Album Year: 1982
Age: 0
Track Number: 4
“I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” is the first song in this series that was recorded in the epoch of the music video. As is true for many other people my age, it’s difficult to overestimate the effect MTV had on me. It’s likewise difficult to overestimate the effect MTV has had on culture in general. The pace of MTV’s editing- that being lightning fast- wrapped a façade of exterior cool onto everything it came in contact with, into every aspect of culture from commercials to film to reality television (which it invented) to broadcast news. The tempo and the rhythm of MTV’s fast editing has had drastic effects on how we as a species process visual information. Before MTV, we were an image-obsessed culture. Now, the visual is so powerful that it blocks out most of our other senses- it is the ultimate measure of reality- to be perceived is to be seen. This effects our entire race’s conception of ontology. So, to say that MTV has had effects on the species is not the least bit hyperbolic (okay, maybe the least bit). For not only did MTV set music to pictures, it made images into music. Reality became a music video, our experiences set to the conventions and restrictions of traditional composition, mappable and navigable.
In an essay written shortly after the death of Michael Jackson, I commented that Michael Jackson’s rise corresponded with the start of my memory development, thus I never knew a world without Jackson. The same can be said about MTV. MTV turns 30 this year and so do I. My world and the MTV world, the neoliberal world, the Michael Jackson world, have always been the same one.
“I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” is a perfect sample of an MTV era song. It’s a tune that can be defined as much by its “look” as its “feel”. By “look”, I don’t meant the actual music video or the way Daryl Hall and John Oates actually look, but the way the music purports to be seen, as well as the way the music looks upon the world. The music on “I Can’t Go For That” appears smooth, ironed-out, and healthy. Its hair is combed and not wily, its clothes stylish and sporty rather than ragged and labored. Daryl Hall’s voice sounds clean and that rare sheen of twinkling synth sound seems to reflect the glint in Hall’s pearly white teeth and baby blue eyes. You can smell the cologne. If Three Dog Night were as “slick as Wesson Oil”, Hall & Oates were as smooth as astroglide, an erotic wish-fulfillment fantasy (and the 80s sure were full of those) of cleanliness next to godliness, sexual desire as the manifestation of purity and good health.
Rock n’ roll’s primality and grit, its blood, sweat, and tears if you will, were frequently its greatest selling points. Daryl Hall’s crystal clear, immaculately produced voice was absent what some critics have dubbed the “grain” of the black voice, evident in oldie R&B stars like Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and Smokey Robinson. Hall & Oates and their peers were dubbed blue-eyed soul by their detractors, a name signifying not only whiteness, but an ethnic cleansing of blackness, which at the time (and still to a certain segment of the population) was the sole barometer of a music’s authenticity and worth.
Rock’s grit was a distinguishment of the genre as the music of the unwashed masses, a permanent underclass. However, rock n’ roll had won the culture wars. It conquered the world. The proliferation of the upwardly mobile yuppie class signified that social hierarchies and the rock n’ roll impulse were not mutually exclusive. The New Pop of the new leisure class just repositioned Bacchanalian hedonic drive as consumer-driven desire, a paragon of purity as naturally motivated as the libidinal reflex of a gyrating Jagger or Elvis. The sonic timbres of the music, guided by the hand of machines (synthesizers and particularly digital emulators), took a turn towards the luxuriant, the stylish, the elegant, and the hygienic.
The Hall & Oates look was perhaps perfected in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, a slick crime drama often referred to as an MTV cop show, one where the fuzz stroll around in extravagant convertibles in flamboyant designer outfits. Miami Vice too was a show that in retroactivity is perceived as being an overtly “white” syndrome of the era, but actually had a fairly integrated cast of blacks and Latinos. The soundtrack to the show was partially scored by former Mahavishnu Orchestra member turned synthaesthete Jan Hammer, but it’s rotational series of pop hits mostly felt like variations on the “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” template of suave and professional sophisti-pop nourished by warm synth pads.
Despite the accusations of bleaching soul out of all its vitality (which many of their peers could be rightly accused of), Hall & Oates were quite popular at the time amongst blacks and whites. “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” topped both the pop and R&B charts, which had never been done before. It fit the format for urban radio, contemporary pop radio, and new wave radio. The song even scored Single of the Week by rock tastemaker magazine NME, which at this time was still primarily championing bold and adventurous new sounds from both the post-punk underground and the emerging synth-ruled mainstream.
By the time Daryl Hall and John Oates had met at Temple University, both of them were already playing on soul records being put out on Kenny Gamble’s arsenal of labels. Daryl Hall had even written songs for Chubby Checker. The sound of the records Hall and Oates recorded was the formation of what Gamble and his partner Leon Huff would mold into Philly Soul. When they began to put out their own records, their sound diverged from the Philly Soul aesthetic, incorporating rock, folk, and even prog elements into their soul. Their 1973 concept album (!) War Babies even used Todd Rundgren’s prog-rock outfit Utopia, featuring on such tunes as “I’m Watching You (A Mutant Romance)” and “Johnny Gore and the ‘C’ Eaters” (I swear this a real Hall & Oates album), as their back-up band.
Hall & Oates had a spotty career until its meteoric rise in the 1980s. Long, unsuccessful periods were punctuated by astronomical hits like “She’s Gone”, “Sara Smile”, and “Rich Girl”. Their albums would wildly stray between genres for the first decade of their tenure. In 1977, Hall even wrote an experimental solo album called Sacred Songs, which was produced by Robert Fripp. Featuring the first recorded appearance of Frippertronics, the art prog music (check the red hot proto-punk intensity of “NYCNY”) was meant to be part of a trilogy along with Peter Gabriel’s second self-titled album and Fripp’s own Exposure. Hall’s managers, seeing this as career suicide, did everything in their power to stop it, which they successfully did.
Hall & Oates seemingly responded by incorporating the pop avant-garde sounds of synthpop into their R&B (Ian Penman allegedly stated that “I Can’t Go For That” was something like “avant-MOR”). By 1982, synthpop had arrived in form, producing mega-stars like The Human League, A Flock of Seagulls, and Dépêche Mode. Synthpop itself was a very image-conscious sound. Based partially in Bowie and Ferry, synthpop produced a tech’ed out glam for the 1980s in crisp and clear tones, which were at times overshadowed by a barrage of make-up and evocative imagery plucked from surrealism and sci-fi. “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” belongs as much in the bucket of synthpop as R&B. It was high society as glam alienation.
Though it is rarely remembered amongst this canon, the song has remained a classic amongst the hip hop community (who, it should also be noted, dig Hall’s art-rock peer Phil Collins). The appeal amongst the predominantly black artists who have relentlessly sampled the track has baffled outsiders for years, many of whom have considered hip-hop heads to be the ultimate curators of cool and Hall & Oates to be the harbingers of death to rock, pop, and even synthpop.
