France's Tahiti 80 Rocks Fez; Angular NYC Quintet Les Savy Fav
ACE="New York" SIZE=5> As soon as my friend and I shoehorned ourselves into Fez for this sold-out show, I knew that this was the kind of gig where my granny'd feel comfortable. A gentler crowd: jaded music-industry types, indie-scene hipsters, some fat Jersey girls and, rounding out a large corner table like stonefaced, narcotized lemmings, what appeared to be a Korean tour-bus contingent.
I knew I was rolling the dice. I hadn't heard any of the bands myself, just of them, in a series of "famous by association" Chinese whispers: He sounds like him, their band played on his CD, and so on and so forth. I swallowed down a vodka tonic and fingered the Klonopin in my pocket, in case agitation set in; which seemed likely after I informed a bidi-smoking Buster Poindexter-in-miniature that the space beneath my crotch did not qualify as "standing room."
A group called the Saturday People were first to take the stage: an unmemorable three-piece electric outfit that demonstrated the fallacy of that horrifically overpopularized 90s DIY band ethic: that you're somehow cool if you play everything flat, refuse to utilize the soundman and, in general, act as if you'd prefer using your guitar pick to dig the crap out from underneath your toenails.
Thirty less-than-merciful minutes later, the Saturday People bleated off into Sunday morning, and Dudley Klute and L.D. Beghtol from the band Flare came on. The first high-pitched yowls of the evening rose up from the audience. This was a performance I had been anticipating. Both were guest musicians on Magnetic Fields' 1999 triple-CD 69 Love Songs. L.D. and Dudley played an acoustic set, crooning simple yet striking angst-ridden ballads in the country-and-western vein. L.D., a big hunk of a man who looks like a Hells Angel, but who harmonizes like an altar boy, cut a striking figure?big ass drooping off a diminutive plastic chair, wistfully strumming the ukulele like his mama had just passed.
The main reason I had dragged my own big ass out of the house, however, was to check out French band Tahiti 80. Seconds into their first song, I knew they were the wake-up slap that the audience had been waiting for. As energizing as a shot of B-12 into the vein, they pumped out an intensely melodic, lush mix of funk, power rock, acid jazz, lounge and good old-fashioned jump-for-joy pop. Lead singer Xavier Boyer's voice has been compared to Ian Brown's of Stone Roses fame?and while it does hold a similar ethereal quality, it's hard to consider this innocent-looking curly haired lad in the same light as the stewardess'-ankle-biting and generally infamous Ian. All four members played their instruments with giddy ease, especially guitarist Mederic Gontier, who brought new meaning to the word multitasking, switching from his guitar to synthesizer before standing alongside the drummer to pound out a duet of slamming, funky beats. Tahiti 80 sang their songs in French, but no one seemed to care what the hell they were singing about?just as long as they kept on playing.
Tahiti 80 ended their set to screams from the audience, which demanded an encore, but from their plaintive expressions you could tell there were other musicians still waiting in the wings. I had never heard of the Clientele, but it was clear who the crowd had come for. By the time the Clientele took the stage, a good portion of the crowd had fled the premises, happy to ride off on the euphoric coattails of Tahiti 80's performance. This included the freshly resurrected Koreans, many who left clutching signed copies of Tahiti 80's new CD Puzzle to their chests. I fingered my Klonopin again, and wondered if I should offer it to the lead singer of the Clientele, who was starting to croon into the microphone like a much paler, vocally challenged Chris Isaak.
Nah. It looked like he needed something with a little more kick. Like perhaps a Tahiti 80 CD.
Keeno Ahmed
Les Savy Fav The Free Butt, Brighton (June 15)
Rock music. It's pointless. Needless. Trivial . Sometimes, a rudimentary diversion... "This song's a hex on Rome."
Why would you go see a band? They run through the same motions, the same songs, the same damn chords...night in, night out. If you're lucky, perhaps they'll have bothered to change a couple of notes, extend the drum break or distort the vocal line borrowed heavily from the band who borrowed it heavily from the band before them. Know a fast way to turn any right-thinking person away from U.S. rock? Say the artists in question sound like any of the following: Pavement; Six Finger Satellite; anything on Thrill Jockey; Brainiac; anything from New York City; Fugazi. Know a clear way to tell that U.S. rock is in a sorry, sorry state of affairs? People are still attending shows by these bands in the hopes of reenacting shows they missed (or caught) the first time round.
"We thought this place would be a training school for prostitutes?you guys need to learn how to spell right."
Why see a band? Stay home with a video of Kurt Cobain's belches, if that's your speed. You like the band that reminds you of the time that you once had when the world didn't matter. Personally, I like a band that can play to 30 people and make it seem like 31. A band that realizes that rock shows are mundane, pointless. A passing diversion. Capes don't do it for me. Neither do hair-slides. You think a band's going to win me over through the sheer brilliance of their invention or musicianship? Get real. The last time I saw someone original, I was being belted on the back by a midwife.
"Thank you. If you cheer loud enough, we will not return."
