On a recent episode of “Fresh Air,” Terry Gross interviewed Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the bandleader on Jimmy Fallon’s “Late Night” show and one of the driving forces behind one of the most protean hip-hop acts ever, The Roots. I really can’t say enough about how much I enjoyed the interview. One of the most interesting bits is how he described deejaying. I was struck by how similar it is to the way I hear other programmers describe coding:

Here’s Questlove on Deejaying:

I believe the number one rule of DJ is: You have to immerse yourself in music. Immerse. Not love music, you have to immerse yourself. [...] is: So for me it's like a chess game. I'm thinking about the payoff song that's going to be 20 songs from now and how can I build up to that moment. [...] the only time that I will be a complete ass to a person is when I'm deejaying. I absolutely want zero interruptions, because I'm in a trance and you're breaking my trance, and I need to know how to get from point A to point B. [...] I can go anywhere. [...] that world is my oyster and I need complete absolute concentration.

Let’s do a few search and replaces to make that quote describe programming, shall we?¹

As part of my ongoing unwinding of my Twitter history, I found a number of posts where I shared music from Spotify. I aggregated all these songs into a playlist that’s embedded below. Or, you can play them in-browser if you follow the jump.

I suppose there’s a time in life when you realize you have a favorite tea, a favorite Scotch, a favorite grocery store, and a favorite Christmas album. My favorite Christmas album is Michael Bublé’s, “Christmas.”

While I start off every year reaching for She & Him’s version of “A Christmas Waltz,” for the bulk of the classics, there’s no topping Bublé.

I like Bublé because:

1. Great voice
2. Great arrangements that swing
3. Appropriate respect for the song
4. Communication of joy

He does three songs in particular that make me feel the season and which I’d like to commend.

1. A New Orleans-inspired bluesy, boozy, “Blue Christmas”
2. A traditional-sensitive version of “White Christmas” (in duet with Shania Twain!)
3. A flapper-ready swing of “Jingle Bells” (with the Puppini Sisters!)

Below I’ll write about what I love so much about each of the songs, but the one thing that unites all of them are arrangements that are evocative and, frankly, damn funny. In each of these songs, the arrangements give us:

• A set of rules, the “straight” version of the song
• And then it gets wild: fun phrasings, a fat swing break where the rules are broken, delighting the ear
• And then now that the wheels are loose on the bus, let’s see if we can shake ’em off (we do) in a way that shows the staggering talent of the musicians

Also, I find these songs to be incredibly rich pictorially. Every time I hear these songs I imagine a music video (directed by me) that accompanies the breaks and beats in the songs. I’ll share them here too.

Last week our neighbor invited Lauren and I to attend a performance by Teatro Nuovo at the fabulous Gothic, Episcopal Church of The Heavenly Rest on 5^th of a restoration of a symphony by Donizetti and Rossini’s “Stabat Mater” (“The mother was standing”).

It had been a hot day so it was wonderful to arrive at the church and be welcomed into cool shade. We were lucky to hear introductory remarks by Mr. Gabriel Dotto, a scholar of Italian opera.

I was unacquainted with Donizetti, but found this symphonic piece to be very compelling and remarkably well-done. The fourth movement had not had its orchestration completed and, as part of the revival, was restored by scholar and our maestro, Will Crutchfield.

As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up exposed to lurid horrors of American Southern Gothic folklore in school. Even now, I can remember snatches of songs like this from a version of the circa-1650 ballad “The Twa Sisters:”

He made a bridge of her bone-ridge.
Oh! the dreadful wind and rain

This ballad finds its source in Northumbrian folk tradition. As the English departed England for homes in Appalachia, these ballads traveled with them. As the colonists staked their new homes, they stitched into the American folk songbook these songs of dismembered, disemboweled, drowned, or imprisoned women (usually with a fiddle and mandolin accompaniment).

Recently, a friend from my childhood neighborhood recalled on Facebook seeing David Holt spin his ghastly yarns (that I recounted before) with an incredulous “Does anyone else remember this?” I think there was also some implicit “Couldn’t do that today.” Her post was a prompt to review my post on this material.

With those thoughts refreshed, the tradition of the murder ballad was discussed in an episode of the podcast “Dolly Parton’s America” (a podcast series that I heartily recommend). I’d like to connect my baptism to that tradition here. I also wanted to make a note of the vibrancy of this tradition by noting its influence in the Anglo-Scots folk tradition of Australia, courtesy of Nick Cave.