Perhaps the most popular sample of “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” is the one in De La Soul’s “Say No Go” from their seminal acclaimed Three Feet High and Rising album, which takes its title from a line in the song (It’s also a syntax-skewed piss-take on Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign). However, there are two songs both called “I Can’t Go For That”, by Priority One and 2 Live Crew respectively, that appeared a year prior to De La Soul’s 1989 album (The 2 Live Crew song uses the song’s chorus to reject women who want to get into their wallets. Despite some bland literalism and the prerequisite misogyny, the song features some decent scratching).
However, it was De La Soul’s “Say No Go” that underwent some critical scrutiny. Writer Elizabeth Wheeler claimed that De La Soul’s use of the song was “ironic” since it took “an insipid love story” and relocated it “in the ghetto where babies addicted to crack cocaine are born every day”. This was conveniently a victory for postmodernism, a neutral pastiche re-invigorated with political potential by an underclass moment of detournment.
However, this couldn’t have been further from the case. Prince Paul, producer of “Say No Go”, confirmed to interviewers that he was actually a big fan of “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” and this was the sole reason for the lift (from Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop by Joseph Glenn Schloss).
Though the aforementioned songs sampled bits of the chorus and verses, the introduction to “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” offers several entry points. The oft-borrowed break that leads the song off was actually made on a drum machine, a CompuRhythm box preset. Nevertheless, despite its mechanicalism, the beat has been used via sampling in at least a couple dozen hip-hops songs, and probably elsewhere in breakbeat-oriented electronic music as well. The opening bassline has also been replicated innumerable times, the most prominent example being Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”. MTV God Jackson admitted to Hall during the “We are the World” sessions (more on that one later) that he had filched his infamous lick in "Billie Jean" from “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)”, which Hall was apparently flattered by.
In fact, unlike other stuffy artists at the time who regarded hip-hop’s pilfering enterprise as an affront to rock’s worksmanship (The Turtles had sued De La Soul over another sample from Three Feet High and Rising), Hall & Oates loved the attention they got in the hip-hop community, which they saw as something of a new vanguard, even going so far as to regularly champion “Say No Go” in interviews and play it before their concerts. It’s unclear what they might think of the way they’ve curried favor in the chillwave/hypnagogic pop community, but it’s worth noting that these are two cutting edge communities which have cited Hall & Oates as a precedent.
“I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” is an odd song, one that endures despite its time-specific limitations. Most notable amongst these are the ripping sax solos, which have become something of a calling card of ironic referential/deferential pop (see Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F)”). Sax had been present at rock’s inception. It suffocated at the hands of schmaltzy records by Chicago, but was reborn in the 1980s as New Pop's take on soul dabbled in what was soon to be called "Smooth Jazz". What became known as “Smooth Jazz” though was actually quite a new invention (it had roots in the muzaky leanings of fusion artists like The Weather Report), albeit an innovation that irked and provoked more than it inspired. Still, two years time from the release of "I Can't Go For That", smash hits like Wham’s “Careless Whisper” would flood the charts with alternating synth n’ sax and blue-eyed soul’s keyboard patches would find a legacy from Level 42 on down to Rick Astley, for better or worse.
Where “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” splits from these admittedly non-noncommercial pariahs is in its intentionally cold demeanor. The bridge is its most euphoric part, but its uplift of “I’d do almost anything thing/That you want me to” is quickly crushed by the bitter deterministic realism of Hall’s admission of “But I can’t go for that…no can do”, sung in an equally distant, detached manner. Here is a disquiet at odds with the comfort food of Yacht rock. Lyrically, the ambivalence of the pronouns ("That", "You") could afford any substitute. Plenty have offered their suggestions. Pop music has a long history of hiding desire behind the pronouns “you” or “it”, but here the “that” does not really seem to signify anything specific. The verses offer little beyond circumstantial, and inadmissible, clues.
The most tempting interpretation of “that” is “love”, which would make Hall seem little more than an icy, proudly self-absorbed dick. It seems like Hall wants girls to exploit his fame for sex, but has no interest in getting involved, which is at least more sincere than the bulk of love songs on the radio. In this “anti-love” scenario, Hall proposes that his paramours “Use the body, now you want my soul”, later daftly admitting that “I can’t go for being twice as nice/I can’t go for just repeating the same old lines”. He doesn’t have time for romance. He just wants a quickie. Or conversely, he thinks romance is dated and too cliched to be meaningful ("same old lines").
However, this is just one possible analysis. It’s one that fits cozily as a buffer to the greed decade and the rise of the Patrick Bateman types as soundtracked by what has historically been counted as Hall & Oates’s legacy (Huey Lewis, UB40, George Michael, etc.). However, the amount of subcultural capital the group have accumulated suggests that the band have contributed more to music that just pride, vanity, and a world mediated by imagery. The song may not have meant much to me (other than me thinking, like Prince Paul, that it was a cool tune), but the song’s impact on MTV, on Michael Jackson, on blue-eyed soul, on hip-hop, on Junior Boys, on Ben Gibbard, and on chillwave form a vast network of sonic ramifications that make its allure undeniable. Like its subject matter, the song’s place as either nemesis or benefactor of pop music remains an enigma.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Three Dog Night- Joy to the World
Album Year: 1982
Age: 0
Track Number: 3
Like Blood, Sweat & Tears, Three Dog Night are not a band who survived the turmoil of history well. Like BS&T, they too had a miraculous streak. The band had 21 top 20 hits, 18 of which were consecutive singles from the group. With a string of gold records under their belt, the band was nothing short of a hit factory, and it was easy to see them as exactly that, churning out records for the charts at the dreck-end of the 1970s.
The pop charts of the early 1970s are commonly seen as the detritus of the 1960s, a deadening hangover in the wake of a surge of quality of the preceding decade. After the dissolution of The Beatles (and their “return to roots” finale act), innovation in pop was sidelined, mostly to genres generally thought to be more puerile and soul-less in nature (heavy metal, glam, funk, disco). Critics loathed Three Dog Night, considering them to be symptomatic of the nascent decade’s rate of decline, but then again there was just a lot of hate by grumpy music critics of the 1970s, who alternately hated Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis’s fusion albums, and Electric Light Orchestra’s post-Beatles prog pop in equal measure. In fact, the perception of the 1970s has been so fundamentally altered over the past 30 to 40 years that it’s hard to fathom that the decade was ever viewed as a kind of dead zone of musical history. Still, while many genres and artists received ample reconsideration in the decades that followed, Three Dog Night remain a bit untouchable as an artifact, linger as a pockmark in critical consciousness, proof of what Jerry Casale would soon after dub the “devolution” of cultural standards.
