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Posts Tagged ‘The FPE’
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
I have a million records by George Clinton and his satellites. In 1997, I produced an Orgy ™ for Harvard’s WHRB radio station which consisted of 55 hours of the music of George Clinton. (I staffed all the air myself. At one point a caller complained that I had broken in and talked over a “lovely Michael Hampton guitar solo”; at another point I dozed off and let the sound of the needle on the trailoff groove saturate the air for fifteen minutes) I’m a fan – thus I was wicked psyched when Frances pulled out the first two Clinton “solo” albums, Computer Games and You Shouldn’t-Nuf Bit Fish (if you don’t know the official story, it’s this: he “dissolved” his band”s” Parliament and Funkadelic [which mostly had the same people in them] at the dawn of the 80s, and continued to do the same thing he’d been doing for the past twelve years: write songs, make records with the same people, shake his butt, talk about shaking his butt, and probably lots of drugs. The only thing that changed was the names of the artists credited on the albums – “George Clinton”, “the P-Funk All-Stars”, and “George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars” replaced “Parliament” and “Funkadelic”). The generally favored part of the discography is the “classic” 70s output of Parliament and Funkadelic – but all I want to listen to these days is the non-classics. 
This happens with all my favorite artists. I overplay all the famous records and then all I’m left with is the late-career masterpieces that only I appreciate. I’m always going on about how, say, Greendale is so worth it, man (I saw the tour – he did a rock opera! A ROCK OPERA!!!), and no really, you should check out Weird Revolution (Gibby co-wrote a song with Kid Rock! Called “The Shame of Life”!!!). Don’t even get me started on Bob Dinners and Larry Noodles Present Tubby Turdner’s Celebrity Avalanche.
Same goes for the Mothership. Everyone thinks the 80’s records are the crappy records. No one hears “Some of My Best Jokes Are Friends” and says “Oh man I need to rush out right now and get everything this guy ever did!!!” Actually, no one ever hears “Some of My Best Jokes Are Friends”, period. Which is kind of the point – the people that play the music are too busy playing “Tear the Roof off the Sucker” to get around to the Urban Dancefloor Guerillas album. But say you’re George Clinton, and it’s 1981. You have to do something, right? You already made all the good records.
(I just need to put in a plug here for Trombipulation, the final album released as Parliament, in 1980. If you know it at all, it’s probably for the hook in “Let’s Play House” which was made famous by Digital Underground in their 1988 hit “The Humpty Dance”. If you don’t know it, you need it, serious. It’s eight tracks of cocaine-sheen funk that came from another planet. The cover, too – a gatefold that just shimmers with dark silvery blue, George and the Sphinx with prosthetic elephant trunks. Mmmm. What a gem. But I digress.)
Yes. What to do when the fame monster casts is gaze elsewhere? Here’s an answer: “Lord, bless this fish,” as George Clinton intones at the close of You Shouldn’t-Nuf Bit Fish. The title track, it’s “filler”: a funky place-holder beat that George just kind of freestyles over for almost nine minutes, working on some whacked-out metaphor for the human race and how we’re like fishes in the race to nuclear annihilation. I think it’s something to do with “bit off more than you can chew” or maybe “be careful when you play with fire” but he’s created a new idiom to express the thought: “you shouldn’t-nuf bit fish”. Is that metonymy, when you are talking about one thing but you use an unrelated thing as a symbol/placeholder for it? I think that’s closer to what he’s doing here than metaphor. Because the human race isn’t really like a fish, as far as I can tell.
Both Fish and Computer Games are totally great, start to finish. In the last couple weeks I’ve been playing them over and over, and the hooks have done their job – I’m a gibbering fanboy all over again. “Quickie” (co-written by dirty-blues icon and sometime P-Funk contributor Andre Williams) features an unstoppable guitar groove and a lovely Michael Hampton guitar solo (well actually it might be Williams, DuWayne McKnight, or even Eddie Hazel – they all get guitar credit on the album – but anyway it’s super dirty and grimy); “Pot Sharing Tots” delivers on the promise of being a synth-marimba-driven number that answers the question “If we were babies, would I share drugs with you?” (the answer is yes); even the least cohesive selection, “Silly Millameter”, is a huge funk monster with glittering little horn twinkles and sort of a Heatwave quote (ok maybe that’s just a coincidence) that pull you in and keep you rocking.
And, “Atomic Dog”. Holy crap.
What I love about Clinton and his discography is that he just keeps trying stuff, and he works with it till it sounds good. He doesn’t care if it’s not going to start an ass-based revolution like Mothership Connection – he’s done with that (except that people still want to hear it so he plays it live). Exhaustion might play a role (he’s only released five studio albums in the last 20 years, most recently an album of mostly cover material), but artistic paralysis? Not that I can hear. (Ok, I confess I haven’t listened to anything he’s done in the last fifteen years. But the records still get good reviews – except the most recent one – and Dope Dogs was awesome!)
 Before long, I’ve overplayed everything in the Clinton catalog, from America Eats Its Young all the way through Hey Man… Smell My Finger, and I’m left where I was back in 1997: Clinton fatigue. I’ve identified this pattern in my life. I find out about some artist I’m really into and then I get everything. It’s almost a sense of relief, an obvious but reliable recommendation: play Wish You Were Here and The Dark Side of the Moon. Repeat till you’re sick of it. Move on to Animals and Ummagumma. God help you if you can’t stop before The Division Bell is all that’s left. Why a relief? Because if you don’t happen to have thousands of albums and a toddler, you need a way to keep yourself going. Recommendations aren’t as easy as they seem.
Incidentally, in case it wasn’t obvious, the same stuff is true in lots of other contexts. Brand loyalty keeps me buying the same kind of dish soap and eating at the same restaurants over and over again. The careers of film directors, bloggers, politicians and authors live and die on their ability to attract and retain a loyal fanbase. Trivial recommendations get their power from this obviousness, and it’s their pitfall. When an artist inevitably makes a clunker (it always happens) the fandom just feels so betrayed. Emotionally injured, almost. Fortunately, there’s always the old records, and if you get really, really sick of those, you can convince yourself to like the new one – or maybe you should just find a recommendation engine to tell you something you didn’t already know about.
