VOX POPMUSIC – R & B Tunes Of The Year

I’ve had this lingering unease about Tom’s “Vox” article since I read it, how his criteria work against his choices, and just what the real underlying criteria are. He looks for the best vocals as those that work integrally to the song. But he chooses the vocals which most distinguish themselves, not by rockist “authenticity” but by indie-rockist studio tricks and nervous tics. Vocals, then, overwhelmed in performance by additional layers of meaning, almost as though there’s something to be feared from the naked voice, in confronting the notion of “authenticity” it carries with it, and in fear of manipulation by the talent of performance.

Tom tars all R&B with the brush of Mariah Carey, all frills and no center, glitter for its own sake. But this can only come from a perspective where vocals, unless they’re full of frills, don’t matter. Why is it voices which “bully everything else into submission” at all? Why does a song need to be about anything but a voice, and why can’t the best voices define themselves not as the aggressive center of a song, but the natural center, as something so appropriate that to burden it with lavish production and effects would only be to bury its impact?

I came to R&B only last year, and only by the most deliberate effort, spurred by a friend who wouldn’t let up. We would take turns napstering files — R. Kelley followed by Daft Punk followed by Keith Sweat followed by Missy. Our only common ground was Aaliyah. She was our girl, our age, wildly successful, and untouchable. And through her, we passed over into different worlds, culminating when we first heard “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” and I could only talk about flow while he could only talk about production.

She existed at this nexus, the female R&B star who could pull off slow jams and love songs, crossing into a man’s world while her contemporaries lost themselves in the past or flocked together in production-laden groups, running from the naked voice and finding safety in numbers. We knew the least about her personal life, but with every note she sang we knew everything she had to give. More than any other performer she erased the stigma of “authenticity” — why would we expect her to write and produce her songs when the transubstantiation of her voice was already enough?

He would ask me how I could listen to pop schlock like Destiny’s Child. I would ask him how he could listen to emotive schlock like R. Kelley “Imagine,” he said, “that you’re in a white suit and have roses. Imagine that you’re in a limo, and she’s in mink. That’s how you’re supposed to listen to this music.” And one morning, driving to work at 7am, hung over, head aching, I tuned the radio to K-Ci & Jo-Jo’s “Crazy” and it was the most soothing thing in the world, crawling over my skin and caressing me, subtly insinuating itself into my mood, transforming my upholstery from vinyl to leather. And I began to get it.

Listening to R&B can be draining, like listening to Merzbow. Seventy minute albums drawn with a limited palette, overwhelming in their repetition and consistency. But there’s also extraordinary catharsis to be found and a trancelike purity of meditation, production increasingly less bound to orthodox song structure and more draped over the invention of the singer — all interpretation and personality. The whole notion of arrangement in a traditional sense has been outdated by tracks like these, where classic structures have given way to establishing a relation between elements of the production, just as the sixteen-bar forms of classic jazz have given way to more fluid and emotionally responsive precepts in free jazz. So, then, as an answer to Tom’s vocals from songs not about vocals, I present my list of R&B tunes which are all about vocals.

SET THE CONTROLS FOR THE HEART OF THE SUM

Jan Jelinek, Bjork and the Evolution of Glitch

These past two weeks I’ve been listening fairly constantly to Jan Jelinek’s loop-finding-jazz-records, and thinking about beauty. Beauty in IDM and glitch techno is something I’ve been meaning to write about for literally ages, but I never got around to it because in my head it kept on unfolding into an impossibly long epic as painful to read as it would be to write. So now I’m just writing, with very little idea of what I’m going to say next - in other words, the way I usually write about music.

Now that the glitch is accepted almost as orthodoxy among the techno and IDM community, with even the most abrasive works of Thomas Brinkmann or DAT Politics provoking little more than arched eyebrows, the movement, as Mille Plateux are eager to insist that it is, must find itself new challenges. One alternative is to attempt to combine the sound with already existing styles such as hip hop to house, and even rock when Radiohead can be bothered. Jan Jelinek’s aim meanwhile seems to be a simpler and very sympathetic one: to make the glitch a thing of beauty.

It’s easy, with records like this one, to focus on the process of its production (hinted at even in the title) rather than the music itself. The idea of piecing together samples and loops from old jazz records to make a glitch album is an intriguing one primarily, I think, because it acts as a nice counterpoint to the dub-obsession of so many glitch artists, particularly those on Jelinek’s own label, ~scape. Listening though, I don’t notice much about the specific sounds Jelinek uses that I can identify as particularly jazzy - usually they’re all too bitty and isolated to even identify as specific instruments, with little to differentiate them from the ambient drones used more commonly by other glitch techno artists.