It was the “hit factory” side of the group that irked many critics. Robert Christgau, in a mostly positive review, called them “slick as Wesson Oil” and assumedly just as manufactured. Even well into the 1970s, it was not rare for a band to pack their album with covers (1973’s These Foolish Things by Bryan Ferry even used the concept of a covers album to postmodern ends, reducing “serious” rock to cabaret and dignifying bubblegum pop with all-too-earnest interpretations). However, Three Dog Night didn’t even really have songs of their own to write off. Their albums largely consisted of a strategic selection of un-originals shopped around from the local record store. In a spirit that would prefigure the ‘naughts by three decades, Three Dog Night was a curatorial band, a playlist band, one who condensed libraries into pub rock renditions of their top selections.
Unlike a curatorial band like, say, Sonic Youth, for whom taste is king, Three Dog Night flirted in high, low, and middlebrow, from poetry on through bluster. They gave equal footing to revered singer-songwriter types like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson as they did to showbiz folk like Elton John and Paul Williams. This probably provided the band with a broader appeal to listeners like my parents, who were immune to music’s internal dialectics. Though my parents were very much a product of the 1960s, I never got the impression that they felt music and art were crucial to the social transformations of the age, at least not to the extent of other college-aged kids their age who would rush home with albums, read the lyrics obsessively, get stoned or trip out to unlock the mysteries of the fetishized commodities, and run off to the concerts to get closer to the experience. Music for them was a social experience (which is more than you can say of today's earbud-trapped listeners), but the ties that bonded the personal the political ended for them at the body (skin color, X chromosomes, the corpses of friends in Indochina).
People like to forget that the radical voices at the forefront of the 1960s were just the center stage, supported by myriad faceless voices in the audience who were alternately just there for the party, eager to be in on the craze, or anxious to be on the right side of history. For all those who believed in revolution, there were dozens more who believed only in a partial revolution, a 45 degree revolution (which was not captured in 45 RPM). Folks like my parents didn’t want to levitate the Pentagon or militarize the ghettos, they wanted to end the Vietnam War, stop the oppression of blacks and women, and get nice jobs to support their well-structured nuclear families. They went to a few protests, but ultimately did not renege on the American dream, of which I’m a successful byproduct. For this crowd, there was Sha Na Na, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Three Dog Night in the aftermath of Nixon. As their politics mellowed in self-sustaining detachment from Kent State and the Weather Underground, former hippies turned to James Taylor, Carole King, and Don McLean to ease the transition back to the status quo.
“Joy To The World”, from Three Dog Night’s fifth album Naturally, went to number 1 for six weeks, going on to become Billboard’s number one song of 1971. Written by country/folk singer of little note Hoyt Axton (his mother Mae wrote “Heartbreak Hotel” for Elvis) for a 90 minute children’s show called The Happy Song (which never aired), “Joy to the World” was a song nobody expected to be a hit. Perhaps it was that 1960s hangover that called out for a celebratory anthem to lift the country out of the Nixon years. Maybe the record’s family-friendly content allowed the group to appeal to a broader core. As a boy, I certainly remember Jeremiah the bullfrog with as much fondness as Bob the Giraffe, Eddie the Elephant, or other characters my father would invent for storytelling purposes. “Joy to the World” was a joy to sing along to, a tune that could easily pass into the folk lexicon alongside “Old MacDonald” or “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.
The drunkard amphibian of “Joy to the World” seems to be just as impulsive a construct as some of my dad’s improv subjects. Axton’s original lyrics was “Jeremiah was a prophet”, but apparently “No one liked that”. The original lines give a little bit of a blasphemous tinge to the opening verse though, where the singer appears to be indulging in religious ritual just for no other purpose than getting shitfaced off the holy wine. Interestingly enough, the singer’s perspective on drink alters in the second verse where he promises to “throw away the cars and the bars and the war” if he were “king of the world” (after having already declared his love of wine). Perhaps, bars were too provincial, too insular, and segregated, whereas the drinks of concerts and churches were communal and open. But the jibberish of the third verse, where the narrator boasts of being a “high life flier”, a “rainbow rider”, and a “straight shootin’ son of a gun”, shows that the lyrics suffer from an overall lack of coherence and foresight, making them little more than silly nursery rhymes.
Still, musically, it’s a pretty fun song. The gritty distorted organs that kick off the song alternate in the verses with acapella shoutouts. Those opening riffs are probably more influential than they're given credit for. I can hear echoes in rave-era tunes like Pizzaman's "Happiness", for example. Later on in the track, there’s some raucous drum breaks which could have reached “Amen Brother” levels of ubiquity were they not bonded to the vocals. Those vocals themselves, in all their gruff machismo, were sung by Chuck Negron, one of the three (!) vocalists in Three Dog Night. Despite the numerical significance of this triad, the band name has nothing to do with the three top dogs on vocal duties, but was apparently named after a magazine article about native Australians sleeping amongst dingoes to avoid freezing temperatures, making the group even more postmodern in that this is evocative and yet seems to have no real resonance on the group's music.
"Joy to the World" exalts to a singalong by the tune’s end, further cementing its place in the annals of children’s song. And truly, the chorus is the thing- a more sincere, perhaps even less humble version of Ray Stevens’s “Everything is Beautiful” that includes all the fishes in the deep blue sea in its blessings (amidst all the boys and girls, you and me, and the world) and evokes a Christmas carol in attempt to spread the joy of the season all year round. It’s utterly shameless, but it’s also harmless, undeniably chaste merriment. It seems that Three Dog Night’s biggest crime was arriving at a moment that was culturally inappropriate and financially advantageous. I’m pretty sure they didn’t lose much sleep over what the critics said.
Years after the song’s release, “Joy to the World” would be featured in The Big Chill a film about former hippies reuniting to reflect on the loss of their idealism. The opening scene (see clip below before it gets taken down) involves one of the 60s radicals' kids singing the song in the bathtub as his wife comes in to announce that his friend (who represents the bygone 1960s) has died. I guess nothing sums it up better than that.
Age: 0
Track Number: 3
Like Blood, Sweat & Tears, Three Dog Night are not a band who survived the turmoil of history well. Like BS&T, they too had a miraculous streak. The band had 21 top 20 hits, 18 of which were consecutive singles from the group. With a string of gold records under their belt, the band was nothing short of a hit factory, and it was easy to see them as exactly that, churning out records for the charts at the dreck-end of the 1970s.