Tags: clinton, clinton fatigue, frances, funkadelic, george clinton, matt, p-funk all stars, parliament, The FPE
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Saturday, January 16th, 2010
The album I’ve been asked to examine by my beautiful daughter Frances today is none other than Clearing, a 37-year-old album that I briefly mentioned in my last blog post. It was sitting right in the open spot next to where she had picked the previous album, so I guess she figured, why mess with a winning formula? She can’t read, so she didn’t know that my brief blog-mention of the record was to dismiss it as “awful”. Upon a number of subsequent listens, I can now safely report that it is in fact as awful as I remembered, but of course as with anything, awful doesn’t tell you the whole story.
 Now, taste is all about what you think is awful. You like some awful stuff. Maybe you’re embarrassed to like it, or maybe you revel in its badness. Maybe you like to be bad. Even before I decided to write about Clearing, it had already logged more spins on my turntable than lots of records that I don’t think are awful. I guess I’m like that teenager who’s all “O my god I hate this song!!!!” but if it comes on the radio they don’t change the station and furthermore they know all the words and yeah you know that story. You do it too, I think, but instead of Lady Gaga it’s something else. Peter Frampton maybe, or James Taylor, or Alanis Morissette, or the Doors, R. Kelly, Bush, Madonna, Rush, Nine Inch Nails, Paula Abdul, Garth Brooks, Aqua, Abba… whatever touched a lot of hearts without over-challenging a lot of brains when you were a teenager; whatever was on the radio and had the hooks and the production and the demographic heft to get you to swallow the insipid lyrics; whatever made you feel like a grown-up before you grew up and discovered your Dead Prez and your Guided by Voices and your Husker Dus and your Mountain Goats and your Fela Kutis.
Clearing is one of the thousand-and-one albums that came out below the mainstream radar under the influence of the Dream of the Sixties, back when there were gentle people who didn’t do all kinds of drugs and didn’t want to start a revolution and were just really into all the Peace and Love on a personal level. This is the demographic that gave us Jim Henson and Sesame Street, Montessori schools and Free to Be You and Me. It’s all about kids and gentle, gentle love. Ok, I’m kind of a hippy, and I’m comfortable with that, but if I’m gonna be really true to that, I should be all “O my god I hate this song!!!” when, like, “Cats in the Cradle” or “Wild World” comes on the radio. And those songs just don’t interest me that much. For me to think it’s awful, really truly awful, I’ve gotta be invested in some way. It’s got to touch me. I bet that’s how it is for you too – what do you really hate? The annoying pop music that plays in the background in the mall, or the artist that takes the aesthetic you love and tweaks in a direction you can’t follow?
Why do I hate this record? Because I live in a fantasy world, where Clearing was the biggest album of 1973, and Jeff Brewer, Sara Benson and Joan Minkoff were huge rock stars, bigger than Elton John or Peter, Paul and Mary. In my world, obscure artists that made go-nowhere records on tiny labels just because they loved the music they were making are always gonna make it into the rotation ahead of the ones that I’m supposed to like. In my world, “Morning Light” plays on “The Drive” (Chicago’s lame excuse for a classic rock station) between Fleetwood Mac and Bruce Springsteen. O my god I hate this song!!!! “Now when I see your face / I see the sun rise clear and bright / Soft as a meadow-green / Where children play in morning light…” I know right? So bad! La la la la la…
In my world, these records are the important ones, BECAUSE no one else wants to hear them. When a record like this sucks, it hurts me, because I need to listen to it all the time. Perhaps as a defense, I’ve gotten to the point where the pain of cringing is part of my aesthetic.
 But really, how could anyone not want to listen to Clearing? It starts off with a bang – the one song that’s the hallmark of any truly awful record in the genre that I’ve just now decided to call Gentlefolk. Anyone care to hazard a guess? It’s a lovely song, a really beautiful melody paired with some deeply touching lyrics about the beauty of creation on display in all the large and small works of nature. If you’re of a certain age (mine) and had a certain kind of parents (lots of you did) you heard a lot of this song when you were little, sitting cross-legged in a circle with other perfect little Creatures of God, learning the words along with “Kumbaya”, “Dona Nobis Pacem”, “If I Had a Hammer” and “This Land Is Your Land”. Anyone? A Christian hymn, but everyone thought Cat Stevens wrote it? Right. “Morning Has Broken”. (The distinctive piano arrangement in the Cat Stevens version, incidentally, was by Rick Wakeman, previously derided in this space; a fact that I’m ever so slightly bummed out to have learned. Curse you Wikipedia!) Now you know when a record opens with “Morning Has Broken”, you’re in for some seriously gentle music.
They give the unaccompanied verse that opens the song (as well as most of the other lead vocals on the album) to Sara, whose voice is what you might call very annoying. You might call it that, and maybe I would too if she hadn’t set the standard for singers in my fantasy world, the same way that Simon Le Bon did for the real world. This bit of genius is the first, and so far only, inkling of the musical atrocity in store; otherwise the song is merely a competent and well-played arrangement where guitar and harpsichord tinkle away beneath a tasteful three-part harmony vocal.
The follow-up, an original (as are all the rest of the songs, unusual for a record of this vintage) by Clearing’s friend Victoria Fraser (who goes by “Vici” – you only wish you knew how to pronounce that) called “Morning Light”, is innocuous, pretty and of course, gentle. Just a pretty little song like a million others, competing for ears, and no one ever saying they hate it or love it or anything about it. In the real world. In my fantasy, though, the words I quoted above (that stuff about the meadow-green etc.)? That is gold! As nothing compared with the best songs of the 70s: “All your life you’ve never seen woman / Taken by the wind…” Sorry, Stevie, you’ve got nothing on “I never saw a heart that’s searching / I never saw a puppy’s tear / Now I can see what was once in darkness / And all because you’re here.”
Wow.