Rather, the jazziness that I, at least, can discern within the album (and I must add the disclaimer here that I am hardly a suitable judge in this regard) is in Jelinek’s treatment of his samples. It’s in the way he stretches them into warm, wavering chords that don’t sound ambient or spectral so much as relaxed and comfortable. Combined with the often random seeming flecks of percussion and skips that always hover just on the edge of forming a proper groove, the experience reminds me of all the times I used to put on Davis’ Kind of Blue before I would go to sleep, hoping to “get” jazz by osmosis. Loop-finding-jazz-records affects that same dreamy, distracted air which that album gave and still gives me. It is, however, a distraction that is only seeming, disguising the intense concentration of expert craftsmanship.

The album is undeniably one of the more beautiful glitch records I’ve heard, and for that I love it, but I actually think Jelinek could stand to allow even more beauty into his work next time around. Unlike the live renditions of his work that I have heard, which were considerably more beat-driven and house-affiliated along the lines of Luomo or Herbert, there’s a certain restrained prettiness to loop-finding-jazz-records which, though certainly enjoyable, gives the music the appearance of reserved formality. It may turn out that this slightly arch chill is in fact one of the defining and best qualities of Jelinek’s work, and yet I can’t help but wonder what might happen if he let his guard down a bit.

In doing so I find myself frequently, if perhaps only half-heartedly, comparing Jelinek’s album to the Schematic label’s compilation Lily of the Valley, an album I have treasured for some time but have found it difficult to write about. Unlike Jelinek’s work, much of the music on Lily of the Valley goes some way towards snubbing its nose at prettiness, but such a move does not at all prevent it from straining towards a certain beauty. This beauty is one of emotional expressiveness rather than formal loveliness, and while it is reasonable to expect the two to often coincide, Schematic’s artists seem to have an uncanny ability to portray emotions in flux, striking delicate balances (or powerful imbalances) between light and dark that force them to delve into more shadowy corners of the glitch/IDM/electro landscape than Jelinek might feel comfortable with.

The roughly conjoined sections in Richard Devine’s opening “Anthracite T. Vari”, for example, seem to toss and turn with a petulant destructiveness, the deliberately ramshackle glitch and self-consciously jagged DSP processing of the initial stages indicating to me an incoherent and unsympathised - because unsympathetic - anger. This small-voiced rage is slowly, eventually subsumed within mournful, wise ambience, giving these later stages of sad melodicism a context and edge that actually renders them more affecting. Maybe I’m projecting when I say that this track simply has to be an elegy for the loss of the innocence of youth (and maybe the loss of youth’s freedom to be incoherent), but it suggests such a narrative to me too powerfully for me to entertain any alternatives.

Excepting the lovestruck-but-bittersweet sonics and butterfly stomached underwater percussion of Takeshi Muto’s “Muto Love”, nothing else on Lily of the Valley hits me with such force as Devine’s piece, but much of the album seems steeped in that aforementioned emotional expressiveness. Most often the music strikes me as attempting to recreate the singularly magical, if frightening, world of the isolated child. Like a musical homage to Alice in Wonderland, many moments here offer up a vision of the world as an alternately fascinating and fearful place that often inspires but only occasionally satisfies an earnest desire for the security of home. Indeed, the musical selections are as diverse as Alice’s alien world, ranging from the spooked-out soundscapes of Jeswa’s “Poema Singleo” to the more familiar Aphex Twin-like wistfulness of Delarosa & Asora’s “Lily’s Theme”, or the fragile optimism of Phoenicia’s “Monday (Disjecta RMX)”, or the starry-eyed wonder of 09’s “Seven Milliseconds”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, on her latest album Vespertine Bjork has gone further than almost anyone in forging a deliberately emotional brand of glitch/IDM, utilising glitch’s fetishism of the mistake to create a beautiful but accurately flaw-riddled map of her experience. Of course, in a certain fashion she is only half-successful, as unstable glitch rhythms have never sounded more natural, more eternal than on this album, set against the backdrop of lushly orchestrated and choir-adorned love songs. The glitch has traditionally been an aural signifier for the digital world, the cast-off remainder of a thousand simultaneous and precisely calculated divisions; on tracks like “Hidden Place” or “An Echo, A stain”, though, the eddying whirls of glitch rhythms more closely resemble networks of microscopic organic lifeforms, clustering and dispersing with a fluidity that transcends the stiff grace of mathematics - a patternless profusion shaped and sculpted by the demands of nature.