The pop charts of the early 1970s are commonly seen as the detritus of the 1960s, a deadening hangover in the wake of a surge of quality of the preceding decade. After the dissolution of The Beatles (and their “return to roots” finale act), innovation in pop was sidelined, mostly to genres generally thought to be more puerile and soul-less in nature (heavy metal, glam, funk, disco). Critics loathed Three Dog Night, considering them to be symptomatic of the nascent decade’s rate of decline, but then again there was just a lot of hate by grumpy music critics of the 1970s, who alternately hated Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis’s fusion albums, and Electric Light Orchestra’s post-Beatles prog pop in equal measure. In fact, the perception of the 1970s has been so fundamentally altered over the past 30 to 40 years that it’s hard to fathom that the decade was ever viewed as a kind of dead zone of musical history. Still, while many genres and artists received ample reconsideration in the decades that followed, Three Dog Night remain a bit untouchable as an artifact, linger as a pockmark in critical consciousness, proof of what Jerry Casale would soon after dub the “devolution” of cultural standards.
It was the “hit factory” side of the group that irked many critics. Robert Christgau, in a mostly positive review, called them “slick as Wesson Oil” and assumedly just as manufactured. Even well into the 1970s, it was not rare for a band to pack their album with covers (1973’s These Foolish Things by Bryan Ferry even used the concept of a covers album to postmodern ends, reducing “serious” rock to cabaret and dignifying bubblegum pop with all-too-earnest interpretations). However, Three Dog Night didn’t even really have songs of their own to write off. Their albums largely consisted of a strategic selection of un-originals shopped around from the local record store. In a spirit that would prefigure the ‘naughts by three decades, Three Dog Night was a curatorial band, a playlist band, one who condensed libraries into pub rock renditions of their top selections.
Unlike a curatorial band like, say, Sonic Youth, for whom taste is king, Three Dog Night flirted in high, low, and middlebrow, from poetry on through bluster. They gave equal footing to revered singer-songwriter types like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson as they did to showbiz folk like Elton John and Paul Williams. This probably provided the band with a broader appeal to listeners like my parents, who were immune to music’s internal dialectics. Though my parents were very much a product of the 1960s, I never got the impression that they felt music and art were crucial to the social transformations of the age, at least not to the extent of other college-aged kids their age who would rush home with albums, read the lyrics obsessively, get stoned or trip out to unlock the mysteries of the fetishized commodities, and run off to the concerts to get closer to the experience. Music for them was a social experience (which is more than you can say of today's earbud-trapped listeners), but the ties that bonded the personal the political ended for them at the body (skin color, X chromosomes, the corpses of friends in Indochina).
People like to forget that the radical voices at the forefront of the 1960s were just the center stage, supported by myriad faceless voices in the audience who were alternately just there for the party, eager to be in on the craze, or anxious to be on the right side of history. For all those who believed in revolution, there were dozens more who believed only in a partial revolution, a 45 degree revolution (which was not captured in 45 RPM). Folks like my parents didn’t want to levitate the Pentagon or militarize the ghettos, they wanted to end the Vietnam War, stop the oppression of blacks and women, and get nice jobs to support their well-structured nuclear families. They went to a few protests, but ultimately did not renege on the American dream, of which I’m a successful byproduct. For this crowd, there was Sha Na Na, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Three Dog Night in the aftermath of Nixon. As their politics mellowed in self-sustaining detachment from Kent State and the Weather Underground, former hippies turned to James Taylor, Carole King, and Don McLean to ease the transition back to the status quo.
“Joy To The World”, from Three Dog Night’s fifth album Naturally, went to number 1 for six weeks, going on to become Billboard’s number one song of 1971. Written by country/folk singer of little note Hoyt Axton (his mother Mae wrote “Heartbreak Hotel” for Elvis) for a 90 minute children’s show called The Happy Song (which never aired), “Joy to the World” was a song nobody expected to be a hit. Perhaps it was that 1960s hangover that called out for a celebratory anthem to lift the country out of the Nixon years. Maybe the record’s family-friendly content allowed the group to appeal to a broader core. As a boy, I certainly remember Jeremiah the bullfrog with as much fondness as Bob the Giraffe, Eddie the Elephant, or other characters my father would invent for storytelling purposes. “Joy to the World” was a joy to sing along to, a tune that could easily pass into the folk lexicon alongside “Old MacDonald” or “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.
The drunkard amphibian of “Joy to the World” seems to be just as impulsive a construct as some of my dad’s improv subjects. Axton’s original lyrics was “Jeremiah was a prophet”, but apparently “No one liked that”. The original lines give a little bit of a blasphemous tinge to the opening verse though, where the singer appears to be indulging in religious ritual just for no other purpose than getting shitfaced off the holy wine. Interestingly enough, the singer’s perspective on drink alters in the second verse where he promises to “throw away the cars and the bars and the war” if he were “king of the world” (after having already declared his love of wine). Perhaps, bars were too provincial, too insular, and segregated, whereas the drinks of concerts and churches were communal and open. But the jibberish of the third verse, where the narrator boasts of being a “high life flier”, a “rainbow rider”, and a “straight shootin’ son of a gun”, shows that the lyrics suffer from an overall lack of coherence and foresight, making them little more than silly nursery rhymes.
Still, musically, it’s a pretty fun song. The gritty distorted organs that kick off the song alternate in the verses with acapella shoutouts. Those opening riffs are probably more influential than they're given credit for. I can hear echoes in rave-era tunes like Pizzaman's "Happiness", for example. Later on in the track, there’s some raucous drum breaks which could have reached “Amen Brother” levels of ubiquity were they not bonded to the vocals. Those vocals themselves, in all their gruff machismo, were sung by Chuck Negron, one of the three (!) vocalists in Three Dog Night. Despite the numerical significance of this triad, the band name has nothing to do with the three top dogs on vocal duties, but was apparently named after a magazine article about native Australians sleeping amongst dingoes to avoid freezing temperatures, making the group even more postmodern in that this is evocative and yet seems to have no real resonance on the group's music.
"Joy to the World" exalts to a singalong by the tune’s end, further cementing its place in the annals of children’s song. And truly, the chorus is the thing- a more sincere, perhaps even less humble version of Ray Stevens’s “Everything is Beautiful” that includes all the fishes in the deep blue sea in its blessings (amidst all the boys and girls, you and me, and the world) and evokes a Christmas carol in attempt to spread the joy of the season all year round. It’s utterly shameless, but it’s also harmless, undeniably chaste merriment. It seems that Three Dog Night’s biggest crime was arriving at a moment that was culturally inappropriate and financially advantageous. I’m pretty sure they didn’t lose much sleep over what the critics said.