 And so it goes. The really stunning thing about Clearing is the variety of kinds of badness it offers. “Sunshine Man”. How do I get the feel of this song into this text? What’s it like? It’s minimal! Sara sings in unison with a single high guitar line, punctuated with bongo hits. It’s deep! “I used to think the hours told time / That distance was measured by space / But time and space disappear / In the love I see in your face.” It’s… perky! “Good mornin’ sunshine man in me, good mornin’ sunshine man in me.” Ok! It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re like, ok this is my song (actual song that Frances made up): “Happy chicken! Happy chicken! Whooooaaaa!” except actually you’re an adult and adult ickiness has crept into the joy and you didn’t just let it slide – instead you convinced your friends to add a bluesy melody to the verse and practice it till it was super-tight and record it and release it on “Aberdeen-Acme Records”. Oh Clearing, how do you out-write yourselves every time?
“She’s Leavin’” is another solo Sara number, this one with Joan accompanying her on the piano (I think that’s the case – it’s a little hard to tell from the liner notes. Anyway it’s just voice and piano). The lyrics say, “Hey friend that just got divorced and moved to California, I still like you even though I’m friends with your husband too. Let’s still be friends, ok?” The music says, “You know that Joni Mitchell record Blue that came out a couple years ago? You know the song ‘Blue’ that’s on there? O my god I hate that song!!!!”
“The First Time” comes close to renewing the joy of “Sunshine Man”, with the cringe-inducing poetry of Jeff’s lyrics (“I told her that I loved her and that she / Knew what was best for her and best for me / I knew that I would someday love again / And that was the first time I knew pain”) The First Time – get it? It’s a breakup song about the girl he “lost it” to. Classy! But don’t forget the innovative harmony: on the final “I knew pain” in each chorus, Jeff and Joan nail this dissonant interval so reliably each time, you start out thinking they are just off-key, but by the end you realize that they are experimenting with a microtonal sonority.
“Seth” is a particular flavor of awful familiar to anyone that loves Jim Henson – Jeff even kinda sounds like Rowlf, especially on the “ba da ba da” part. It’s a fantasy piece – inspired by an actual event perhaps? – about someone named Seth – maybe Jeff’s actual kid? – going on a balloon trip in the sky. “To think of being up there with nothing to see / But the world and the face of God.” Ok does anyone else think it’s just a little weird that this one came out almost 40 years before that Heene nonsense? Leaving that alone. But yeah you know how you’ll be watching the Muppets and laughing and slapping your knees and stuff, and then all of a sudden this unapologetically cheesy, sentimental number will come on and you’re like, ok if this wasn’t being sung by a blue caterpillar with ping-pong balls for eyes then I would be so outta here – and then you’re like, ok but it’s Jim Henson, I mean the childlike wonder and total commitment to cheesiness at all costs is what I respect about him so I guess I can deal – but if it wasn’t Jim Henson then man, this would be lame! So this is that song if someone else wrote it, and yes it is that lame and no, there’s no excuse.
The thing is, Jeff, Joan and Sara seem like they are super-nice, regular baby-boomer type folks. The music is competent, Sara can’t help her annoying voice (she can carry a tune just fine, it’s the timbre that’s the problem), and the lyrics are lame but who’s never humiliated themselves in public with some schlocky sentiment? Of course they loved Blue, millions of people did. Blue is an amazing album, why not try to make more music like it? It gets me to thinking, what do I really mean when I say I hate a record? If I click the one-star rating, do I mean, never show me any more stuff like this, or do I mean, this music really bothers me because it teases me by sounding like stuff I like but it sucks? I don’t know. I don’t know if Clearing is Love to Hate or Hate to Love. Such a thin line!
Lest I appear unduly resentful toward this record for stealing so much of my time (who’s making my decisions for me anyway? Oh right. Frances is) let me state for the record that “The Church Where We Got Married (Is an Auto Showroom Now)”, which opens Side Two, is genuinely charming and witty and even kind of fun. It’s also my least favorite track on the record. What can I say? I love to cringe. “Sunshine Man” hits it out of the park.
Tags: clearing, hate, humans, matt, The FPE
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Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
My wife had an interesting experience yesterday. Here’s her account of what happened:
“I met up with an old lady who asked me to walk her to the gas station and back across the street. I was watching her cross and she just barely made it. Then when I crossed and met up with her she asked me to help her – so I walked with her to the gas station. She was telling me that she has a cataract and she wasn’t able to fill out her forms to get her food stamps before Christmas – things like that, hard to get around, cold and icy, etc.
Then we went in and the guy was giving her a little bit of a hard time. I was thinking, does he know her or is he a jerk? I guess it was both. So he said, who’s this, and she said that she found a girl to help her across the street, and he said I can’t believe you’re making her late for work, and I said it’s not a problem, and he said, does she know why you’re here, and she turned and said do you know why I’m here? and I said no, and he said, she doesn’t know why you come here every day, and I said, I guess it’s for something she needs, and she asked if she could give him pennies. He said no and made a fuss. She counted out quarters instead (he said that 100 pennies is not even a dollar – I thought that was funny).
Anyway, she got 2 boxes of cigarettes, 2 cans of coke and a can of 7-up, which I guess she needs – it was over $20.
So I was just thinking, what am I supposed to take from this? I still don’t know.”
Frances chose a record for me a few weeks ago – Bruiseology, the second and final album by the amazing new-wave band the Waitresses, from Akron, OH – and I’ve been listening to it a lot. I could write and write about the Waitresses, their leader Chris Butler, their original label Clone Records, and their spunky little scene of like-minded Akron bands out to mix rock and avant-garde musics and thereby change the world – but, I’m not going to because I don’t need to right now. It’s Christmastime here in the West and I’m thinking about what I need, vs. what I want. What I need to do with the Waitresses is listen to them.
 Logging lots of turntable time is not always what happens with the records Frances chooses for me. Some I listen to out of a sense of obligation, and some I can’t bring myself to play. By some people’s definition, these are records that I don’t “need” – but if I think about selling a record like, say, The Hands of God Reached Out and Touched Me by Sister Mattie Moss Clark and the South Michigan State Community Choir, I come up against a million reasons to keep it on the shelf (between another Mattie Moss Clark record, That’s Christ, and the awful self-titled early 70s album by Newton, MA’s psych-folk trio Clearing). I’m a record collector, so there are things about these objects that appeal to me beyond their ostensible utility as preservers of sound. They feel like connections to people and times long gone, portraits of unavailable landscapes, maps of people’s minds.