Bjork realises, I think, the suggestive power of the glitch, mirroring as it does the mistake-fetishising oddness of her own vocals. On “Cocoon”, underneath what is one of her most roughly unadorned performances and some of her most painfully personal lyrics (”he slides inside, half awake half asleep. We faint back into sleep-hood. When I wake up a second time in his arms- Gorgeousness! He’s still inside me!”), a collection of vinyl pops and jittery beats provide a rhythm halfway between the steady breathing of sleep and a surprised, startled exhalation - if beats had mouths to form a perfect “O”, these would do so. Far from submerging herself into impersonal and inhuman soundscapes, Bjork uses the glitch to better capture her basic humanness, and the constant, beautiful fragility of everyday life.

The two most stunning songs on Vespertine - the near-ascension of “Undo” and the raw music box balladry of “Pagan Poetry” - don’t actually use glitches in their arrangements, but they are just as marked by glitch as a movement and methodology, not only in their lustrous tapestries of sound, but in their willingness to admit the presence of mistakes, and to reach past them towards beauty regardless. In the latter track, Bjork sings, “On the surface, simplicity, but dark currents beat in me.” It’s an apt description of Vespertine itself, which uses direct songwriting and the overwhelming largesse of orchestras, choirs and Bjork herself to partially - only partially - veil music as complex and fragile as human skin under a microscope.

On loop-finding-jazz-records, Jan Jelinek seems determined to show that mistakes can be beautiful, too - as formally pretty as if they weren’t mistakes at all. If something vital still somehow eludes him, it is because he manages to fulfil his aims so successfully. Glitch’s greatest promise - and one it only occasionally realises - lies in its capacity to achieve a wild humanity: a passionate intractability in the face of the demands of order, like a heart palpitating wildly under the constraints of reason.

Many refer to Vespertine as being merely the most accessible, commercially viable end of glitch as a movement. It is, however, also at the centre of a separate movement, which includes not only the artists at Schematic, but also the warm desire of Herbert and Luomo’s mistake-riddled house music, or the by turns foreboding and heartbreaking techno-pop of Cologne’s Kompakt label. These figures, though divergent in style, share a knowledge that emotions resemble cracked glass more readily than a smooth metallic visage, and that the robot is cut off from humanity most fundamentally in its inability to make mistakes; dissatisfied or impatient with the search for the soul within the machine, they have elected instead to locate its heart.

Tim Finney, 4 December 2001

STICK AROUND – Pulp’s We Love Life

This is a very difficult album to review. This is usually quite a good thing since initially difficult records are usually the most enduring. But Pulp were Laura’s favourite band. In the final stages of her illness one of my stock catchphrases was, “Come on Laura, you’ve got to hang on at least until the Pulp album comes out!” She always laughed at that, and at the time we thought that she might do.

What I cannot fathom is the general media presentation of We Love Life as a “Jarvis-happy/back-to-normal-again” record after the presumed dark night of Hardcore. Lyrically this album is at times as bleak as lyrics can get, and musically…it’s as if Scott Walker took an electron microscope to the band’s little tics and magnified them to telescopic proportions.

You immediately feel the difference right at the start of the opening track “Weeds.” The drums rebound from channel to channel, echoing and resonating with a literally wall-shaking bass reverb. I don’t think I’ve heard drums as loudly and three-dimensionally recorded since Trevor Horn’s early ’80s work. Guitars slash in, making one feel initially that they are trying the Achtung Baby tack. The lyric itself isn’t one of Jarvis’ best, being a rather strained rewrite/remetaphorisation of “Mis-Shapes,” and when the drawled refrain “We’d like to get you out of your mind” comes in, one could almost be listening to Oasis (specifically “Fucking In The Bushes” plus vocals).

I was rather dubious about the whole thing at this stage, but of course should have known better — just as the song is about to climax, it slows right down and segues into “Weeds II (the origin of the species)” where the band moves into another gear which you feel Oasis wouldn’t be able to find. Jarvis does his Barry-White-on-Worthington’s talkover reciting a treatise on weeds which could equally read as self-analysis. “A charming naivety, very short flowering season; no sooner has the first blooming begun than decay sets in.” He then expands on the meaning of “weeds” projecting into cannabis to be consumed at dinner parties and to subsume the original “weeds” back into their proper places. The Swingle Singers hover distantly behind him like a floating citadel.