The Murder Ballad in the Australian Folk Tradition: Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue

This video reawoke my Gothic gene from a decade of slumber:

I hadn’t thought of murder ballads much in the ten or so years since my baptism into the Southern Gothic until one fine day when the music of two Australians found me on the cobblestone streets of Holland.

Photo of Rhiannon Giddens by Tanya Rosen-Jones for nonesuch records

While listening to Dolly Parton’s America, the musician Rhiannon Giddens was interviewed (at 29:11), and I was absolutely floored by how she dismantled the idea of “mountain music” being per se “White.”

Typographical Note: I’m using White to denote a social construct of race, not to denoted an actual racial phenotype.

My default image of “mountain music” is Dolly, or Kenny, or Del McCoury, or Hank Williams in his rhinestone suit, or Roy Clark “Pickin n’ Grinnin” on “Hee-Haw.” Something like this:

Such images and their imperial power would have us think that everything in such tableaux: bib overalls, straw hats, banjos, etc. were all also White.

But Ms. Giddens deflates that idea noting that luted instruments came from Africa. Think about it: the gourd was the resonating chamber of early lutes, and gourds grow in Africa not Europe. Luted instruments and the designs might have been translated into wooden forms in Spain (Moorish invasion) or Italy (trade with the city-states), but these instruments are fundamentally African.

Gen-Xers complaining about the loss of “their MTV” (the one that showed videos) is now itself, a joke. Gen X-enters-midlife inaugural series “Portlandia” went so far as to feature an episode where Portland-based Xers united with our Cronkite (Kurt Loder), and our Barbara Walters (Tabitha Soren), and our ready-made music-guru buddy (Matt Pinfield) to stage a coup against the channel’s current Gen-Z-oriented, “Teen Mom”-pushing programming director.

She doesn’t care about your nostalgia, Harms

It’s hard to sell someone else on their loss. No one, reasonably, wants to hear about how great the party (or New York City, or San Francisco) was just before they got there. So, perhaps against type to my generation, I’d like to not say what the later-born lost because they were born after MTV was paved over with boy-band-friendly, gonad-vaporizing “TRL” and insipid reality shows gone horribly wrong (What hath “The Real World” wrought?).

Instead, I’d like to recall what humanity gained in that early era of videos. In this post, I’d like to recall and celebrate a director who laid down a gauntlet to say “We could do this ‘video’ thing with artistry and daring, like this.” The director was Englishman David Mallet who, in his visionary collaborations with David Bowie made profoundly memorable, challenging, and daring videos. Bowie and Mallett’s videos hinted that the medium could be more than musical ads to sell records. It could be an art form unto itself.

During my evening dog walks in the quarantine quiet, I’ve been enjoying doing some deep listening to songs: thinking about the poetry, the themes, the mechanics, and my historical relationship to the song. Recently, I listened to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ recording of “Red Right Hand” (1996) in this manner and, to my surprise, heard it in an entirely new way. My imagination had always held the seducer described in the song to be sinewy, handsome, and Byronic like Stephen King’s Randall Flagg from The Stand. But a new thought came to me:

The seducer can also be the intentionally-rumpled, cynical, ill-tailored, faux-populist, manipulative, unpolished, yuckster-huckster Trump archetype as well.

In the climax of the song, the narrator warns us:

You’ll see him in your nightmares
You’ll see him in your dreams
He’ll appear out of nowhere but
He ain’t what he seems
You’ll see him in your head
On the TV screen
Hey buddy, I’m warning
You to turn it off
He’s a ghost, he’s a god
He’s a man, he’s a guru
You’re one microscopic cog
In his catastrophic plan
Designed and directed by
His red right hand

Foreword: I’ve had this post incomplete in my drafts folder for many months, but the recent passing of the Eve of the DWotD (Doo-Wop of the Damned), Ronnie Spector, on January 12^th has urged me to finally finish this one off. In memoriam.

An important part of my musical taste that intersects at horror, maudlin sentimentality, oceans of reverb, and beautiful harmonies deserves a name. I dub it the Doo-Wop of the Damned (DWotD). It’s not a common taste, really, but I was trying to remember how it formed in me, so I thought I’d write down its recipe.

I’ve also created a playlist to sample some of the music discussed here:

I recall reading an interview with Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann years ago and, having been in and around the “Britpop” scene of the 1990’s, she remarked that she had expected the breakthrough in America Britpop band to be the Stone Roses.¹

It was funny to me, then, because I had never even heard of “the Roses” or even her own previous band at that time, Suede. But who knows why certain English-speaking acts go huge in the UK but not America: The Spice Girls made the leap, but Bush remained unknown in Britain; Radiohead crossed the briny deep and remained relevant in the UK, but Catatonia did not.