Music is the great comforter, the pacifier. Here's the reason I like angular New York City quintet Les Savy Fav. They don't remind me of any of the above bands. No. They remind me of explosive, obstreperous Dutch insurrectionists the Ex. (Hah!) Also, songs like "Wake Up!," "This Incentive" and "Titan" (from new album The Cat and the Cobra) know when to start and when to stop.
Frankly, though, neither of those is reason at all?however frantically Mr. Harrison Haynes bangs on his drums, or Mr. Seth Thom Jabour labors to invent slightly different sounds on his battered guitar. No. Les Savy Fav charm all 30 of us tonight in the UK's Smallest Venue Official?and believe me, it really does feel like there are 31 present?because they try. An event isn't an event unless the people there treat it as such. So the deceptively normal-looking singer Mr. Tim Harrington goes on walkabout. He examines an array of different objects?lights, fans, beer glasses, an audience member's hand, turntables, the front door, every audience member's back, the ceiling?while sing-shouting. He jumps up. He jumps down. He's polite, yet intense. He makes us feel privileged to be in Brighton, England, tonight.
It takes a very rare band indeed to manage that, nowadays. Believe me.
Oh, and the first person to ask, "Didn't David Baker from Mercury Rev used to do precisely the same back in the early 90s?" receives a boot in the face from me. You cynical bastard.
Everett True
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Madison Square Garden (June 12)
So: Springsteen's in town. And he's "turned into some type of fucking dirtbag," according to Bob Lucente of the Fraternal Order of Police. Onstage last Monday in the Garden, clothes drenched in sweat, Springsteen unceremoniously snuck his new 41-shot number, "American Skin," into his three-hour rock convention. Floorside were Kadiatou and Saikou Diallo.
It would be impossible to tell from the eighth and ninth pages of the next day's Post and the seventh of the Daily News, but no one cared about Amadou at the show. People stood up to applaud, and some booed, but right after "American Skin," they drank, screamed and made out to "Promised Land." Sentiment at the concert toward the most notorious police debacle since, well, Abner Louima was best represented by the behavior of the man who opened his wallet into the leather collection pouch of City Harvest, there raising money. He fidgeted with the bills, counting out crumpled singles and fives as thousands of people hustled, deafeningly, past him on their way out. Frustrated, he breathed hard through his nostrils and exclaimed, "Oh, hell, I make a million dollars a year," and thrust forward a $20.
City Harvest was my ticket into the sold-out show. At the Boss' behest, a delegation from the city's food retrieval network was present to gather donations from the fans. Springsteen gave the organization for which I've volunteered my weak back formidable support by allowing us to commandeer a table at the show and by dedicating "Dancing in the Dark" and "Born in the U.S.A." to it. The gesture was unsullied by the arrangement of both zeitgeist components as unlistenable solo pieces?just Bruce and his earnest twelve-string.
The opposition to the police boycott emphasized Springsteen's benefits for slain officers like Patrick King. The Boss is not a turncoat or a hypocrite for criticizing the police handling of the Diallo incident, he's a Democrat who calls them as he sees them. Springsteen is already an icon. He doesn't have to hitch his wagon to any rainforest cause to earn station-wagon credibility.
As I scampered around the stadium I considered the case of a bald fan in a red polo shirt. He was splitting his focus between Springsteen's cratered pores on the video screen and the Lilliputian brutalizing the Playmobil guitar below. In the recesses of his peripheral vision was a gyrating woman in a black dress, her hair flying, mouthing lyrics to "Born to Run" with a grin suggesting her recollection of exactly what she was doing the first time she heard them and the motion of her hips not caring if everyone knew what it was. Dances like these are rare occurrences at rock shows, better suited as they are for Barthes essays in the minds of the sort of rock fans who would greet a Madison Square Garden show with an upturned nose. And this man, not a foot away, was pumping his fist to the Boss, screaming the chorus and not paying a whit of attention to the most enchanting display imaginable at any concert. I had given up all hope for him when suddenly he turned to her, swept her brown hair away from her face with the back of his hand, and kissed her like he was Rudolph Valentino.
It seems reasonable to assert that as that man kissed that woman he didn't care about City Harvest or Amadou Diallo. Most people passed by our collection table no matter how we tried to corral them. Every rock fan knows the politics attached to rock 'n' roll are less important than the intensity of the guitars. Doubtless that Springsteen knows it after more than 25 years in the business, and he'll still place as much emphasis on hungry people or immigrants who die in horrific circumstances as making people kiss. His influence gave City Harvest, who advertise the power of 43 cents to buy a pound of food, almost $1900. And still he gets called a floating fag by the Fraternal Order of Police.
Spencer Ackerman
Welcome to the Voice Town Hall (June 9)
Don't blame Elvis Costello. Don't Blame John Flansburgh. Don't blame Ron Sexsmith. And don't blame Ned Rothenberg. It wasn't their fault. They're all worthy musicians playing bit parts in someone else's bad idea. Who's to blame? Steve Nieve. Who? He's a sideman, a mere technician. He's worked with all the big stars like Squeeze and Little Richard and is a member of Costello's band the Attractions. But, really, he shouldn't be writing "operas." Nor should he have cast rock musicians to sing his operas. They're not meant to belt out 10-plus-minute "arias." Their voices aren't trained for that sort of workout. Take away the rock beat and they're out of their element, they look dull. Nieve should have learned from the Grammys a few years ago when Pavarotti didn't show up to sing "Nessun dorma." Aretha Franklin stepped in and belted out a damn good pop rendition, which lasted about three minutes.