If “Weeds” is a re-perspectivisation of “Mis-Shapes,” then “The Night that Minnie Timperley Died” is a bookend of sorts to “Sorted For Es & Whizz.” The doomed “beautiful girl” attends a rave-type shindig where her brother is DJing. But here even the pretence of community exposed in “Sorted” has been wrecked. Instead we have “football scarves, the girls drink halves & her brother’s crying ‘cos he has lost his decks.” Needing air, Minnie goes outside where a man offers her a ride. Inevitably murder and/or rape occurs (it’s not made absolutely clear in the lyrics in which sense she “died”) all “‘cos you looked like one of his kids.” Unfortunately the music doesn’t find the invention to animate the lyrics.

“The Trees” I’m slightly ambiguous about. For sure, if Pulp have shot their bolt commercially speaking, the final nail must have been Jarvis’ strangely out-of-tune-can’t-really-be-arsed performance of this song on TOTP. The kids (all there to see S Club 7, Steps and Natalie Imbruglia) couldn’t have but wondered exactly who these daft old buggers were. Lyrically it’s essentially a rewrite of “Whispering Grass,” but although this, as with other songs on the album, purports to be about a breakup, you can’t help but feel, as with Sinatra’s “No One Cares” album, that this goes beyond mere saloon bar lamenting and into something more sinister and/or final. The song does start with Cocker cocking his air-rifle at a magpie, shooting it dead. He then notes “Your skin so pale against the fallen Autumn leaves (another subliminal Sinatra reference) & no-one saw us but the trees.” Is he reminiscing, looking at the deceased magpie or has he stumbled across the body of Minnie Timperley? “You try to shape the world to what you want the world to be. Carving your name a thousand times won’t bring you back to me” (it should be noted that Sinatra left off “Gloomy Sunday” from No One Cares as it was “too damn cheerful”). A driving string riff (sampled from the long-forgotten Tom Courtenay (?) ’60s spy flick “Otley”) certainly keeps the song moving, but Cocker’s vocal is almost determinedly numb throughout (I must admit, the ghastly spectre of the Thompson Twins briefly peeked through the chorus for me). Not the only time on the album where Walker seems intent on reviving 1968 pop to such a degree that you wish he had found a Fairlight compressor to make the job complete (and they still do exist — Geoff Emerick used one on Costello’s Imperial Bedroom). I like the Wyatt-esque organ solo, though.

All of this pales, however, before the astonishing “Wickerman,” the epic centrepiece of this album just as “I Spy” and “Seductive Barry” were the secret hearts beating at the core of the previous two albums. An unthinkable Brit counterpoint to Gillian Welch’s even more phenomenal “I Dream A Highway,” the lyrical concept here is of an Iain Sinclair/Peter Ackroyd-style imagined/actual journey through the course and history of the underground River Porter in Sheffield; detritus recalled and mixed with recollections of Jarvis’ own coming of age while he is clearly reassessing his life as it stands (one clear signpost, where talking about a supposedly legendary suicide viaduct bridge, he intones firmly, “there’s no way you’d get me to jump off that bridge. No chance. Never in a million years.” So even here he is not completely devoid of hope). Then Jarvis goes into a “Night Of The Hunter”-style reverie (”Occasionally catchng a glimpse of the moon, thru’ manhole covers along the route”). Inevitably, at the end of the song time circles in on itself and he considers returning to the source — “I may find you there & float on wherever the river may take me . . . Wherever it wants us to go.” Gillian Welch’s “abandoned boats.” Time becomes an irrelevancy.

Musically the piece is phenomenal; starting off with an almost REM-like guitar motif, it then dramatically expands into slowburning orchestral Technicolor. Now you see why they needed Walker; one incidentally notes the industrial thump/hum which takes the track to an end is the same one which terminated “The Electrician” 23 years previously. A magisterial piece of work.

After that, the title track is a bit of a comedown. A rather ill-advised attempt to rawk out and starting with an uninspired Larkin dilute. The irony of the song is of course double-bolded and double-underlined, so that by the time he squawks the climactic “you’ve got to fight to the death for the right to live your life” (recorded of course before 11 September) in front of a “Kashmir”-type climax, it has kind of made the point more than it really needed to.

A relief, then, to get back to “The Birds in Your Garden,” which is more traditional Pulp and probably would have made a safer first single than the “Trees/Sunrise” double-header. A fine song with an extra beat combo push that ought to put it in alongside forgotten late ’60s pop operatives (the Casuals? Grapefruit? Barry Ryan?), and clearly a deliberate touch of Scott’s, it’s ostensibly a song about taking advantage of life while it’s there — “Take her now. Don’t be scared, it’s alright” — although of course this remains ambiguous, given what we know became of Timperley and knowing that Cocker is a keen shot with an air-rifle (”Cut her off quick,” said the crow — Lanark, Alasdair Gray) — although I think I might be over-exaggerating here and this is simply about a young kid nervous of sex/commitment. Then again, the final line — “Yeah, the birds in your garden, they taught me the words to this song” — well, make of that what you will.