As it happened, Frischmann was the front-woman for a band that had a mixed leap: they landed a single or two in America, but were largely forgotten by the time of the release of their sophomore album, The Menace. So, that was the down side.

But the upside was their freshman album, the self-titled Elastica. Sexy, androgynous, flirty, witty, and funny, Elastica landed in the summer of 1995 with it’s provocative and catchy “Connection” hitting medium rotation on MTV. Shortly after “Connection,” “2:1” appeared as part of the Trainspotting soundtrack which helped lift Elastica’s profile.

Heading off to college in the Fall of 1995, Elastica was a resident in my dorm room CD changer. My earliest memories of schoolwork (doing “Contemporary Moral Problems” essay writing) have this album as soundtrack.

Giving the album (yet-) another listen after all these years, I couldn’t resist the pop hooks, the nostalgia, and fun of the album. I also couldn’t avoid the conclusion that I had memorized much of the lyrics incorrectly as I was unable to seine out the words through Frischmann’s Kensington accent which was further accented by snarls, slang, exclamations, and semi-orgasmic squeals. As it turned out, it didn’t matter: the hooky-ness of the songs, the energy, and the beat power over the fact that you didn’t hear every fourth word and, even if you did know them, many of the lyrics in toto are verbal experiments or lyrics à clef detailing some music-business society kerfuffle that you don’t have any context on anyway.

Don’t worry. Be happy.

Let’s go back to the midpoint of the 90’s and un-forget Elastica’s Elastica.

Once upon a time there was a band called Catatonia made up of bored and isolated young folks in Wales. They wrote clever and catchy songs. They sang in Welsh and English. Their singer’s voice was supple and ferocious; it could seduce and it could head-butt you as an opening salvo in a pub brawl. She was a sonic and cultural Boudicca. At a fevered peak in the 1990’s, Catatonia left Wales to try to make it bigger and became a commodity product adjacent to the “Britpop” narrative (viz. Blur and Oasis) as part of the “Cool Cymru” sound. That Catatonia never quite got their due, and that Catatonia’s final album is a complete piece that shows their versatility, capability, and uniqueness.

Let’s un-forget Catatonia’s Equally Cursed and Blessed.

In one of my earliest book reviews, I reviewed the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. I wrote that a trope “that really interested me was how VanderMeer’s writing can be conceived of as a post-DNA-theory, “bio-philic” Lovecraftian horror” and I also acknowledged the source of that adjective as being the Icelandic artist, Björk.

Pictured: Badalamenti (left) and director David Lynch (right)

On the 11^th, I saw that Angelo Badalamenti had died. As a fan of moodiness and reverb, it was sad to see an artist adjacent to the Doo-Wop of the Damned echo on to that great, permanent stillness.

Badalamenti knew how to provide sounds that let the expansive, strange, and wonderful dreams of David Lynch breathe onscreen. While I first conceptualized his music as being part of the Pacific Northwest (Twin Peaks), the first Lynch movie that ever caught me was the quintessentially Angeleno Lost Highway. While Badalamenti might have been more-frequently associated with moody, foggy, reverb-laden soundscapes, his compositions for the Trent Reznor-produced Lost Highway showed his flexibility in that he could do lounge or more straight-ahead, less-atmospheric movie scoring:

For me, my favorite Badalamenti composition was his transfixing and transporting soundtrack to Mulholland Drive:

Owing to the recent arrival of Alexander, doing hands-free entertainment while hands-full of Alexander has become a regular part of my life. As such, I’ve been going through some of my archived, but unplayed backlog and I really enjoyed the interview between Alec and Todd Rundgren. I’ve never been a fan of Rundgren’s music and, honestly, this podcast really didn’t change my mind.

That said, through his years in the music business, Rundgren had some really funny observations about his career and the music business. You can basically play from the link below ’til about 2 minutes

Minutes 09:45 to 12:00 are the source for these anecdotes

My favorite podcast, “60 Songs that Explain the ’90s,” hosted by Rob Harvilla recently returned. On the show, Rob, a music critic and editor, discusses the significance, great moments, powerful lyrics, and emotional impact of various songs. He truly is a gifted writer about the experience of loving music and loving the making of music. The opening track for his new series covering the 2000’s is The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside.“¹

His coverage made me think to the first time I had heard the song in my living room on Rainbow Drive in Mountain View on late-night MTV² ; I thought about the song’s album, Hot Fuss, playing on my iPod Shuffle at the Gold’s Gym off of 101; and then I realized that the album is now twenty years old. So this is a post about The Killers, the Death of Rock ’n Roll, the 2000’s, and Hot Fuss.