A record is just what the name implies – a document that records a piece of the past. The long-playing record album (LP for short – the handle “album” is a holdover from the early days of recorded sound, when 3-5 minutes was all you could fit on a record, and if you wanted to have, say, a whole opera in recorded form, you needed to store a bunch of fragile 78-rpm shellac monstrosities in an album) is to me the zenith of the medium; its development is to the art of music what the novel was to the art of narrative. If you’re a musician, once you make your statement in the form of an LP, it’s unalterable – a perfect communication to the world of today and tomorrow.
I have a hard time separating form from content in art. I think both need to be solid to make the art stick – how you say a thing plays as much of a role in transmitting it as what the thing is that you’re actually saying (a favorite satire of mine on this dichotomy, bringing the form into violent conflict with the content, has always been this cartoon by B. Kliban). Sister Mattie Moss Clark and the producers of her albums have one central message – it says it right on the back of the album in the notes by Evangelist Maria Gardner and Anthony Flowers: “Sister Clark’s continuing prayer is for a deeper consecration, a deeper devotion and most of all a closeness with the Lord so that she may continue to reach the hearts of both young and old.” They have deployed the best technology they have available to them in the service of this message: the LP. The biggest, brightest lights in the world are shining on this message of spreading the gospel throughout the land.
This message, as it always does with LPs, starts with the cover. A deep, rich red background frames a head shot of Sister Clark, a staring lovingly out towards us, and a group photo of the choir, thirty-nine beautiful young men and women in white robes that give their faces the appearance of angels floating in the clouds. The backgrounds of the photos are faded out, giving the jacket a feel that’s both old-fashioned and timeless, floating in an eternal moment where the only solid things are the steps and brick wall of what I imagine to be their home church.
Beckoned inside, we go deeper: the needle drops. Within moments, we’re floating on an unquiet sea of sound, an ocean of feeling surging beneath the unmoving surface. The first song, “God So Loved the World”, is all choir; Sister Clark doesn’t take a solo till track 2, “He Satisfies”. When she does, her rich alto wraps around the text: “My lonely heart is singin’, singin’ singin’…” while the band keeps her afloat on waves of sound. The choir comes in at key points, lifting her vocal on angels’ wings. This song ascends to about the middle of the air, leaving the remaining tracks on side one to first whip up the winds (“Try Him Right Now”) and let the storm break forth (“I Found Him to Be Alright”).
 Gospel isn’t a genre I’ve historically had any interest in (which one might guess from reading my older posts in this space), nor is it something I still spend very much (or any) time listening to, or even thinking about – so I don’t have any idea how or why I bought (or otherwise came into possession of) this gospel record. I must have had it for at least ten years, and thinking about what I was into in the 90s, there’s only one way this record could have fit in – the tiny, hypnotically abstract Westbound Records logo in the lower left-hand corner. Westbound connects to the earliest days of my musical awakening: the home of Funkadelic, whose monstrous Maggot Brain forever repositioned the 10 on my musical scale of 1-10 when I discovered it as a teenager in the basement of this 30-something dude who lived up the street from me.
You can tell there’s a connection, even without knowing the label. Those fringe-wearing freaks obviously came out of this same soul-soaked community: it’s all Detroit, churches, organ, funk, funk and funk. Some of the Hammond licks played on this album by organist “Twinkie” Clark (quotes not mine), particularly in the first seconds of “Try Him Right Now” and “I Can’t Give Up Now”, make it obvious where Bernie Worrell came up; bassist Tommy (no last name provided) is all over the fretboard and the choir wails away in the background in a way that’s completely familiar to anyone that’s worn out the grooves of a George Clinton production or two.
I guess I must have bought the record based on the Westbound connection, but I can’t have ever listened to it – it doesn’t really sound or even look all that familiar. The knowledge of the connection and the ownership seems to have been enough for me, until now. Musing on the reasons I have the record brings me back to the question of what I want vs. what I need. I’m a guy with way too many records – my problem is one of choice. It’s a problem felt acutely by those of us lucky enough to have experienced the great demystification and bounty of music that the last ten years of digital availability have brought on. The response of many artists has been to recombine, rethink and re-contextualize previously obscure forms like Afro-pop and Balkan party music; the response of many consumers has been to become overloaded and short-circuited, desensitized to the beauty and majesty of creation inherent in each recording, and unable to love on an individual level the products of the recording industry.
I’m luckier than many: I have lots of choices. In the absence of choice, though, we all face the problem of existence. I have no idea if that lady my wife met yesterday needed what she got at the store, but I can reasonably conclude that something about that trip, either the cigarettes and soda that she bought or the chance to get out of the house or some detail I missed, was a strong enough motivator for her to risk life and limb in the icy Chicago December and scrape together change for overpriced, health-wrecking products of our choice-laden society. In that sense, she needed whatever she got. When I buy records, or books, or MP3s, or anything really, I express my choice and desire in terms of need – if I’ve got finite cash to spend and a store full of stuff to explore, I can’t get it all. I’ve got finite time on this earth, and I can’t listen to all the records or read all the books, so I need to make a choice. My greatest need at this time is to live the best life I can, and for me that means in part choosing my media carefully, and trying to minimize my exposure to mediocre art, like Mannheim Steamroller. It also means finding something to take away from the art that I’m exposed to – making sure my time’s not “wasted”.
It seems my problem of separating form from content has a parallel incarnation: want vs. need. Again, I turn to the great artist B. Kliban for a pithy illumination of this dilemma: the Only Show in Town. In the absence of choice or in its overabundance, want becomes need and vice versa – the most strongly felt desire is to need something enough to feel its absence.