Welcome to the Voice is a ripoff of the early 80s movie Diva. It's about a drunk (played by Costello) who falls in love with opera and eventually obsesses about his idol. She falls in love with him and saves his life. But due to her frantic touring schedule, she jumps on a plane; Costello is left alone with nothing but his bottle.
This meandering piece of crap hobbled along for almost two hours and managed to sap every cliche from the classical music world and render it into mush. A good string quartet, the Brodsky, was forced to function on a grade-school level, mixing tonic strains of Pachabel's "Canon" with dashes of Satiean romantic modernism; there was not a trace of innovation to be found. A few warbly sopranos were thrown in to "evoke the ghosts of Carmen, Norma and Butterfly." Worst of all, the mezzo-soprano "diva star" playing opposite Costello, Julie Leibowitch, was unforgivably flat. Every note she sang was an embarrassment. Maria Callas must have been turning over in her grave.
If the music weren't enough to kill the piece, a dancer with one name?Yarmo?did "expressive" "interpretive dance" solos between each vocal number. Far from breaking up the tedium, his dance-workshop-style schlock only added to it.
There's a strange phenomena that happens when rock musicians try to make "art" or when artists try to go "pop." Laurie Anderson is a perfect case. At some point, she decided that she wanted to be a rock star. In doing so, she alienated both sides: she was no longer arty enough to please the art audience and didn't have the chops to cut it in the rock world. It left her in a netherworld, with a fan base devoid of connoisseurs; instead, the great wide middle embraced her. In Nieve and Costello's case, the middle is their milieu. The fans?mostly middle-aged guys sporting ape-drapes and Costello tour t-shirt?ate this dogshit up. They swooned where they were supposed to swoon, laughed when they were told to, and were visibly moved by "interpretive" dance. When it was all over, a few people even held up cigarette lighters during the standing ovation, certainly a first for an "opera."
Kenneth Goldsmith
Storm and Stress Hanover Centre, Brighton (June 9)
This isn't your usual rock show. No flashy lights, no elongated guitar solos, no screaming packs of semiliterate morons down the front. Just three men creating a variety of jazz-textured noises and sounds (some of which stop, some that don't) in a half-deserted community center. All the while, a slide projector shines a static upside-down image of New York on a white screen behind them. Someone attempts to leave: the drummer lobs his drum stick her way. Curfew falls as the singer/guitarist halfheartedly attempts to juggle three beer bottles in the air and gives up halfway?letting the containers crash to the ground. It's the evening's pivotal moment.
The brilliantly named Storm and Stress (led by ex-Don Caballero Ian Williams) don't create music as such. No. That would be too simple. Instead, they utilize drum loops, repeated guitar notes and a frantic, energetic drummer to create a series of seemingly random, distorted soundscapes that can occasionally bewitch in their intimacy. The fourth track of their Jim O'Rourke (Tortoise)-produced debut LP is called "It Takes a Million Years to Become Diamonds So Let's Just Burn Like Coal Until the Sky's Black." Get the picture yet? Yes. These men are musical wankers of the highest order. Indeed, if it wasn't so obvious that they're all in hidden hysterics at their own ability to have so many secretive musical jokes, they'd be reprehensible.
But I love them.
One guitarist sits slumped in a chair, occasionally waving his hands in the air when he can't be bothered to even make the most rudimentary of noises on his guitar. Another looks even more laid-back. The drummer appears to be playing to a different beat altogether?perhaps the second half of the Melvins' Ozma CD. The opening patterns to the snappily titled "Forever, Like Anti-Oxidants (Listen to the Sound Our Cells Make)" trickle out as a sleepwalking student high on alcohol dances precariously among the stupefied audience, imitating the shape a table makes. Listen closely. It sounds like girls talking, stage-front. And still the drones drone and the guitarist recites his German train timetable. Oddly, the overall effect is somewhat beguiling?like shoving your head inside a Hoover bag while sparrows fly in and out of garbage trucks. Yazoo, this isn't.
Everett True
Stereolab/ Thurston Moore, Yoko Ono and DJ Spooky (Bell Atlantic Jazz Fest) The Lawn in Battery Park (June 3)
It's not even 7 p.m., and they're out of veggie burgers. That's the first thing we notice. The second is a kid alone on the lawn, reading Faulkner. The third is how many indie-rock girls are wearing pink this season. The fourth is how many boys are wearing orange. Then one important discovery: There's an "alternative" beer table and porta-potty here that almost no one in the crowd knows about, so we don't have to wait on any lines. This audience knows fashion, literature and nutrition, but it's blissfully ignorant about the ins and outs of lawn concerts.