Years after the song’s release, “Joy to the World” would be featured in The Big Chill a film about former hippies reuniting to reflect on the loss of their idealism. The opening scene (see clip below before it gets taken down) involves one of the 60s radicals' kids singing the song in the bathtub as his wife comes in to announce that his friend (who represents the bygone 1960s) has died. I guess nothing sums it up better than that.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Blood, Sweat & Tears- Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie (1st and Second Movements)
Album Year: 1982
Age: 0
Track Number: 2
Note: The above contains the first two movements, as well as "Smiling Phases", which I did not include on the mixtape. However, I could not find any other version on Youtube with just the two movements.
It’s possibly apocryphal, but allegedly Brian Eno’s Discreet Music was used in hospitals as a maternity tool, a sort of Lamaze-lite exercise in controlling one's breathing and body via a very conditionally regimented environment. The first album of Eno’s ambient period, Discreet Music was primarily influenced by Erik Satie’s “furniture music” pieces, the most famous of which being “Gymnopédies”, the basis for this second track on my zero year documentary mixtape.
The three movements of “Gymnopédies” are each variations on a single theme, one that nearly any one could recognize, and they too lend themselves neatly to the labor of delivery. Preceding electronic music, “Gymnopédies” works on a series of looped rhythms, with a kind of respiratory alternation between two chords while simple gradations in melody occur throughout the piece. It’s not beyond reason to think that mothers looking to cool out under the stress of childbirth were administered Satie as a kind of non-narcotic anti-anxiety medication in the early 1980s when I was born.
I can’t say I know for a fact that this was the case with my mother, but she did have the second eponymous album by Blood, Sweat & Tears. It’s one of the few albums I remember seeing in their house when I was young. At this point, my parents had switched from vinyl records to cassettes (with a few 8 tracks left in their collection). Though cassettes first become massively popular in the 1980s with the rise of the portable walkman, my folks were actually ahead of the game in terms of tapes. When I began to transfer their music from tape to CD-R in the early 2000s, some of their cassettes, which preceded my lifeline, were warbled and unspoolable, the effects of age having taken their toll.
Released in 1969, one year before Eno’s band Roxy Music formed, the music of Blood, Sweat & Tears couldn’t be further from any of Eno’s output. Whereas Roxy Music and Eno’s solo work only now sounds as if the future has just now caught up with it, Blood, Sweat & Tears are a relic. What was once an adventurous fusion of jazz, classical, R&B/soul, big band, and rock now bears the bloated weight of the prog inclinations that historically followed. All of this makes a take on Satie a curious choice to bookend their aforementioned self-titled album. A garage band may want to cover Satie simply because of its simplicity and someone like Eno may admire the song for its functional elegance, but Blood, Sweat & Tears were an implicitly tight outfit, comprised mostly of a series of session musicians who mastered jazz and rock simultaneously, and often spontaneously. The band was formed by Al Kooper and Steve Katz, both formerly of the improvisational act The Blues Project, a band whose jams were the envy of The Grateful Dead and whose style was eventually appropriately classified as some of the first strains of blues-based psychedelic rock.
Written in ¾ as if part of some Benzedrine-fueled waltz, Satie’s ”Gymnopédies” has a pretty revolutionary approach to structure, one that essentially radicalized John Cage when he first became familiar with the composer’s work. Satie was largely unsuccessful in his lifetime, only gaining eventual acclaim after being championed by his friend and follower Claude Debussy. Blood, Sweat & Tears, on the other hand were somewhat defiant of traditional rock structure, avoiding conventional time signatures and harmonic infrastructures for the interpretive coordinates of jazz. On an album packed with covers- Laura Nyro, Brenda Holloway, Cream, Billie Holiday, Traffic-the choice of Satie may be the band’s most adventurous.
Played on strummed guitars and flute with twinkling chimes in the backdrop, the take on the first movement is a bit too new age and fairydust for its own good. The shiny brass at the end, with its cartoon Mephistopheles apocalyptic gesturing, is not only horribly dated and overwrought, it also completely realigns the song. One year post Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, everybody was trying their hand at the concept album and Blood, Sweat & Tears here seemed to be turning to classical theater for its instructions here, using Satie as a motif without any causal logic. Nevertheless, the album sold ridiculously well, and even beat out The Beatles at the Grammys (more on that in a future entry).
Nevertheless, even if the version of the song that gave me comfort in the womb and in the ensuing years is a bit inapproachable now, something about the tune itself stuck with me, as “Gymnopédies” easily remains one of the most sublime pieces of music amongst the hundreds of thousands I’ve ever heard. Its lack of flux makes it seem as though every time you put it on is a continuation of the last time you heard it, forever looping in ebb and flow, which must be an existential comfort when you bring something into the world that you know will one day die.
Age: 0
Track Number: 2
Note: The above contains the first two movements, as well as "Smiling Phases", which I did not include on the mixtape. However, I could not find any other version on Youtube with just the two movements.
It’s possibly apocryphal, but allegedly Brian Eno’s Discreet Music was used in hospitals as a maternity tool, a sort of Lamaze-lite exercise in controlling one's breathing and body via a very conditionally regimented environment. The first album of Eno’s ambient period, Discreet Music was primarily influenced by Erik Satie’s “furniture music” pieces, the most famous of which being “Gymnopédies”, the basis for this second track on my zero year documentary mixtape.
The three movements of “Gymnopédies” are each variations on a single theme, one that nearly any one could recognize, and they too lend themselves neatly to the labor of delivery. Preceding electronic music, “Gymnopédies” works on a series of looped rhythms, with a kind of respiratory alternation between two chords while simple gradations in melody occur throughout the piece. It’s not beyond reason to think that mothers looking to cool out under the stress of childbirth were administered Satie as a kind of non-narcotic anti-anxiety medication in the early 1980s when I was born.
I can’t say I know for a fact that this was the case with my mother, but she did have the second eponymous album by Blood, Sweat & Tears. It’s one of the few albums I remember seeing in their house when I was young. At this point, my parents had switched from vinyl records to cassettes (with a few 8 tracks left in their collection). Though cassettes first become massively popular in the 1980s with the rise of the portable walkman, my folks were actually ahead of the game in terms of tapes. When I began to transfer their music from tape to CD-R in the early 2000s, some of their cassettes, which preceded my lifeline, were warbled and unspoolable, the effects of age having taken their toll.