In the months after my son came into my life, I was spending a lot of wee hours alone washing, rinsing, cleaning, wiping, and reloading so that my wife could get a few hours of sleep here and there. I had never paid much attention to Spotify’s podcasts, but, thanks to long hours standing at the sink, I had run my normal podcast content to empty and I took a chance.

I’m so thankful. Rob’s “60 songs that explain the 90’s” did cover insights about the music of my teens and twenties. But Rob’s writing and his angle of attack on the questions of music are inventive. His tone and personal anecdotes enliven and draw out laughter. Some episodes drew me straight away because I loved the song under the microscope (Portishead’s “Glory Box”); some I hate-listened (Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Kinda Life")¹ ; but the one that I avoided the longest wound up being a powerful showcase about what makes this show so special: Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”

I’ve been wondering: What would a library look like in a culture that still communicated its most important cultural institutions through music versus prose?¹ What if the language of music were to define how that culture organized knowledge so that speaking (singing?) of the organization of knowledge imparted some metadata about the knowledge itself? What if we crossed solresol with the Dewey decimal system?

This idea was inspired by my playing, this past Spring, "Horizon: Forbidden West.“² With its superb world-building and the graphics/audio capabilities of the PlayStation 5, the development team at Guerilla games helps us imagine a world where music is a dominant and uniting cultural thread:³

The game’s heroine, Aloy, enters in the Utaru tribe’s home village of “Plainsong” to beautiful choral music.

Rob Harvilla recently covered M.I.A’s “Paper Planes” on his podcast and the discussion dropped me right square in 2004 Mountain View listening to San Jose State student radio. In an era of Hoobastank and Evanescence, her first song, Pull up the People hit like a ton of space invader bits with its originality and appetite for confrontation.

Pull up the people
Pull up the poor

Slang tang
That’s the that M.I.A. thang
I got the bombs to make you blow
I got the beats to make you bang bang bang

It felt like I was hearing the future. It was Marxist/insurgent/militant sentiment and resentment standing on top of an anti-capitalist and anti-globalist platform as described in Hardt & Negri’s Empire.¹ . The album art and her videos had a complete visual aesthetic: bright, garish, and adjacent to street art or 8-bit video games. Her fashion integrated the fast-fashion (bright, garish, produced in southeast Asia, petrochemical-laden, and cheap) demands of the slavering jaws of Western consumerism. She took Target basics like ugly t-shirts and bike shorts and crossed them with blingy hip-hop street style as ripped off the streets of Mumbai, Colombo, Delhi, or Rio. It was a whole declaration.

With its square beats and computer-inflected … noise you could feel the anger and the sense of how much of a fuck she did not give.

Said M.I.A. in Spin of the era: “I don’t just want to talk about coming from a war…I want to talk about…how the first world is collapsing into the third world.”

With New York and its skyline still reeling from the terror that third-world agents can unleash, this seemed prophetic and frightening. For Westerners who’d matured under the Pax Americana in the 70’s-90’s, it was hard to legitimately imagine what a collapsed Western society might look like. Surely not National Socialism, certainly not Shining Path socialism. What would that blighted end-state look like?

About that same time, the South African hip-hop/rave/wtf band, Die Antwoord raced onto my radar. They were 23 minutes into the future of where M.I.A. was seeing culture heading.

As part of their zef aesthetic, they would unite dated, shitty clothing, weed-whacker-delivered hair styles, daring tattoos, violence, outrageous sexuality, and horror film elements. Said Yo-Landi Visser, half of the duo: “[Zef is] associated with people who soup their cars up and rock gold and shit. Zef is, you’re poor but you’re fancy. You’re poor but you’re sexy, you’ve got style.” In short, nihilistic, sexy, tattooed, and pugnacious. I recall interviews with the duo: they stood in dusty roads amid modest, sun-scarred, cinderblock homes in Johannesburg. They looked and felt like the visual aesthetic to accompany Tom Friedman’s book Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

If M.I.A. was telling where we were going, Die Antwoord were a time capsule from the future sent back in time to help our stymied imaginations.