It's one of the nicest evenings in the history of New York City, it seems, until Ono, Moore and Spooky start playing. Who in the name of Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe dreamed up this collaboration? Three preposterous bores (yes, Thurston used to wail, before he was neutered) having their own private wanks simultaneously?within seconds a dozen hackysackers find their buzz totally roasted. The trio onstage can't even fool anyone into thinking that this is some kind of avant-garde project that might sound good if only you could delude yourself into an advanced enough state of pretension, because Ono is so savagely bad. Moore actually spends a moment trying to change what he's playing so her vocals clash with it a bit more artfully, but immediately gives up and goes back to his strictly-for-the-paycheck mode. The only mitigating factor is that Spooky brought with him a big banner emblazoned with his name and vintage '92 nickname, "That Subliminal Kid." It's mitigating in that it's funny.
I decide it'd be also funny to eavesdrop on some stoodents trying to pretend they're not getting ripped off out of an opening act, but can't find any. College kids today are too dumb to look for alternative beer outlets, but keen enough to recognize a triple-dipple corporate fraud when presented with one at high volume. Opposite of 10 years ago. Chalk it up to the dot-com revolution, I guess.
Soon it's a really nice night again. Then Stereolab comes on, and they sound like shit, too.
We decide it's not Stereolab's fault?there's something wrong with the sound system. It seems the toxic jamming of Oh No, More Spooky contaminated the speakers?they'll have to be remanded to the nearest Superfund site. Luckily, that's the nearby Hudson River. We prepare to hurl ourselves in. The whole crowd will end up quarantined on this fenced-in landfill lawn, I worry. Then we discover, serendipitously, that Stereolab sounds okay from within the confines of our own private porta-potty. But it's not worth it. Suddenly, Stereolab announces they're going to take a five-minute break. And on returning, they sound fine. Better than before as heard from inside the porta-potty. Better than the five-minute break, even.
Perhaps that was the whole point?to convince us that listening to a band that hasn't had any ideas since 1994 is better than listening to something that sucks, or to nothing at all. I believe it! Remember that New Music Seminar when Stereolab played Central Park, and then later that day Yo La Tengo played the Union Square Greenmarket and the park behind it magically metamorphosed into the quad at Wesleyan? No? Well, someone, I think it was Rob Brunner from Entertainment Weekly, told me that day that an English band playing competent Krautrock alongside lovely French-pop vocalists was a good idea, and I nodded in assent. Uh-huh, I said. Later tonight, I'll run into Jeff Gatland from Space Needle, and when I report to him that Stereolab hasn't had any ideas since '94 he'll say, "God bless 'em." Again I'll have to nod, convinced.
We leave the fenced-in area while Stereolab is rocking that song that opens Emperor Tomato Ketchup and continue listening from the park benches facing the Statue of Liberty. We do this to smoke a joint that it turns out nobody remembered to bring with them. "My whole family was almost crushed to death on this very spot in 1986," I say, referring to the statue's 100th-birthday fireworks show. "It was also the day they introduced Dove Bars." This was better than that, though less exciting.
Adam Heimlich
Cat Power The Spitz, London (May 30)
There is absolute silence in the club. Even a beer glass lifted or a camera clicking near the front seems intrusive. Onstage, a girl stands by herself, hair covering her face so her features become formless, completely lost in her own...space. A guitar is in her hands, tentatively played, chords trickling out slowly into the stilled atmosphere. Her voice whispers, slightly echoed where she stands slightly back from the mic. One song moves slowly but surely into another?a softened cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" reduced to a plea for help; a helpless version of former lover Bill Callahan (Smog)'s "Red Apples." There's no space to breathe, no cause to move. Guitar chords echo into stillness, and still the girl sings.
It's difficult to explain Chan Marshall's appeal. Sure, she has incredible presence?and the ability to reduce the normally chattering classes of trendy London to a death-like hush. Her voice isn't spectacular; spooky, yes?the way she draws out so many syllables and then will carefully enunciate an ending consonant. Her recent The Covers Record is fine, maudlin and possessed of real grace, but pales next to Seattle bluesman Mark Lanegan's similar collection of olden songs, slowed down and given space to breathe. Her piano and guitar playing are rudimentary, possessed of a certain naive charm. None of this matters, though. When Chan strikes up the opening chords to "Wild Is the Wind" on piano, or lisps her way through a slightly camp reading of "Salty Dog," she transports herself and everyone else concentrating to another place entirely?a place where the ghosts of her deep South background still howl and whisper and carol the blues.
When Marshall sings all quiet and intense through the surreptitiously haunting "Moonshiner" and "Colors and the Kids" (from Moon Pix), the noise and hubbub of the world outside us in the East End neighborhood of Spitalfields?all the tourists on their Jack the Ripper tours, all the prostitutes on the prowl?are reduced to nothing, to a faint aching, echoed blur. Like Jeff Buckley when he reduced CBGB to a stunned silence all those years ago, Chan Marshall has the ability to kill any party stone dead with but a few echoed chords on "Sea of Love." Then again, most parties don't deserve to exist anyway.