Tags: humans, matt, The FPE, the only show in town
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Monday, October 26th, 2009
Back in the olden days, I was in a touring band. We played shows all over – toured the US a whole lot of times, Japan once and the UK once. The first time we went on tour, we’d been together for two years, had just released our first 7”, and the Internet was still a bunch of newsgroups for Mountain Dew-swilling techies with dial-up connections. If you were a band that no one knew, you were at the mercy of whoever put an eighth-page ad in MRR. Not unsurprisingly, we ended up playing a lot of shows that didn’t make sense – say, with hair-metal pre-post-grunge bands in Spokane, or with a punk/funk band and a goth band at a pizza restaurant on an Apache reservation in Arizona.
We learned from the mistakes we made early on, and as the years went on our network got bigger and our shows got better. After we released an album or two, there were kids in some places that knew who we were and would put together a reasonable bill to fit us on. Also as time went on, our music became a kind of dialogue with the other bands we liked and who we thought were doing interesting things – so there began to be more of a context within which our music could sanely exist.
For us, the best shows were always in the small towns. Places like Bemidji, MN, or Kirksville, MO didn’t have a lot of bands come through (“You’re the first band to play here since Whitesnake!”) so our show could be the biggest event of the season for the local kids. We rarely had good shows in bigger cities like Chicago – there was too much for people to do and an obscure art-punk band that wasn’t on Kill Rock Stars always got lost in the shuffle. Thinking about how it went for us, with our niche music and poorly promoted tours, sheds some light on the idea of one kind of music recommendations technology in the pre-dawn of the current age.
Rock shows are recommendations, and anyone who’s been to a few will tell you that a well-thought-out bill can make you see all the bands in a different light, make you love a band you thought you hated or give you an experience whose all is greater than the sum of the bands’ individual awesomenesses. If you’re a kid in a tiny town, putting together a bill is easy – you get your friends’ bands (say it’s 1998 – that would be a metal-hardcore band, something twee or emo [in the late-90s sense – the bands were more Hot Water Jaw Music-breaker than Panic! At the Chemical Romance then] or both, and a long-haired kid with an acoustic guitar), and the greatness or lameness of the experience comes not from the jarring juxtaposition of musical aesthetics but from the chance for everyone to be there and see the freaks that showed up from out of town. In a city, sub-scenes have the opportunity to coalesce around various sub-genres – there’s basement punk, basement noise rock, all-ages hardcore shows in clubs and Elks lodges, indie rock shows in bars for the hipsters – and lots of opportunity to make a complementary bill with bands that fit together in interesting ways, with a corresponding increase in the risk of screwing it up and making a show that’s no fun for anyone.
There are lots of reasons for going to a show, and those reasons seldom boil down to purely musical considerations. This is true no matter what the scene – I could write this same essay about classical music, the status-consciousness of the concert attendees, and the specific pressures that shape the programming of orchestras and chamber groups. In real life and online, people form groups based on appreciation of similar sounds; a venue that usually books bands you like, a friend setting up a show, or the presence on a bill of a band you wanted to see will get you out, and once you’re there, when the sound waves vibrate the air, the experience thus colored by the promoter, booking agency, bartender, sound guy, tall dude blocking your view, girl in leather pants standing three people over distracting you from the band, city commissioners that passed the smoking ordinance forcing you out into the cold, and everyone else that conspired to make it is a big, fat recommendation engine. It’s other stuff too, but there’s no way I’d have, say, a The Bangs record if it weren’t for the operation of that system.
 So when Frances went nuts in the B and C sections the other day, and I sat staring at the four records she had picked out for me, unable to understand how the FPE had failed to deliver a reasonable set of options, it suddenly hit me – she’s a tiny booking agent, and those four bands happened to be in town that day, and she put together a genius bill that would bring out the punks, the post-punks, the math rockers, the noise rockers, the real people who fall somewhere in between those marginally useful categories, all their friends and dates, the hangers-on, the underage beer drinkers, the cops…
In a strange coincidence, all the bands on the bill are performing complete albums, faithful to the original studio versions; also of note is that they are being performed by the members who originally played them, which actually entails at least one person returning from the dead for the duration of this essay – only possible at a Halloween show.
Openers Blind Idiot God, from St. Louis via Brooklyn, set the tone; they’re playing their self-titled first album. It’s only 10 and nobody’s shown up yet, but the promoter is eager to get the show going because the neighbors complained about the noise going too late at the last few shows, and he doesn’t want the cops showing up this time. And anyway, the first waves of kids are walking in the door, nodding their wussup nods and claiming their presence on “the list”. So yeah, Stupid Blind Goat or something. What’s the deal with these guys anyway? Sweaters? Really? Is this “college rock”? Hey wow – they’re metal! Wait – is that metal? Umm. I think this rocks. Whoa. Now they’re on some kinda King Jammy-Jam vibe. I don’t get this at all. Hey, is that girl in the leather pants into them? Ok, yeah this is kind of good. I think I’ll get the album. What the hell is that on the cover – an eye-monster? Did Leather-Pants Girl see me buy it?
 The second slot is the secret weapon – it’s the meat of the show, the glue that holds the rest together, but lots of people miss it usually; it’s actually the ease with which it’s overlooked that gives it such power. With no one paying attention, and half the crowd still drinking out back, a band that plays second has a chance to be the background noise that creates the atmosphere. Today this slot belongs to Cinemechanica, from Athens, GA, who will be playing their first album, The Martial Arts. Athens is a college town, and it gets reinvented every few years, but it’s probably destined forever to be associated with its more famous musical children of the 1980s (I speak here of Oh-OK and the Georgia Satellites, naturally) and the 1990s (Bubba Sparxxx and Japancakes). Two of my favorite bands, Harvey Milk and Jucifer, both started out in Athens as well; really, this town rivals Jamaica in terms of the disproportion of its musical notoriety to its size – and none of these scenes inform Cinemechanica’s music at all. They play a tightly coiled series of labyrinthine songs, guitars harmonizing in dissonance, drums and bass cacophanizing organizedly, almost politely, and screamy vocals fitting snugly in their appointed slots. It’s like a musical spaghetti junction; an expertly plotted mess. They have packed the noise of the last 20 years of underground rock into their van and driven like Jehu to get it into eMusic’s catalog, where technology provided by a little startup called MediaUnbound recommended it to me. A bit of a convoluted path to get the LP into Frances’s hands and thence to my turntable for the show today, but it could have been no other way.