Released in 1969, one year before Eno’s band Roxy Music formed, the music of Blood, Sweat & Tears couldn’t be further from any of Eno’s output. Whereas Roxy Music and Eno’s solo work only now sounds as if the future has just now caught up with it, Blood, Sweat & Tears are a relic. What was once an adventurous fusion of jazz, classical, R&B/soul, big band, and rock now bears the bloated weight of the prog inclinations that historically followed. All of this makes a take on Satie a curious choice to bookend their aforementioned self-titled album. A garage band may want to cover Satie simply because of its simplicity and someone like Eno may admire the song for its functional elegance, but Blood, Sweat & Tears were an implicitly tight outfit, comprised mostly of a series of session musicians who mastered jazz and rock simultaneously, and often spontaneously. The band was formed by Al Kooper and Steve Katz, both formerly of the improvisational act The Blues Project, a band whose jams were the envy of The Grateful Dead and whose style was eventually appropriately classified as some of the first strains of blues-based psychedelic rock.
Written in ¾ as if part of some Benzedrine-fueled waltz, Satie’s ”Gymnopédies” has a pretty revolutionary approach to structure, one that essentially radicalized John Cage when he first became familiar with the composer’s work. Satie was largely unsuccessful in his lifetime, only gaining eventual acclaim after being championed by his friend and follower Claude Debussy. Blood, Sweat & Tears, on the other hand were somewhat defiant of traditional rock structure, avoiding conventional time signatures and harmonic infrastructures for the interpretive coordinates of jazz. On an album packed with covers- Laura Nyro, Brenda Holloway, Cream, Billie Holiday, Traffic-the choice of Satie may be the band’s most adventurous.
Played on strummed guitars and flute with twinkling chimes in the backdrop, the take on the first movement is a bit too new age and fairydust for its own good. The shiny brass at the end, with its cartoon Mephistopheles apocalyptic gesturing, is not only horribly dated and overwrought, it also completely realigns the song. One year post Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, everybody was trying their hand at the concept album and Blood, Sweat & Tears here seemed to be turning to classical theater for its instructions here, using Satie as a motif without any causal logic. Nevertheless, the album sold ridiculously well, and even beat out The Beatles at the Grammys (more on that in a future entry).
Nevertheless, even if the version of the song that gave me comfort in the womb and in the ensuing years is a bit inapproachable now, something about the tune itself stuck with me, as “Gymnopédies” easily remains one of the most sublime pieces of music amongst the hundreds of thousands I’ve ever heard. Its lack of flux makes it seem as though every time you put it on is a continuation of the last time you heard it, forever looping in ebb and flow, which must be an existential comfort when you bring something into the world that you know will one day die.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Bing Crosby- Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That's An Irish Lullaby)
Album Year: 1982
Age: 0
Track Number: 1
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That’s an Irish Lullaby)” is an obvious first selection for a mixtape revolving around my first year of life as it’s probably the first song I ever remembered. As a series of melodic ascents and descents, the song properly fits the qualifications for a lullaby. It’s simple, easy to remember, and easy to sing along to.
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is a tune that, like the song itself says, my mother used to sing to me many years ago in a voice so sweet and low. Since she was still singing this to me by the time I could remember her doing it, my educated guess is that she was singing it to me when I was even younger, even at zero years old. In turn, I have sang the song to my daughter to get her to sleep and hope to continue this tradition in our household until she can remember music too.
Bing Crosby though belongs more to my grandparent’s generation than my parents. By the time my parents had their music (60s and early 70s rock n’ roll), Crosby was a fogie, an establishment figure. Yet, a cassette of a Christmas album with a bunch of crooners, as well as some Crosby songs still linger in my parent’s personal music collection. Still, I associate Crosby more with my maternal grandparents’ music collection, whose tastes (Crosby, Andy Williams, Pat Boone) were distinct from my paternal grandfather’s (Nat King Cole, Al Martino), which bore the imprint of jazz, even if it was safe, somewhat wholesome jazz.*
This is perhaps because Crosby was not only a national treasure in his heyday, but something of an Irish folk icon for his popularization of traditional and modern Irish music. My family’s not quite as Irish as my grandmother and mother always made us out to be, but there dwelled within the Irish part of my family0 an old country pride, the kind specifically evoked in “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” (more on that in a minute). I never got a chance to ask, but I’m guessing this sentiment was instilled so deeply within my grandmother (a second generation American) because her generation was not far off from the anti-immigrant/anti-Irish/anti-Catholic antagonism that was prevalent around the turn of the century.
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” has roots around this era. It was written in 1914 by James Royce Shannon, a songwriter and actor who, like my grandmother, was likely more English than Irish. Shannon was born James Royce and adopted the last name “Shannon” after moving to New York, possibly to sound more Irish. The song played a minor role in an even more minor Broadway play called Shameen Dhu, a product of the final in a series of collaborations between the prolific stage writer Rida Johnson Young and composer Chauncey Olcott (with additional music by Ernest R. Ball and Shannon). A love story set in the 18th century amidst the backdrop of Irish-British struggle, the play ran for 3 weeks and was never performed again. Though Olcott received the main credit for the play’s music and sang the song in the cast as lead mean Dare O’Donnell, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is solely attributed to Shannon. According to the comprehensive Broadway International Database, Shameen Dhu was the only Broadway play Shannon would ever compose for.
The song was used as a theatrical cue to rouse the spirits of the expatriate Irish audience using the nostalgia of a homeland in Killarney, a place associated with a mother’s warmth, as its ammunition. Whether the mother of the song is now departed or simply miles away (and the song doesn’t reveal this), the song, an Irish lullaby, bridges the distance.
Somehow the song survived as a parlor tune, leading to the myth that it actually was a traditional Irish ditty. After some 30 years out of the public, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” eventually made its way to Hollywood and into the hands of Bing Crosby under the musical direction of former Broadway director Robert Emmett Dolan. Though Crosby was already a super-duper star of radio, film, and popular song at the time, the film Going My Way, the film which spawned the return of “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral”, catapulted what was already a practically unstoppable rise, one which culminated with the 1954 film White Christmas, whose title track is the best selling single of all time.
The story of two rival priests and their differing approaches towards troubled youth, Going My Way was a commercial and critical blockbuster, earning seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor for Bing Crosby. It was the highest grossing film of 1944. It’s hard to understand the film’s appeal nowadays, even if it was packed with a number of memorable songs. Going My Way was released during the last years of WWII in the throes of a period of extreme censorship under the Hays Code. Perhaps it’s this that made folks move in droves to a film about a crisis of archaic clergy practice. The film’s trailer proclaims that it is “For a world that needs the lift of its wonderful story, which I buy, given the nature of the atrocities going on at the time. Yet, the film is rarely recognized as a classic and seems a bit dry by today’s critical standards. Likewise, the titles in Crosby’s filmography give little indication to younger film buffs that he was actually one of the top grossing actors of all time.