Everett True
The Asylum Street Spankers The Bottom Line (May 31)
Three months ago, I'd never heard of the Asylum Street Spankers. And to be perfectly honest, if I had heard of them in passing, I probably wouldn't have paid them any mind. But a friend who knew them passed three of their albums along to my girlfriend, and they fast became her favorites. I guess you could call them a jug band?at least every once in a while?but they also played jazz and country and flapper-era standards and twisted Dixieland as well?with a lineup that included guitar, fiddle, washboard, ukulele, upright bass, lap steel, banjo, clarinet and saw (among several other instruments). So when one day, quite by accident, my girlfriend walked past the Bottom Line and saw their name on the marquee, well, there was no question?and a week later, we found ourselves sitting front row center for the very first show of the Spankers' summer tour. Missing Pops on washboard and a few other featured players from the olden days, this mostly new seven-piece Spankers lineup was still something. They slid easily from raucous, bawdy numbers to old romantic tunes to songs about pot and beer, and then more songs about pot, from instrumentals to singalongs, all of them completely acoustic (the only amplification used was a tiny microphone center-stage, which is how they record their albums, too). You never knew what to expect next?what style it would be, or what instruments they'd use or who would be singing?the only thing you knew after hearing the first few numbers is that what was coming would make you smile. The folks could play.
And rarely have I seen so many people crammed together on such a small stage have such a good time. They were loose, they were relaxed and Christina Marrs, the singer/saw player/ukulelist/banjo-picker was even extremely pregnant (admitting at one point that audiences got uncomfortable when a woman in her condition sang songs about pot or sex, so she sang a song with no words instead). Wammo, a big bearded guy in a cowboy hat, sat in the center, drank beer the whole while and only occasionally played the harmonica, sang like an ox, but with such gusto that you just didn't care. The fellow playing the 12-string was amazing?as was Stan Smith, a tall, wiry older gentleman who played a mean clarinet and sang like a coherent Dylan. The bald, bespectacled youngster on the fiddle may have looked like an accountant, but could play like a demon.
Most of the tunes that night seemed to be off their new album, Spanker Madness?which consists almost entirely of drug songs (and there's not a goddamn thing wrong with that when the songs are this lively and this funny). The only exceptions were a couple earlier songs?like a cover of Les Paul's "Walkin' & Whistlin' Blues." They also did a beautiful instrumental (featuring the saw) from the soundtrack they'd scored to play along with Charlie Chaplin's City Lights.
I don't much care for going out, and I don't much care for live musical shows, mostly, these days?but these guys had me singing along with the chorus to "Beer" (which goes, in part, "Beer beer beer beer beer beer beer beer") and their encore, an old song called "Scrotum." (It's about scrotums.) Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the evening was the opening acts?Swan Dive, a duo from Nashville, and the Moonlighters, from here in town. Rarely have I seen opening acts set the stage so perfectly for a headliner?and they were both pretty spectacular in their own right. Swan Dive sang sweet Jobim-esque numbers, and the Moonlighters?featuring Bliss Blood and Helmet's Henry Bogdan?tore through a set of mostly 20s and 30s standards on guitar, upright bass, uke and lap steel. Bogdan, I might add, can play lap steel like few people I've ever heard.
No, I may not like going out, but it's been a while since I've had that much fun at a show.
Jim Knipfel
The Monkeywrench Borderline, London (May 27)
Lean, lank, laconic. Moonlighting Mudhoney singer Mark Arm is all three, still. He knows when to snarl and when to hold back. Okay, he may not leap around with such carefree abandon as during his prime, but he sure the hell has presence. He sure looks sharp, in the classic Iggy sense. Electric Children, the Monkeywrench's second album, may have taken eight years to appear (all the band members were kinda otherwise engaged) and be almost completely composed of garage standards and heavy psych/blues fallouts that sound like they've been written 1000 times before, but it doesn't matter. The feeling is what counts. And the Monkeywrench has feeling in trumps.
Arm smiles indulgently as a rabid Tim Kerr from the Lord High Fixers jostles and wrenches a thousand different styles of feedback from his guitar and an overloading amp. Kerr is out of sight. Some of his fingers are gaffer-taped, others have metal tips. How else is he going to shake his guitar hard enough? The smile on Kerr's face as he rampages around the stage, chucking his instrument into the audience for fans to bang along to on "Thirteen Nights," is cheering. "Sugarman" is the best full-on freakout I've witnessed in too many a long year?Kerr's unstoppable now as he rushes about, throwing in wonderful dissonant discords to complement Arm's almost ghostly vocals.
The evening is such fun. Sure, it might be retro, but hell. All of life is retro if you want to take that tack. Arm grins widely as guitarist Tom Price (Gas Huffer) and bassist Steve Turner (Mudhoney) sing a few off-key yeah-yeah harmonies on "Day Trader Shuffle." It's all Turner can do from not donning his 10-gallon hat. It's beyond the ken of any of us not to put our arms around the memories, as the band rushes through Arm's electrifying "In the City Tonight." Loney's raw-throated classic "Love Is a Spider" and "Great Down Here," Turner and Kerr thrashing through the jams like the Groundhogs, MC5 and Blue Cheer had never split the scene. Lubricated Goat drummer Martin Bland is so heavy on the floor he breaks the bass drum pedal within seconds. Like grunge never happened.