On a four-band bill (the perfect number for a rock show, if you ask me), the coveted slot in underground rock is the third. By the time the fourth band sets up and is ready to play, the train has stopped running and the crowd has thinned out considerably. An astute programmer will often recognize this, and put the draw on third; even if no one stays to see out-of-towners that no one’s heard of, at least they’ll get paid, and it’s not like keeping a huge crowd in your basement till 2am does anyone any good if there’s no beer to be sold. This brings us to the Circle Jerks, who are offering their first album, Group Sex. Holy. Crap. What was that? They played for like 10 minutes and this kid almost ripped my ear off! Seriously though, all preciousness aside, what a great record – Frances has awesome taste for real. So many high points, not a single moment wasted. The tossed-off guitar riff that opens “Back Against the Wall”, an epic 5 seconds that negates the entire prog era; the anthemic explosions of “Wasted” and “Red Tape”; the way Keith Morris finds ten different line readings for the word “ass” in “World up My Ass” (but the first one is the best – probably my favorite recording of anyone saying “ass”, ever); the breakdown in the middle of “What’s Your Problem” – budduhbudduhbudduhbump. Budduhbudduhbump. Three bars of juggajuggajuggajuggajuggajuggajuggajugga, then THRASH! Pity the unlucky fools that have to play after the Circle Jerks.
Today that duty falls to Chrome, and it’s a good thing a lot of people left. Theirs is not a crowd-friendly noise. The setlist is 3rd from the Sun, the final album they released with the classic lineup of Helios Creed and Damon Edge, and from the big-eyed, space-spawned hell-bug on the cover, through the impenetrable, alienating processed guitar and sub-bass-drone grooves to the hellishly low-pitched vocals, it’s all too much for a casual music fan. I don’t want to know what they are singing about, but I do get the feeling that it’s all the same to them if the room’s cleared out. They appear to be making music because if they don’t release it this way it will claw itself out of their abdomens, The Thing-style, with all kinds of guts and blood and organs and stuff, and everyone will be all scared and have to run away and it will feast on the drunk dude that totally passed out by the furnace.
As the survivors regroup to begin picking up the beer cans and start to heat up a late-night, post-show burrito, it’s time to zoom slowly out… Conclusions! The FPE has freed my mind this time, liberating the concept of recommendation from the shackles of technology, the while allowing me to indulge nostalgia and invent the perfect rock show. Yet another triumph for the little engine that could.
Tags: Blind Idiot God, Chrome, Cinemechanica, Circle Jerks, humans, matt, The FPE
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Friday, October 9th, 2009
In my last post I mentioned limitations to the FPE, but I didn’t mention any specific problems except for the height issue. Another problem has brought itself to light recently.
Frances’ little fingers lack the dexterity to reliably pick one single record from the shelf, and her little arms lack the strength to push the heavy records aside to pull a single record out. Thus, FPE picks are heavily weighted towards records at the ends of rows, and those that don’t have the weight of other records resting on them.
That means some of the likeliest picks are smack in the middle of the Yes section.
This time around, I’m evaluating two Yes albums: Time and a Word (for which Frances was tasteful enough to select the British version, featuring an alternate cover with a Naked Lady on it) and Tormato.  I am very, very grateful that she didn’t pick Yessongs–but, it being a triple album, maybe the strength limitation of the FPE was on my side in this case.
Why do I even have a Yes section? The short answer is Buffalo 66. I can’t remember a single thing that happened in this movie–all I have is a vague memory of a sense of ire crescendoing over the course of 90 minutes to a peak brought on by the preciousness of its auteur. That and a scene of an uncomfortable dinner with parents–oh I guess I did remember something. Way to go, Gallo.
There are two Yes songs in this film. One is “Starship Trooper”, which plays in a pivotal scene involving some gimmicky camera work with a bullet (shoot, I remembered something else – well, really it’s because of the Yes song), and whose profile is not helped at all by its appearance in this (or I suspect any) film. The other is “Sweetness”, a gorgeous and uncharacteristically subdued early-career song that plays over the credits. Before this film came along, I had subscribed to the general feeling among my peers that Yes is “pretty lame”. That dude’s high nasally voice, the ridiculous lyrics, overblown songs that go nowhere and take 20 minutes to do it… After I heard “Starship Trooper”, I revised my opinion to one summed up in an IM I made earlier today after playing Tormato for the first time in seven or eight years:
Matt Pakulski: oh man
Matt Pakulski: oh man
Matt Pakulski: Yes is pretty awesome
To enjoy Yes, you need to be aware that they are going to take you to some ludicrous places, that these are not necessarily places you think you’ll want to go, and that it’s all about that ridiculous up-front bass playing. Wakeman the keyboard player gets a lot of attention for his huge setups and ability to play a keyboard as well as your average classical pianist, but without that bass they would be Starcastle (yes, I have a Starcastle section too.  Yes, I’m glad it’s in the S’s that Frances can’t reach). Anderson’s is not a voice that I particularly like the sound of, but it completes the sonic palette and occasionally provides effects that make you glad their vocalist isn’t, say, Greg Ginn. Also Anderson’s the chief songwriter, especially on the early records–but I think the actual songs (catchy syncopated vocal melodies wrapping around preposterous lyrics about celestial beings and the like) are much less interesting than the arrangements. For me, this group is all about those high highs–the two or three minutes in the middle of side one of Relayer (the mid-point of the side-long “The Gates of Delirium”) where the guitar and bass melt the universe; the crashing waves of love at the climax of “Close to the Edge”; the part in “Starship Trooper” where they rush you to the edge of a cliff and then cast you into the eternal void. I can do without the many boring and/or awful bits–the classical indulgences they allowed Wakeman; the blissed-out, go-nowhere final movement of “The Gates of Delirium”; the ever-lazier reliance on a single ridiculous idea to carry an overlong composition that became their chief M.O. starting sometime in the late 70s.