Next comes “Bob Lind — the only way is down)” — the subtitle I think would have sufficed here — beginning with a subtle Hall & Oates lyrical reference. Again, I have to say that musically this is standard, unremarkable Pulp, but the lyrics cut deeply if, like me, you can apply them to the possibility that the partner has not left for a younger man but has left this world for good. The business of coping, the doomed attempts at reconciliation with a not very sympathetic world (”Can I give you all the love I have? — it’s not much but I’ll try & raise a loan”) because the author cannot admit that he is “a fuck-up, like the rest of us.” And the line about “You want someone to screw your brains out; I’d say they’re running out of time & they’d only go & cut themselves on the daggers of your mind. This is your future” — that’s so true. You want to get back to normality somehow, but because the whole business of bereavement floods your mind and you can’t talk about anything else, people will keep a distance from you in fear of impaling upon your problems with the jagged edges of their own.

“I just fell down, could you please help me up? ‘Cos if you help me maybe I could fall in love again.”

Yes.

(Brief diversion: one of the (inadvertently) saddest records I know is “Fastlove” by George Michael. The man who 14 years previously said fuck young marrieds, I want to live/be free, now faces the consequences of such a life, making saddo pick-up attempts in his BMW, soundtracked by an excerpt from “Forget Me Nots” — which was released and charted at the same time as “Wham Rap”)

Next is “Bad Cover Version.” This is not the quasi-Engelbert MoR extravaganza Reynolds claims in his Uncut review, but a replica of ballad form upon which Cocker projects his cynical update of “The Winner Takes It All.” For me, though, the song tries a bit too hard to impress with its faux-cynicism, such that it ends up as a Stuart-Maconie-does-Pulp lyric complete with rather naff comparison points (”a later Tom & Jerry” etc.).

Better is “Roadkill,” a quiet meditation on mortality and the road which could have come straight off that undemonstrative masterpiece of accepted loneliness, East River Pipe’s “The Gasoline Age.” Sad and accepting of his position in life and the realisation that what was is no longer. Dignified like Sinatra’s “Where Do You Go?” is dignified (as indeed would its distant cousin, Lionel Richie’s “Hello” had it not been for That Bloody Video).

The long dark night of the soul ends, as it only can, with “Sunrise.” Initially resentful of the sun rising as he was of the trees, as I sometimes am (why the hell should I have another day to suffer through? I could have gone last night! Better to crawl under the duvet and never come out again). But of course he knows better than this, instinctively, and rises to face the world again. “But you’ve been awake all night,” he concludes, “so why should you crash out at dawn?”

With which he exits the stage and leaves the band and choir to lead him out of the abyss. It powers towards three separate climaxes, as if to say for fuck’s sake don’t go! Stay around! Don’t leave hang on there’s joy and beauty yet people still to meet and to love and stay here don’t desert us don’t kill of what’s left of her in you you need to stay alive for her sake and yeah I’m projecting me onto Jarvis Cocker now but can you really blame me because I respond to what it says and what it says is HANG ON STICK AROUND and you realise he’s talking to you.

“Yet at midnight if here walking,
When the moon sheets wall and tree,
I see forms of old time talking,
Who smile on me.”
(Thomas Hardy, “The House of Hospitalities”)

Marcello Carlin

SECRET PLUNGES – The Other History of Arthur Russell

Cities of the mind: a rather poetic evocation of something many of us have experienced. It’s a peculiarly suburban, peculiarly faux-bohemian teenage phenomenon. Can there be a word more distasteful to the disaffected teenager than suburb? Even the blunt, rounded corners of its stunted syllables seem to invoke a cultural dead-zone preserved in pack-ice, a deracinated mass of consumer stuff, the uniform gray of extruded siding. Of course teenage ennui is deliciously enjoyable — but only in retrospect. In the throes of biological warfare your body has declared on your mind, it’s deadly serious stuff.

Like most teenagers, I spent more time thinking than doing. And mostly what I thought about was getting out of the one-horse town that was obviously Sucking All Potential From My Life By The Minute. But where would I go? To The City of course, a simultaneously sepia-tinged and technicolor wonderland, cobbled together from a lifetime of movie images and snatches of TV, from song lyrics and sound bites: cultural haven, patron of the arts, sinister and glamorous, sprawling and amorous. It was there that my fortune would be made, my genius recognized in its own time, instead of languishing “out here,” one county removed from share croppers.