Crosby’s music survives better, but only slightly. His fanbase is slowly dying off and becoming the stuff of records by The Caretaker (more on him late in the mixtape series). Yet, in nursing homes and veterans hospitals across America, Bing Crosby is being pumped through the air like Oxygen in Vegas, keeping elderly folks alive several years longer thanks to the help of an old undead friend. The Going My Way Soundtrack was issued by Decca nearly a year after its release because Paramount had re-released the film to theaters with enormous success. The soundtrack was a Billboard number one hit for six weeks, but it has never been reissued to cassette or CD.
In a scene from Going My Way where the older, stricter priest played by Barry Fitzgerald lays down to sleep, Fitzgerald mawkishly asks Crosby “Do you know ‘Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo’?” (further suggestion that the song ran deep throughout Irish tradition), to which Crosby proceeds to sing and mostly hum to the elderly priest. As the verses do not feature in this scene, they were likely popularized from the ensuing soundtrack LP (which also features the first version of “Swinging on a Star”, now largely known as a children’s song), as well as Crosby’s ensuing albums and greatest hits collections.
The Crosby recording chosen here is drippy with sentimental gloop strings, twinkling crescendos, and fluttering woodwinds, as close to a Disney Orchestra as Crosby could muster. The lightness of the arrangements, they way they seem to sometimes defy gravity in cute, playful ways emphasizes the utopian nature of the longing, while the final refrain of the chorus is far more sturdy, almost signaling a return to reality from the Oedipal fantasy. This simple tonal emotional tear-jerk appears so often in Disney films (and far too many Hays Code era musicals) because it offers a psychic environment which is uncluttered and uncomplicated. Children need this kind of narrative for psychological development. Their thinking is not abstract enough to grasp the tenuous nature of emotion as it actually exists, so music in children’s films can provide an elementary guide to the “rules” of human cognition (which leaves a wide open space for ideology). This arrangement of “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” chooses the form of the lullaby to provide the listener with their most safe and most vulnerable position, cradled next to his or her mother (Ireland) where he or she is safest from the poisons and pitfalls that surround him or her.
One day, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” will be too hard to listen to, because it will never cease to be a substitute for my mother. The song has become the very fantasy it evokes. The mother of my “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is not my real mother as she is, but the religious figure the song exalts her to be. Such is the power of music as an energy. “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is a permanent establishment in my mind, an institution of fantasy and memory, itself a safe place, a Killarney. I can go there at will, lull myself into dream by simply listening to the song. It will never prevent the decay of mortal flesh or protect me in the ways that my mother could when she sang it to me, but “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is far more affixed to me than any organ in my body. It is part of my genetic code. It is written into me.
*Crosby got his start in jazz too, fronting The Rhythm Boys at the behest of Paul Whiteman, whose unfortunate name proves an apt indicator to what type of jazz he was involved in. During the Harlem Renaissance, a period characterized by a kind Jazz continuum of Dixieland, Ragtime, Swing, and Big Band, Paul Whiteman was making these musicks safe for White America and being dubbed “The King of Jazz” for it. Crosby came out of this school.
Age: 0
Track Number: 1
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That’s an Irish Lullaby)” is an obvious first selection for a mixtape revolving around my first year of life as it’s probably the first song I ever remembered. As a series of melodic ascents and descents, the song properly fits the qualifications for a lullaby. It’s simple, easy to remember, and easy to sing along to.
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is a tune that, like the song itself says, my mother used to sing to me many years ago in a voice so sweet and low. Since she was still singing this to me by the time I could remember her doing it, my educated guess is that she was singing it to me when I was even younger, even at zero years old. In turn, I have sang the song to my daughter to get her to sleep and hope to continue this tradition in our household until she can remember music too.
Bing Crosby though belongs more to my grandparent’s generation than my parents. By the time my parents had their music (60s and early 70s rock n’ roll), Crosby was a fogie, an establishment figure. Yet, a cassette of a Christmas album with a bunch of crooners, as well as some Crosby songs still linger in my parent’s personal music collection. Still, I associate Crosby more with my maternal grandparents’ music collection, whose tastes (Crosby, Andy Williams, Pat Boone) were distinct from my paternal grandfather’s (Nat King Cole, Al Martino), which bore the imprint of jazz, even if it was safe, somewhat wholesome jazz.*
This is perhaps because Crosby was not only a national treasure in his heyday, but something of an Irish folk icon for his popularization of traditional and modern Irish music. My family’s not quite as Irish as my grandmother and mother always made us out to be, but there dwelled within the Irish part of my family0 an old country pride, the kind specifically evoked in “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” (more on that in a minute). I never got a chance to ask, but I’m guessing this sentiment was instilled so deeply within my grandmother (a second generation American) because her generation was not far off from the anti-immigrant/anti-Irish/anti-Catholic antagonism that was prevalent around the turn of the century.
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” has roots around this era. It was written in 1914 by James Royce Shannon, a songwriter and actor who, like my grandmother, was likely more English than Irish. Shannon was born James Royce and adopted the last name “Shannon” after moving to New York, possibly to sound more Irish. The song played a minor role in an even more minor Broadway play called Shameen Dhu, a product of the final in a series of collaborations between the prolific stage writer Rida Johnson Young and composer Chauncey Olcott (with additional music by Ernest R. Ball and Shannon). A love story set in the 18th century amidst the backdrop of Irish-British struggle, the play ran for 3 weeks and was never performed again. Though Olcott received the main credit for the play’s music and sang the song in the cast as lead mean Dare O’Donnell, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is solely attributed to Shannon. According to the comprehensive Broadway International Database, Shameen Dhu was the only Broadway play Shannon would ever compose for.
The song was used as a theatrical cue to rouse the spirits of the expatriate Irish audience using the nostalgia of a homeland in Killarney, a place associated with a mother’s warmth, as its ammunition. Whether the mother of the song is now departed or simply miles away (and the song doesn’t reveal this), the song, an Irish lullaby, bridges the distance.
Somehow the song survived as a parlor tune, leading to the myth that it actually was a traditional Irish ditty. After some 30 years out of the public, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” eventually made its way to Hollywood and into the hands of Bing Crosby under the musical direction of former Broadway director Robert Emmett Dolan. Though Crosby was already a super-duper star of radio, film, and popular song at the time, the film Going My Way, the film which spawned the return of “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral”, catapulted what was already a practically unstoppable rise, one which culminated with the 1954 film White Christmas, whose title track is the best selling single of all time.