Time and a Word is from early in their career, and they still sound hungry. This album is from before Wakeman joined the group with his cumbersome organ collection, so the sound is dominated by original organist Tony Kaye’s B3, the always-awesome bass of Chris Squire, and Tony Cox’s exciting orchestral string arrangements.  At four tracks per side, the songs are concise for Yes, making for a less exhausting listen than some of their more bloated opi (Tales from Topographic Oceans, a double LP with four songs total, comes to mind as a diagram of real Yes excess [exYes?]).
The album explodes out of the box with the smoking “No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed”. It’s a Richie Havens song, and I’m ashamed to say I’m not familiar with the original, but I think it’s a fair guess that they’ve punched it up a bit. It flirts with actually rocking, in the blues-based sense, making it a comfortable introduction to Yes for the timid. From there on out, it’s a satisfying album, each song allowed adequate space to develop a few ideas, no aimlessness, and no annoying tracks–the side-closing anthems “Sweet Dreams” and “Time and a Word” (sides one and two respectively) border on annoying but fade out before wearing out their welcomes. My other two favorite songs are the lovely “Clear Days”, barely two minutes and all strings in a fresh arrangement accompanying Jon Anderson’s who-knows-what-he’s-on-about lyrics, and “Astral Traveller” [sic] with its dark, dissonant vocal hook.
Tormato. A real head-scratcher, even for these guys. We’ll start with the cover, designed by prog go-to artists Hipgnosis – apparently a combination of a tomato and a tornado. Why? Is it explained by any of the songs? Nope.  By the time of this album’s release in 1978, Yes had already dealt bombastically with the end of time and the birth of various new orders over the course of several vinyl juggernauts and arena tours. Presumably they were living some kind of rock star thing, with groupies and drugs and stuff–their previous album Going for the One had been the first to move in a pop direction, and this album seems like more of the new easier-to-swallow Yes.
As with Time and a Word, the opening number rules the planet. “Future Times / Rejoice” hits you with that Squire blonk and straight-up joyous marvel: “In the fountains of the Universe / Sits the boychild Solomon…” After this, unlike on Time and a Word, they veer badly off course. “Don’t Kill the Whale” (unbelievably, a Top 40 hit) delivers on its title: “We will judge all who came / In the wake of our new age to stand for the frail / Don’t kill the whale / CETACE!”
Double-you. Tee. Eff.
On further reflection, it occurs to me that “save the whales” was a cause in the 70s and 80s, so I guess this song was topical (and now dated) rather than being evidence of complete mindlessness on the part of Yes [mindlessYes?]. If we needed evidence of mindlessYes, though, it should suffice to remember the cover of this record. A tomato. And a tornado. A man, with some knives or something. Nonsense. Side one doesn’t improve after this, the remainder being devoted to the insufferable Wakeman piece “Madrigal” and the appalling “Rejoice, Rejoice”. Seriously guys, this song is so unrelentingly ugly, what were you thinking?
Side two is a bit of something else. They have remained in la-la land, but kept their wits about them enough to chart a listenable path.  The first two tracks, “Arriving UFO” and “Circus of Heaven” are the type of cheesy total insanity that could only have been made by Yes in 1978; a marvelous achievement. I love the end of “Circus of Heaven”: “On the dreamy ground we walked upon / I turned to my son and said / ‘Was that something beautiful, amazing, wonderful, extraordinarily beautiful?’”, answered by a guest vocal from Jon’s kid Damion, saying, “Oh it was ok, but there were no clowns, or lions, or tigers, no bears, no candy-floss, toffee apples, no clowns.”
Indeed. No clowns. Easy for you to say, Damion.
The final two tracks are certainly worth more than a cursory mention (well “Onward” isn’t really; it’s inoffensive and somewhat pleasant anyway), but I tire of this exercise, so I’ll simply say that I also love the opening moments of “On the Silent Wings of Freedom”: the bass and drums casting about, sounding like nothing so much as when my band used to arrive at practice and start warming up, playing some crap and not listening, just getting the ice out of the fingers.
There you have it. Tormato. Not as consistent as Time and a Word, but more fun for sure. The verdict on Yes: their mind-boggling pretension takes them right over the top into silly land. I love them. Did I ever want to listen to either album again? Not at all. They both put a big stupid grin on my face though, so it appears that the FPE is doing its job. I need to make some tweaks to the engine though so I don’t have to keep writing about Yes. Maybe a baby weight-lifting program at the Y. For now, I’ve shifted the Y section a bit so the weight is off the Neil Young records – maybe next time I’ll be in for some thoughtful country-inflected classic rock stomp.
Tags: humans, matt, The FPE, vinyl, Yes
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Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
At MediaUnbound, we believe a robust recommendation system requires constant tuning and tweaking. You can’t be afraid to try new techniques or allow technology ideology to blind you to new avenues of development.
In order to pull off this type of development approach, your team needs to be able to quickly evaluate results using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Today, we begin a regular blog series highlighting the contributions of Matt Pakulski in his role leading MediaUnbound’s human QA and evaluation team.
Matt has discovered a new type of music recommendation system and is putting it (her?) through a comprehensive review process . . .
I have a lot of records, and also I have an 18-month-old daughter. I’ve found that putting the records she pulls off the shelf (”selects for me”) on my playlist is a great way to explore the music I surrounded myself with for the last 20 years or so, now that my rate of acquisition has slowed to just a few LPs a month.
I call it the “Frances Picks” recommendation system. It has its limitations – for example, she’s not tall enough to reach records by artists beginning with A, D-E, H-I, L, P-Q, or T-V (not to mention half of S). But it beats my previous system, which involved a random number generator and a lot of counting back from the ends of shelves, and it has a human element.
That’s right, I have so many records I need a recommendation system. Why don’t I just pick the records I want to listen to? If only it were that easy! The thing is, I can’t trust myself with these decisions. So many gems are in there – records I forgot I had, records I don’t remember acquiring, records I thought I hated – if I relied on my own picks it would be so boring. Donovan, Thinking Fellers, Donovan, Lightning Bolt, Donovan, Herb Alpert… enough already!