On some level, it’s not an unreasonable dream. Certain things can only bloom in the hot house of a city’s limits. Van Gogh’s greatest paintings are inseparable from the Arles countryside he briefly called home before his suicide. But the work of Edouard Manet could not have existed without the bar-girls and street lamps of his beloved Paris. Sometimes it just takes that New York-London-Paris-Munich-Tokyo-State-Of-Mind. (Besides, who can begrudge a shy, introverted adolescent — even an insufferably pretentious one — his meager dream of a book lined apartment downtown, where he would sit writing novels about Big Important Themes, for an audience which hadn’t realized that reading was dead or at least coughing up blood?)

Despite myself, I did escape, first to Philadelphia and then eventually to New York. (Less a total leap into the unknown than a puddle jump.) And at first it was just as glamorous and alien and full of living electricity as I imagined. The city is an organism itself, not a host; in many ways, it feeds off of you. And since it, in and of itself, won’t sustain you, you have to create a space for yourself separated from the hustle and bustle. Or it can eat your dreams alive.

I say that to say this: I never knew Arthur Russell personally, only through a handful of biographical articles and his music. I have no idea what drove him to begin playing music, what siren song it used to make him devote his life to it. Perhaps he would have led just as happy a life if he had never left the Iowa of his youth. But I doubt it. His achievements — although they could have never occurred to him as a boy — could not have been realized there. For that, Russell had to get out, first to San Francisco and then to the pan-cultural ferment of late 70s/early 80s New York City.

But even amidst like-minded outcasts and free thinkers in the city, Russell’s vision proved to be too idiosyncratic. Commercial concerns, indifferent audiences, and confused DJs all threatened to dilute him, to render him less than he was. I suspect that, like many creative people, Russell’s essential “otherness” (how else to describe someone who was a true American musical maverick — on par with Captain Beefheart, Harry Partch, and Charles Mingus — who achieved no commercial success in his lifetime) forced him to create the environment he needed out of his work. It was a refuge, to quote his obituary from The Village Voice in 1992, “so personal that it seems as though he simply vanished into his music.”

If he vanished without a trace as it were, who was Arthur Russell? In 1994, Point released Another Thought as a posthumous collection of Russell work. It presented the man as a wracked avant troubadour, alone with his cello. One by one his old associates with name brand value (Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, David Byrne) were trotted out to explain why Russell was a True American Visionary. (Which he was, no doubt. But like many other American Visionaries [Richard Maxfield springs immediately to mind] whose own name brand value equals the number items available for purchase [zero], the prospective record company needs every bit of proselytizing they can muster.)

But how much of this view is manufactured? The recordings collected in Another Thought were the last made by a man who had spent his last few years wrestling with the Sisyphean boulder of AIDS; it’s reductive and far too easy to paint him as a merely a tortured genius, a suffering artist (although that was certainly part of his makeup.) In this light, it could have been titled Only Thought; as the only Russell work still widely available and in print, it does its best to airbrush out a side of Russell the academy might not approve, like photos of Trotsky in a Soviet history book.

The “who” is actually a question with multiple answers, reflecting the often confounding ease with which he moved between genres and scenes. First and foremost, although possibly to his chagrin, he was a classically trained cellist, born in Iowa in 1951. He studied with Indian master musician Ali Akbar Khan in San Francisco, as well as falling into the orbit of Allen Ginsberg. His main endeavor at the time (circa 1973) was a piece entitled “Instrumentals,” which lasted for 48 hours (!), obviously never played in its full form.

Once ensconced in NYC, he would enter the downtown orbit of composer/performers like Rhys Chatham, playing on several important minimalist recordings. In an alternate universe one could have imagined him being drawn to the emergent no wave scene, playing avant-rock cello alongside bands like Chatham’s Meltdown and Glen Branca’s Theoretical Girls. (He briefly played in a group featuring Chatham and David Byrne called the Flying Hearts, and he almost became a member of the Talking Heads.) But twas not to be.

In 1979 discophobia was at its peak; legendary xenophobe and DJ Steve Dahl led his anti-disco hordes in the infamous “Disco Demolition Derby.” The image of rock fans so rabid to destroy a form of music that was “artificial” and “alien” to them would smack of the worst kinds of racism, homophobia, and provincialism today. (And if it wasn’t exactly the “dance der Mussolini” then, it was close enough.) But so it was, throughout the vast sweep between the Appalachians and the Rockies. (And not a few people on the coasts either; Lester Bangs, godfather of all things punk rock, memorably described the music as “dead enough to suggest the end of popular music as anything other than bugspray.”)