The story of two rival priests and their differing approaches towards troubled youth, Going My Way was a commercial and critical blockbuster, earning seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor for Bing Crosby. It was the highest grossing film of 1944. It’s hard to understand the film’s appeal nowadays, even if it was packed with a number of memorable songs. Going My Way was released during the last years of WWII in the throes of a period of extreme censorship under the Hays Code. Perhaps it’s this that made folks move in droves to a film about a crisis of archaic clergy practice. The film’s trailer proclaims that it is “For a world that needs the lift of its wonderful story, which I buy, given the nature of the atrocities going on at the time. Yet, the film is rarely recognized as a classic and seems a bit dry by today’s critical standards. Likewise, the titles in Crosby’s filmography give little indication to younger film buffs that he was actually one of the top grossing actors of all time.
Crosby’s music survives better, but only slightly. His fanbase is slowly dying off and becoming the stuff of records by The Caretaker (more on him late in the mixtape series). Yet, in nursing homes and veterans hospitals across America, Bing Crosby is being pumped through the air like Oxygen in Vegas, keeping elderly folks alive several years longer thanks to the help of an old undead friend. The Going My Way Soundtrack was issued by Decca nearly a year after its release because Paramount had re-released the film to theaters with enormous success. The soundtrack was a Billboard number one hit for six weeks, but it has never been reissued to cassette or CD.
In a scene from Going My Way where the older, stricter priest played by Barry Fitzgerald lays down to sleep, Fitzgerald mawkishly asks Crosby “Do you know ‘Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo’?” (further suggestion that the song ran deep throughout Irish tradition), to which Crosby proceeds to sing and mostly hum to the elderly priest. As the verses do not feature in this scene, they were likely popularized from the ensuing soundtrack LP (which also features the first version of “Swinging on a Star”, now largely known as a children’s song), as well as Crosby’s ensuing albums and greatest hits collections.
The Crosby recording chosen here is drippy with sentimental gloop strings, twinkling crescendos, and fluttering woodwinds, as close to a Disney Orchestra as Crosby could muster. The lightness of the arrangements, they way they seem to sometimes defy gravity in cute, playful ways emphasizes the utopian nature of the longing, while the final refrain of the chorus is far more sturdy, almost signaling a return to reality from the Oedipal fantasy. This simple tonal emotional tear-jerk appears so often in Disney films (and far too many Hays Code era musicals) because it offers a psychic environment which is uncluttered and uncomplicated. Children need this kind of narrative for psychological development. Their thinking is not abstract enough to grasp the tenuous nature of emotion as it actually exists, so music in children’s films can provide an elementary guide to the “rules” of human cognition (which leaves a wide open space for ideology). This arrangement of “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” chooses the form of the lullaby to provide the listener with their most safe and most vulnerable position, cradled next to his or her mother (Ireland) where he or she is safest from the poisons and pitfalls that surround him or her.
One day, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” will be too hard to listen to, because it will never cease to be a substitute for my mother. The song has become the very fantasy it evokes. The mother of my “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is not my real mother as she is, but the religious figure the song exalts her to be. Such is the power of music as an energy. “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is a permanent establishment in my mind, an institution of fantasy and memory, itself a safe place, a Killarney. I can go there at will, lull myself into dream by simply listening to the song. It will never prevent the decay of mortal flesh or protect me in the ways that my mother could when she sang it to me, but “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is far more affixed to me than any organ in my body. It is part of my genetic code. It is written into me.
*Crosby got his start in jazz too, fronting The Rhythm Boys at the behest of Paul Whiteman, whose unfortunate name proves an apt indicator to what type of jazz he was involved in. During the Harlem Renaissance, a period characterized by a kind Jazz continuum of Dixieland, Ragtime, Swing, and Big Band, Paul Whiteman was making these musicks safe for White America and being dubbed “The King of Jazz” for it. Crosby came out of this school.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
To Here Knows When
A year or so ago, I found myself thinking about music I had listened to as a kid, but had long since sold, thrown out, taped over, lost, or otherwise scrubbed out of consciousness. The initial plan was to download the songs and create a Mix CD that functioned as a haunted semi-nostalgic tour through my own memories, one which could be sonically evocative through neural frequencies in the temporal lobe long after I had the capacity to psycho-navigate the time-space of my own lived experience. In shorts, tracks which would trigger an emotional response on impulse, however locked and guarded the memories surrounding them were.
But when considering what would go on an 80 minute CD-R, I realized that certain songs recalled precise moments in time (such as a car ride, a date, a school year, a finite relationship) and space (the apartment I lived in, the club I first heard it in). Others spanned years and encompassed different meanings throughout the disparate time periods, but were each attached to either a moment of discovery or a time period through which a song graduated from being an arbitrary node on an endless setlist to a canonical factor in the development of a sonic self, a time when a known song became either new or common. Contrary to the current predilection for a time that is out of joint, time for me on these recordings was set, inescapable.
Back when mixtapes were an actual thing, I took delicate care to thoughtfully assemble them. This is something that the digital age doesn’t easily accommodate, particularly with the breadth of music available at any given point. I still try to direct a narrative when creating Mix CDs, but now their major purpose seems to be storage- a way to contain all this new data.
In effort to reclaim the old spirit of the mixtape, I decided to invest in a Documentary Mixtape process. There would be a total of 29 CD-Rs in all, one for each year. Compiling this series would involved a great deal of investment and research, but my initial aim was completely personal- a gift and scrapbook for myself. It was only recently, after stumbling upon journalistic blogs like Pushing Ahead of the Dame, Freaky Trigger, and the Between the Grooves series at PopMatters that I considered doing write-ups for each and every tune on the mix CDs. In general, I abhor music criticism which incorporates a writer’s personal experience with music, an unnecessary crutch used by writers insecure about their (inter)subjectivity, but I was greatly entertained by Steven Hyden’s Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? series at the A.V. Club and was taken by the possibilities of applying this kind of intersubjectivity to my own project.
The discs are not completed just yet. I’m into the 20s now, but now’s as good a time as ever to start. I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible, though I am relying in large part on the unscientific apparatus of memory. Being that I don’t possess a great deal of recollections of what transpired in my life before the age of five, the first couple of mixtapes are a mosaic of songs popular on the radio during the year in question, songs that became important later than the year of their release, songs I associate with my parents and older siblings, and songs tied to other media (particularly films). I will attempt to parse personal anecdotes with genuine criticism, historical context, and interpretation. Not all songs will be related to the year in question, but each will have some kind of significance to the year in question. Since I was only alive for 16 days in 1981, year zero will be 1982. And since this project will likely not be completed for another year or so, we might as well make an even 30.
I hope someone besides me finds value in these entries. My aim is for accuracy, to record what I actually was listening to, rather than what I wish I was listening to. The only music I've excluded is music that I've created myself (all of which can be found at Timhtunes) to avoid turning this into even more of a vanity project and to save space for other music. Thereby, I will laying bear all my unhip tendencies, my regretful periods, and my general fickleness. No part of me will be spared.
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