As part of MediaUnbound’s continuing project to examine the merits of various recommendation systems, I’m proud to say I’ve been chosen to evaluate the results of the “Frances Picks” rec engine on a semi-regular basis.
This week, I present: Gateway Records 3534, “Hustle, Bus Stop and Line Dances”.
Produced by the club “Dancing Oasis” – “located on Manhattan’s fashionable East Side” – and promising “nonstop disco music at its best”, this album  features a number of huge hits of the disco era (”(Shake Shake Shake) Shake Your Booty”, “Getaway”, “You Should Be Dancing”) performed by an uncredited, but energetic and tight, studio group. The focus is on the dancing – detailed instructions are printed on the back cover for a number of popular moves (a sample: “Chicago Bus Stop. Count 1. Touch R heel FWD. Count 2. Touch R toe behind. Count 3. Step RF FWD (1/4 turn R)…”)
One imagines a madcap Three’s Company setpiece with Jack and Chrissy trying to learn the “L.A. Hustle”, knocking over goldfish bowls, trying to explain their sequined getups to Mr. Roper, and so on. In reality probably this record was played 0-1 times by its original owners (it’s in like, mint condition, a sure sign of an unplayed album) and sat out the 80s on a shelf by the hi-fi, getting to know its neighbors, no doubt avatars of other fashionable movements (Jazzercise, Richard Simmons, Jane Fonda Workout, maybe a stray Leo Sayer record or two) before being sold in bulk to the store where I likely paid a dollar or less for it sometime in the 90s. A sad story really – unloved, unwanted, just getting in the way for its whole life.
Until the Frances Picks system came along!
The music, usually the centerpiece of an LP, feels almost like an afterthought on this record – just another line item. The producer is credited, in about 8-point type, along with the studio, recording engineer, writers of the dance  instructions, cover photographer and “art production”, in a tiny box in the lower corner of the back of the jacket, but the musicians and vocalists don’t warrant a single mention. I guess the studio must have supplied them.
They sure worked hard for their money! Absent the syrupy string section that normally slogs fungus-like over the post-production surface of most disco records, the crisp arrangements that made the genre so easy to dance to shine out here in stark relief. The female vocalist has a mellow, if indistinct, Diana Ross-like croon, while the male vocalist isn’t afraid to get a little dirty on “Lowdown”. The spare rhythm section (just bass, a whisper-thin guitar, and a monster drummer) holds the whole piece together. True to the album’s mission, the music never stops – the drummer starts each song as soon as the previous one finishes. I want to believe that they recorded the two sides live in one 20-minute take each, but this is just an unlikely fantasy that I have.
These versions don’t top the super hits by the original artists in terms of quality – but let’s get real here, is quality the only reason to listen to a song? “Getaway” is a pretty great song, but do I really want to throw on an Earth Wind and Fire album? (I guess now that it’s the future, I don’t need to put on those LPs, I just have to jump on the youtube or whatever. But still) I mean if I really wanted to listen to “Getaway” I could. But I don’t. It’s much more fun for me to hear it on a record like this, take the personality of the original artist away, hear it as a composition that’s open to interpretation, and groove on the human drama going down with the disco club and the recording studio and all the middle Americans buying the dream.
The track “Lowdown” on this record was one I’d never heard or heard of – turns out it’s by Boz Scaggs! Who knew? He does that “Lido” song you always hear in the drugstore, but I didn’t know he had other songs too! It’s pretty good too, the funkiest track on the record (of course, that’s a pretty low bar). I find it interesting that since the producers seem to have tried to make this record about the dancing and not the music, they picked the least controversial songs they could think of. But thirty years on, with at least three or four pop culture disco revivals under our belt, it’s interesting to look at this document as a reflection of what some people at the core of the movement thought of as the mainstream. KC and the Sunshine Band, the Bee Gees and Tavares (”Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel” from the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack) are all represented, but so are a few songs that didn’t really make it into the Disco Canon: the Boz Scaggs song, Natalie Cole’s “Sophisticated Lady” and Lou Rawls’ “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”. A record like this gives you a snapshot of the era as it presented itself, distorted perhaps by the individual inclinations of the producers, but undistorted by the multiple lenses of successive decades; a picture of a living, breathing, powerful movement unaware of the doom that would soon be visited on it. For me, that’s as much a reason to pay attention to a record as quality.
I JUST REALIZED! “The Hustle” isn’t on the record!
So how did the Frances Picks engine (henceforth to be known as the FPE) perform in this case? How do I rate my recommendation? If my criteria are quality of listening experience and likelihood that I would have picked the record on my own, it’s an unqualified success. Never in a hundred years would I have selected this record on my own, and I thoroughly enjoyed the playing. I played it three times! I did not try to learn any of the dances though – I think that’s probably for suckers. My daughter has taught me that wiggling and writhing are the best dances. Or, maybe that’s what I’m trying to teach her.
Tags: boz scaggs, bus stop, dance, discovery applications, hustle, matt, music, music recommendation, recommendation apps, The FPE, vinyl
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By combining the numerical power of computers with knowledge from teams of human analysts,
MediaUnbound helps people find, discover and interact with large catalogs of entertainment
content to deliver an exciting entertainment experience. Every day people receive music,
video, concert and image recommendations generated by MediaUnbound through customers
such as eMusic, Ericsson, Napster, MTVN / Viacom, Terra Networks, NTT DoCoMo, HMV,
and TransWorld Entertainment.
The Social Web Community 2.0 Network marketing gurus all agree: Every corporation needs a corporate blog. Ours gives an inside peak into the people, opinions and activities at MediaUnbound.
What to expect: our thoughts on media recommendation technology; occasional customer and product announcements; in-depth discussions on whether MilkMoneyMaffia is best band from Greenland, or best band ever.
What not to expect: multiple posts every day; corporate babble-speak
Please direct feedback on blog posts to blargh@mediaunbound.com. For further information about MediaUnbound or other questions please see the Contact page on our main site.
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