Everett True
Negativland Irving Plaza (May 3)
Negativland's current "True/False" tour is their first time out in seven years, but it might as well have been twice as long. Nearly everything they did tonight showed a Negativland stuck in a world of their own making that hasn't changed politically, culturally or technologically in 15 years?in pop terms, that's a couple of generations. If they were a group of musicians, this might be taken as a sign of devotion. But since Negativland are media critics, a self-described "loose aggregation designed for maximum musical aggravation," their state can only be seen as arrested development. The first few skits of the night staked out Negativland's basic critical plan and cultural reference points. First was their longtime MC and Over the Edge radio show persona, Crosley Bendix, a facile Ronald Reagan dodderer who might have been a slightly clever character when they first used him nearly 20 years ago; next came a church-lady/televangelist type who delivered a funny affirmation of motherhood centering on her son getting scalded by boiling animal grease; then the full "band" did a long series of numbers, using all available audiovisual multimedia, based on 1970s McDonald's commercials and the Coke/Pepsi cola wars.
The "True/False" tour, the group has said, is supposed to be made up of mostly new material. So why does it all seem like a college art project, circa 1986? Nothing from the show suggested that the group has had any contact with the problems or major topics of the 1990s?the new world order, the demise of the Cold War, multiculturalism, the Internet, the new gilded age or Clinton-era centrist politics. In the 80s, I guess, artistic dissenters had easier social targets. In those days, as anybody can tell by glancing at a Dead Kennedys album cover, all it took was some clip-art of wholesome 50s advertising to convey the idea that American culture is a stifling, conformist media dictatorship.
Even the tools Negativland used in performance were out of date and curiously old-fashioned: they had slide and film projectors for video, and "cart" tape machines for audio that should be familiar to anyone who has done time in college radio. The sounds seemed lifted from Art of Noise records, and the band and crew walked around in white scientists' jumpsuits that, again, made them look like extras in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 short. It all came across like a repeat of Kraftwerk's much-hyped tour a couple of years ago, which was fun but left me with the feeling that these once-creative people had given up on making their music relevant to our time and instead crawled back into a 20-year-old model of cultural dissent. For both Negativland and Kraftwerk, what was once futuristic and subversive has been rendered just as quaint and nostalgic as the cultural enemies they once lampooned.
Ben Sisario
Bang on a Can All-Stars & Toby Twining Music Miller Theater (May 13)
"The People's Commissions," proclaimed the concert program. Columbia's Miller Theater was certainly full of people, though whether these people constituted The People was a tricky question. Two years ago Bang on a Can started what they like to call a people's commissioning fund, meaning that the money comes from individual donors as opposed to foundations, corporations or the government. Though it felt somewhat gauche and contrary to the egalitarian spirit of the proceedings, I couldn't help notice that The People for these purposes included just plain folks like Meredith Monk, Ursula Oppens, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Michael Tilson Thomas.
The concert, which premiered works by Edward Ruchalski, Miya Masaoka, Marc Mellits and Toby Twining, was being broadcast live on WNYC's New Sounds. This meant John Schaefer was onstage announcing each piece, interviewing the composers and generally adding an air of lugubriousness to the proceedings. The evening showed off the grab bag of techniques and approaches found in the amorphous realm of "new music." But it was also a chance to get reacquainted with the qualities that make classical music, well, classical: an elegant economy of gesture, an unabashed devotion to beautiful sounds.
Marc Mellits' 5 Machines stood out on these grounds. Reminiscent of Reich's work, but with even more complicated cross-rhythms and syncopations, it featured lovely percussion work by Steven Schick, particularly on marimba. This was music as sensual as it was intelligent; I saw audience members swaying, nodding, making little motions with their hands. The visceral appeal of the five-movement piece also highlighted what classical music has in common with rock and pop. Movement four was like a machine going out of control, with a pounding left-hand piano ostinato and loud, percussive strumming. The fifth movement made wonderful use of Miller Theater's acoustics, with the All-Stars stopping abruptly so we could hear the sound die away, then resuming their play. These two movements were a shade over-the-top for my taste, but they clearly pleased the audience: Schaefer couldn't be heard over the thunderous applause, whooping and whistling that greeted the work's conclusion.
Toby Twining's Chrysalid Requiem was not as successful. On paper it looked intriguing, to say the least: a setting of the Latin Mass using just intonation, a system that employs microtones or tones in between those found in traditional major, minor and modal scales. There was also some singing of partials like that of the Tuvans. But the ensemble didn't seem entirely comfortable with the challenging piece: it felt bogged down, diffuse, unfocused. The sound of the 12 vocalists (six men, six women) was unaccountably thin compared to the All-Stars. The main merit of the work was probably in exposing the audience to the text of the Mass, printed in Latin and English in the program. Who could resist lines like, "How great the trembling will be, when the Judge shall come, the rigorous investigator of all things!" Twining's piece is scheduled for a performance later this summer in a church, and I'd be willing to give it another chance there.
This concert as a whole made me think about the importance of venues. It was a free concert. Miller Theater's door was open to the street; in theory anyone could walk in, and in reality anyone did not. Bang on a Can is known for embracing a broad variety of popular and unpopular musics, and it has helped to create and nurture a diverse and dedicated musical community in this city. It's a floating community though, and in some ways an invisible one. Imagine a New York without crippling commercial rents and restrictive zoning laws. What if BOAC had a regular venue, one that could accommodate both this concert and last year's sellout date featuring DJ Talvin Singh? What if the venue had banners and signboards telling passersby what was going on? What if you could hear the music from the street? What might the people's commissioning fund look like then?