CHEAP THRILLS – Peaches Live

Peaches, The Bowery Ballroom NYC, 26 July 2001

Making fun of Peaches is beside the point because she gets it over with immediately, like taking off her clothes. Like her costume, your titters are mostly gone by the first song. The show Peaches put on at Bowery Ballroom that Friday night was not a slow-strip triumph of soft-porn lighting and rehearsal, it was something else. (Maybe that’s why she didn’t open for Madonna as she might have, in another pop time or place.)

“This ain’t no fuckin talk show” after all, as she snarled in “Rock Show”, squatting on a raised upstage platform in red high heels and stockings, whacking a huge imaginary cock, with a similarly visually-absent guitar kicking out a crude and blistering jam that rode the shocked crowd of twenty-something bar-hoppers like a sadistic bareback expert. “You came here for a rock show!” she screamed, alone on stage, singing to a minidisc.

There were famous people there. A photographer I’d never heard of who’s made a name for himself using cheap point-and-shoot cameras for his million-dollar fashion spreads. Somebody said they saw Adam Yauch. The lights went down. An ominously cheap bass line started pounding the walls, and the skin of the place tingled - what would she look like? What would she do? There’s no band fer chrissakes, just a mic stand on an empty stage bathed in magenta light. We were in a frenzy. Where was she? I imagined the perfect Peaches show: the entire show played off her minidisc. No act, no people, no Peaches, just savagely cheap beats and pre-recorded vocals.

But I was at the wrong show for that kind of perfect conceptual cleanliness, which is the ideal form that seamless-mix DJs take, hidden in the shadows of the cave, fleshless tech manipulators. Peaches is about the flesh: the embarrassing reality of the flesh, of ugly instincts you want to imagine away. Out, damn spot! But the blood showed up: Peaches bounded out of the wings, aviator shades in effect, scowling, a walk that was more like a stumble. She mumbled something about “New York City” and lurched into “Set it Off”, the dank thuds of bounce-tempo casio beats driving a big fuzz bassline and the chatter of synthetic hi- hats. The crowd was freaking, desperate to cheer this crazy woman, to validate what? Their sense of kitsch perhaps. The $15 they spent on tickets.

But the shared joke among us - that this woman Peaches is a novelty act, hilarious in theory, or for 3 minutes off a hard drive - was left hanging in shreds by the time she’d got down to her red silk panties for “Rock Show”, which seemed like some performative point of no return. A singer with a fake band. A performer with no moves. A sex symbol who insists on her own ugliness. Peaches reversed something about the crowd. She made us accomplices. She knows about that stain you’re trying to hide.

Moldy Peaches were the opener. They were all wearing costumes that looked like the band had made them about 5 minutes before the show, and they played sort of strummy folkrock songs with kitchen-table pothead lyrics (“we hate dance and we hate rap / but we like to contradict ourselves / that’s our act”) and they drew lots of laughs. “Who’s Got the Crack” was a crowd favorite. Knowing what static lay ahead, the MP’s straight-up irony was oddly comforting. I idly amused myself with thoughts of rushing the stage later on, ripping off my shirt, taking Peaches up on her challenge, to turn a promise into flesh, to turn erotica into porn. Peaches did hop down from the stage at one point. A bouncer appeared out of nowhere, his arms crossed, watching. This is New York after all. No one could see what was happening down front, but after a minute or two the bouncer pulled her up and out of there. “That was fun,” she said. And two girls joined her on stage for “Lovertits”. Some guy showed up for “Rock n Roll” and got bottles chucked at him.

But really, Peaches needed nothing but herself: sometimes not even that. About 3 songs in, a long bass drone slams into the room, the lights go crazy, synth drums pound nonsensically and this stripper with a gut, this junkie Sandra Bernhardt, flips off the whole room, crouching with her mic (having flung the mic stand offstage on the first song) and screams “I don’t give a fuuuuuuuuuck…. I don’t give a fuuuuuuuuuck….” She starts humping the floor, a vocal comes in, clearly Peaches, but she’s not singing. Peaches swings the mic violently around her body, twisting the cord, making herself into a bondage doll. She stuffs the microphone in her bra and sings along to herself. She slides it down her pants and hits it with her hand. She wants to break the tool she uses. Or fuck it. Or abandon it. Or all of the above.

