Preacher)

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C. Liegh McIness commended a lovely track by Prince that wasn’t released until after his death, Baby You’re a Trip, and that, in turn, led your editor to another amazement on Prince’s posthumous Originals collection. A version of this song, with the Cuban American pop singer, Martika, doing the vocal, was a hit in Australia. Here’s Prince’s version…

Love… Thy Will Be Done – YouTube

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Taking Bad Bunny Seriously

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First, some facts about Bad Bunny, in case you think he’s a rowdy pet. He’s Billboard’s artist of the year and Spotify’s most-streamed artist for two years running—an amazing feat for someone who sings in Spanish. His reach is global, but his songs are local, rich with Puerto Rican slang. (I’ve heard him introduced as “Ba-Boney” on Spanish-language TV.) He looks like he was born in a baseball cap, but he sometimes performs in a dress. He chose his stage name because, as he told the late-night host James Cordon, “even when he’s bad, he’s cute.”

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“Old Violin” & Hate Songs

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Anger is an energy. Per Johnny Rotten and Richard Meltzer, though I couldn’t recall where/when Meltzer mused on animus in rock ‘n’ roll attitude so I asked him for a steer…

I’m sure—I know—I’ve said it…and things much like it…in lots of places over the years, but I couldn’t give you a GPS on it…it’s just in multiple creases and cracks in the rock-roll road.

I’m sure I’ve said, specifically, that SECOND-PERSON HOSTILITY is an omnipresent aspect of rock all the way back to its Delta Blues origins, much deeper than anything as benign as “attitude”: I dislike, detest, abhor YOU.  Add gender hostility to the package (usually, but not always, as “misogyny”) and you got one throbbing heap of reliably functional HATESTUFF.

Anger isn’t quite the same…no…but…well…good luck in your search.

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“Rap is Clear, So Write Clear”

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Toomaj Salehi has been imprisoned and tortured by Iran’s regime scum who hate how his lucid rap exposes “the filth behind the clouds.” You can find out more about the international campaign on his behalf here. Toomaj should be free as a bird, free as the Iranian woman he images, sans hijab, “…liberty’s mane blowing in the wind.”

The first rap song here has (imperfect) English subtitles.  There’s a translation below the second video (after “read more”).  A taste from its outro:

Don’t wait for a saviour, there is nothing on the horizon
You are the rescuer, you are the hero
If you and I unite…we are boundless
We are the saviours of eternity, we are the Imām of Time

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“Baraye Azadi” (Iran’s Freedom Song)

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The single best way to understand Iran’s uprising is not any book or essay, but Shervin Hajipour’s 2m anthem ‘Baraye’ which garnered over 40m views in 48 hours (before he was imprisoned). Its profundity requires multiple views. (Translation by @BBCArdalan)

The lyrics are a compilation of tweets for #MahsaAmini that evoke felt life among the young in a modern society ruled by a geriatric religious dictatorship. The tweets speak “to the yearning for ‘a normal life,’ instead of the ‘forced paradise’ of an Islamist police state.”  [Per Karim Sadjadpour. More adapted tweets from him below the song.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0De6Asvzuso&ab_channel=iWind%21

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Killer Storm

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What’s above is the entry on Jerry Lee Lewis from Greil Marcus’s annotated discography to the collection of essays he edited: Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island.

 

“Folk Music” (Amplified)

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Greil Marcus’s new book on Bob Dylan opens with a Dylan quote—“I can see myself in others.”—from a loose press conference with journalists in Rome in 2001. I recall listening to audio of that same rap session on YouTube and noticing another line that’s not at odds with the one that jumped out at Marcus. Dylan responded to a convoluted question with his own humorous query: “Am I an idiot?” he asked. This wasn’t a mid-60s prickly (Neuwirthy?) tease. While Dylan was playing to the crowd and encouraging them to laugh with him, he wasn’t coming hard at his questioner (who seemed to take his soft goof well). What struck me was that Dylan, even though he was only acting as if he was clueless, seemed entirely alive to how it might feel to be hopelessly at sea mentally. After all, he’s known what it was to be an unworldly Midwesterner at a Village party with an older generation of haute-bohos. (“I was hungry and it was your world.”) And that, in turn, puts him a thousand thought-miles away from heads who act like they’ve been tenured since they were ten.

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Bob Dylan: the Man; the Moment; the Italian Meats Sandwich[1]

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Chickie Pomerantz was lit.

Opening night of the 1963 Brandeis Folk Festival had been lame.  All those green bookbags and black turtlenecks.  All those skanks and pears.  Then this skinny guy with this scratchy voice came on singing about some farmer starving to death in South Dakota.  Chickie and Kevin Cahill and Frannie St. Exupery and a couple other jocks tossed beer cans at the stage.[2]  “You shoulda seen the assholes run,” he said, coming back to the dorm.

I went the second night.

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The Girl Who Fell to Earth

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One day, I’ll come out of my shell, I’m sure,” says Aldous Harding. She does not seem to be speaking to anyone in particular; her words seem directed mostly at herself. A few minutes later, she repeats those exact words as if she hasn’t said them before. Aldous Harding—real name Hannah Harding; her stage name is presumably taken from the author of Brave New World and even now produces a brief mental ripple of confusion every time I say it out loud—is from New Zealand, and this is the second time I have seen her. My dear friend Andi is with me; this is the third time she’s seen her. Harding is just that sort of singer, the kind you wish you could see every year.

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Arlo in Memphis (& Brooklyn)

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Arlo McKinley (AKA Timothy Dairl Carr) made his great new CD, This Mess We’re In, in Memphis and you sense the lights up the river even as he gives it to you straight about the state of the white working class in Ohiopioid. The sound of This Mess is Memphis’s. Perfect weaves of country/soul/gospel with an inner power. Organ-and-fiddle melting into one another with the beat behind it as Arlo rolls on, strong as death, sweet as love.

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“You’ve Got to Have Freedom” (Pharoah Sanders, Rest in Power)

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Per Eric Lott: “A favorite instance of what Baraka describes in ‘The Screamers’ (1967), a ‘social tract of love,’ ‘the honked note that would be his personal evaluation of the world,’ watching us while he fixed his sky, no head and all head, no predicate, ‘the repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed in its insistence past music . . . hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair,’ spurting ‘out of the diphthong culture, and reinforced the black cults of emotion’ — ‘no compromise, no dreary sophistication, only the elegance of something that is too ugly to be described, and is diluted only at the agent’s peril.'”

May Pharoah wail again soon with John Hicks and Idris M. on the night shift!! B.D.