Eva Neuberg
MF Doom Wetlands (April 24)
It's going to be all right, as far as rap is concerned. This was not a great show, but it made me realize that. It's very easy to get depressed about the future when you've put your faith in hiphop. Did you know that Master P's new star sounds exactly like Tupac? The just-released album by No Limit supergroup 504 Boyz features him. The intro is a child asking his father if Tupac is really dead, 'cause there's a new No Limit rapper who seems to be him in disguise. For being so cynically opportunistic about something that means so much to so many, Master P should be exiled. Too bad no market rewards cynical opportunism better than this one does?he'd exile himself to it. Anyway, the only reason that Puff Daddy's Biggie Smalls soundalike isn't out on CD yet, supposedly, is that the guy was involved in that shooting incident at Club New York. Meanwhile, right now as you read this, Jay-Z is at home listening to show-tune soundtracks, trolling for his next hook. But it's not a dark age.
The acknowledged aficionado's choice for Best Work of Hiphop Art released in the last year is Ghostface Killah's Supreme Clientele, and it does indeed, on its own, mop up a lot of the target-marketed puerility oozing like MC pus from the No Limit/Bad Boy/Def Jam juggernaut. But the more I listen to MF Doom's Operation: Doomsday, the more it seems that this unpromoted wackjob accomplished a lot of the same things Ghost did, only more subtly, practically in secret. There's a whole bunch of commonalties I could point out; the important one is the obliteration of the "thug" and "backpacker" pigeonholes. Both Ghostface and Doom show that this sort of personality categorization, helpful as it is to marketers, works against the salient point of emceeing?the broadcasting of authentic, individual personality. On the cultural level, too, it's poison. The power of gangsta rap is rooted in frustrated intelligence, talent recast as skill and tested in a pressure cooker. In a world where smart kids want to stay within the law and make jazz-poetry-left-activist rap while only dolts like DMX live off the grid and do hardcore, rap's not the Molotov from the black underclass it was. The amazing evidence entered into the record by Mobb Deep and Wu-Tang (and Nas before he sold out) was that complete fucking geniuses were dealing crack in your city. Ghostface and Doom are poets and ex-cons, both freakishly unique, yet bound, linguistically, musically, into an artistic nexus that, when it flowers again, will make Cash Money look like hair bands did after Nirvana broke.
And it's going to happen. At first I was annoyed, finding MF Doom's show so packed it was solid bodies from the stage to the door. Up front it must've been about 120 degrees, and as most in attendance were fat, drunk, bratty white indie-rap kids, the place stunk to high hell and elbows were being thrown like frisbees during Freshman Week. Throughout the opening acts El-P, the fat, bratty white MC of Company Flow, sat on a stool on the stage, waiting for his guest verse, as if that's a cool thing to do. The act before MF Doom got the crowd all riled up?it was Cage, another fat, drunk white guy. He was all right. He and El-P both did political rhymes, getting all angry as if they were the victims of racism instead of the beneficiaries. Like Jigga says, that's cool with me, but how about passing the mic to headliner MF before my bratty, out-of-shape ass needs to go find a stool of its own?
Here's an MF Doom political statement, from the verse he apparently wrote in prison, that kicks off the mind-boggling "Doomsday": "While Sidney Sheldon teaches the trife to be trifer/I'm trading science fiction with my man, the live lifer." It took me a few months to figure that one and lot of other puzzling MF Doom lyrics out, but at Wetlands I was surprised to hear the drunk young man behind me shout every word along with the star, directly into my ear. Just like at that Mudhoney show 10 years ago, only this time I know what it means.
Doom doesn't do "Doomsday" but he does do "Rhymes Like Dimes" and "Hey!" and nobody left after Cage, everybody knows the material. MF's wearing a Jets jersey, a straw cowboy hat and a bandanna over his face (sidekick MF Grimm is decked out in camo and a gas mask) and he keeps bitching about the mic sound, which is better than fine. At one point he screams up at the sound booth, "Do I have to reveal my true identity?!" and pulls the bandanna off.
It takes about one minute of set opener "Operation: Greenbacks" to ascertain that the man can flow in real time every bit as uncannily as he does on wax?replicating jagged stream-of-consciousness so realistically the rhymes would sound incidental if they weren't so slick. The 3-D effects he pulls off via counterpoint between his vocals and samples are in operation as well. So goddamn far off the grid this guy is and his songs work like little pop snacks. Both guys I managed to convince to buy the album and I agree wholeheartedly: Listen to MF Doom and you will find extremely alien sentiments bouncing around your head at odd hours, and you will find the experience edifying. Operation: Doomsday is the only rap album I ever even heard of that wasn't given out free to any person or organization, and it seems the guy doesn't do interviews, but he's reaching people. After 20 minutes he asked his road manager?asked him into the mic so everyone could hear?if they'd gotten paid yet, if he in fact had the money for the Wetlands show on his person. The guy nodded, and MF Doom was gone, away from the b.o. smell and the dopey white kids like me who only wanted a few more numbers, who?c'mon?paid for at least a few more, and who really want nothing but the best for him.
Adam Heimlich
Andre Williams Corner Hotel, Melbourne (April 14) The man is dressed sharp. White suit, red shirt, red tie, red hankie. He grabs the microphone stand, slams it back into his body. Yells. Screams. Drops to his knees. Slaps the dancing girl on her tush as another mean, gritty blues riff starts up. Shouts something indecipherable over the echo-laden, grungy guitars. Screams again. Executes a neat turn, wipes his brow and settles down side-stage. Whips the microphone from out of its socket and starts beating himself into a frenzy.
Andre Williams has come a long way since he had a handful of hits in the 50s. Once venerated by the Blues Brothers (his best-known song, "Shake a Tail Feather," was featured in their film), his brand of creepy, voice-over r&b is now being championed by a new generation of white-boy wannabe bluesmen?Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the Gories and Demolition Doll Rods foremost among them. Spencer, in particular, owes Williams a massive debt. Williams' new album The Black Godfather is as dirty and lowdown as they come. Songs like the full-on "Fire in the Hole" and the title track reveal a whole new blaxploitation element to his music. Explicit where once he would tease, the sixtysomething Williams gives his pretenders a run for their money in terms of energy alone. Image-wise, he's in a class of his own.
"People think that the world revolves around money, but they're wrong," shouts the musical mack as the crowd yells approval. "The world revolves around pussy. Of course, you've gotta have money to get pussy. You've got to look good, you've got to smell good. Then you can get pussy."
Tonight, Williams pulls out most of the stops. A medley of old hits?"Tail Feather," "Pass the Biscuits Please," "Greasy Chicken" and classic proto-grunge blues number "Bacon Fat" among them?is followed by some slick dance moves and a rant on how he can help us all achieve pussy nirvana. In fact, he's begging us to let him achieve pussy nirvana on our behalf. His band?some members of Australia's nasty rockers Beasts of Bourbon and a few Kim Salmon backing musicians?are excellent, especially considering they'd only been practicing for three hours beforehand. They're as snarling and greasy as you'd want. As Williams rasps on the opening track to his genius 1998 album Silky, "I'm agile, mobile and hostile." You better believe it.
Everett True
The Negro Problem Knitting Factory (March 8)
"Most people provide answers," Stew said, near the beginning of the set. "We provide questions that you already have the answers to."
Those questions concerned the desperate optimism of people who keep going back to rehab, women who deserve better than the men they end up with, the implied sexuality of children's toys, destroyed relationships and the dark side of television news anchormen?observations on the absurdity of postmodern life, and of what people go through to survive it. Stew leads the Negro Problem, a band from Los Angeles that has put out two albums, Post Minstrel Syndrome and Joys & Concerns, and he's one of the most thoughtful and humorous songwriters to come along in years, following squarely in the tradition of skewed and sarcastic social commentary as perfected by Randy Newman and Ray Davies. In their world, and Stew's, life's incongruities come out in the details, whether it's in somebody's personal story of denial and frustration or in snapshots of the larger civic sphere of the rich fucking the poor, while the middle class fucks anybody it can.
At this show, the second of five Wednesday-night gigs the band held in a broken-down, "Unplugged" form?they were only three, though the band has been known to stretch to as many as six?at the Knitting Factory's intimate downstairs Old Office, alienation was the theme. Stew opened with "Ken," the story of Barbie's boyfriend, born gay in a plastic-toy factory and doomed to live a manufactured, phony life. "My name's Ken and I like men," he sings. "But the people at Mattel, the home that I call hell, are somewhat bothered by my queer proclivities." Ken resigns himself to putting up the act of living in your children's bedrooms and loving Barbie, but he dreams about loving G.I. Joe. "I'm your corporate toy, cursed to bring you joy," he says. "So fa-la-la-la, la-la, la-la, la-fuckin'-la."
Later, Stew played a brand-new song called "Come on Everybody, Come," that was a preemptive strike against the moneyed types who are all but destined to gentrify his comfortably cheap and hip neighborhood in L.A. "Come on everybody, come on and fuck up my neighborhood," Stew explained before playing the song, "because you're just going to do it anyway." It was the best song they played all night, and featured excellent backing vocals by Stew's bassist and backup chick, Heidi Rodewald.
Throughout the show, the band's sound was fresh and direct, just guitar and bass for most of the songs, with some minimal keyboard work by Rodewald in spots. They had a drummer, who sat twiddling his thumbs for much of the night while Stew stole the show with nothing but his wry sense of humor and his knack for telling tragicomic vignettes. Stew should learn from this experience: it was much better than the band has ever sounded on record, on which they seem to be afflicted by the L.A. Band Syndrome, tinkering with the songs way too much in the studio and diluting the strength and beauty of the songs themselves. Onstage here, Stew had no lounge-band horns or synth effects to throw into the mix, and it was for the better. He had to rely on his guitar and his voice?a poignant tenor that on "Joys & Concerns" is tampered with too much, at times actually sounding like Ozzy Osbourne's helium falsetto. It took Ray Davies 30 years to figure out that he doesn't need his band at all. Let's hope Stew doesn't take that long.
Ben Sisario