After the inital thrill had worn off, and the cheapness of the entire evening began to dawn on us, the crowd was, understandably, a knot of confused indecision. Laughing was impossible - we had gone well beyond that. Cheering also seemed equally strange - how do we applaud this willfully nasty neglect of performative duties? How do we reward this refusal? And then, finally, the infamous “suckin on my titties” song started up and the entire crowd, enormously thankful for some recognizable shard, some agreed-upon if ill-remembered emotion, sang the chorus with her - “fuck the pain away, fuck the pain away” - fists raised in air, triumphant. It was not.

Elisha Sessions

A Pop Epiphany With Tiffany – Live and In Concert

I never met a diva, and I wasn’t expecting to when I went to see Tiffany’s free concert in the plaza of my university. I don’t know what I was looking for, maybe a fleeting moment of pop perfection, or maybe a chance to see some history before she got sick of the whole thing and decided to get a real job. The crowd was freshmen and sophomores, folks who were barely six years old when “I Think We’re Alone Now” broke. I don’t know what they wanted either.

When Tiffany appeared on stage, she wasn’t the Tiffany of ten years ago — black DNKY tank top, leather pants, backing band straight out of a want ad at The Viper Room. Hair like everyone had it back in ‘98, straight midlength, and very very blatantly dyed red. I wasn’t gonna buy this midnight makeover trend hopping shit. The band confirmed all my worst fears, launching into flood-production-knockoff alt-sludge, all two guitars one bassist, drummer, and keyboardist. This was not synth pop, this was Vertical Horizon, prefab synth-rock. I start sizing up my critical chops — a would be Shirley Manson meets Shania Twain. The marketing plan hits college campuses rather than mall tours, reaching for a slightly older version of the same middle american demographic.

And then Tiffany started to sing. And then she smiled. And… god she seemed so happy.

Through a few songs of this Tiffany gets more adventurous, reaching down to the crowd below and grabbing hands, hugging, and giving occasional asides between verses “hey,” “how’re you,” “alright” et cet. But some pricks are already yelling out for you-know-what song, and there’s a certain edge to the crowd. Tiffany must sense this, because next thing you know she sez “Sing along” and so everyone gets hushed and waits for “I Think We’re Alone Now” but instead, we get “Could Have Been” and a sort of wave of disappointment washes over the crowd. We’re disappointed in ourselves, for not knowing the words, for not reciprocating Tiffany’s magnanimous gesture in giving us her other number one single. But of course the appropriateness is clear — a mournful ballad about a relationship never consummated — like Tiffany herself on stage, waiting for the audience to sing along to words it doesn’t know.

Right then, I’m won over hard. Because being a popstar is a contract.

– Save us, cries the audience — I’ll save you, sez the popstar.

And then all else is forgotten, the audience lets go of everything but their promise of salvation. The popstar transforms into an incarnation of collective need, and we’re all transfigured into a crowd. Not because of the music itself, or the lyrics themselves. Not because of the band or the beat, but because we need to be, and we need an act of unselfish love to free us from our egos. That song was an act of love for me, but from there she launched into you-know-what, and that was the act of love for everyone else.

“Children behave, that’s what they say when we’re together” Tiffany says, and the crowd responds, and we’re pogoing because, ohmygod this is a pop-punk/ska take on the tune, but nobody seems to really notice as the band kicks in and we’re “running just as fast as we can, holding onto one another’s hand” and the chorus comes again and again and again, and the audience is breathless and Tiffany waves the mike at the crowd and we sing to her, and all of us are alone now, together, and none of us are around because we’re all the same. We’ve willed ourself into a fan massive, and we will never go back.

We don’t go back. The rest of the concert is magnificent. I’m screaming with the crowd. It must be showing, because people tell me to go on upfront and touch her. I’m too afraid. We’re there for Tiffany and then the concert finishes. Tiffany sticks around signing autographs for a good two hours. While I’m sticking around I get interviewed by a reporter from a skeezy artsy campus magazine, but I have nothing to say.

He moves on to an older man, who, as it transpires, knows an astonishing amount of Tiffany lore. The older man keeps talking, and it becomes clear that he isn’t quite right in the head. Now the reporter goes in for the kill. The man keeps going, the reporter egging him on. I’ve noticed that he’s stopped filling the notepad. Now this is a personal kick on his part, pushing the fan into greater acts of unknowing self-abasement. A hipster nearby tells his girlfriend “somebody should shut that guy up. I want to punch him.” The fan is describing webpages. The fan is describing a concert from ten years ago. Describing the world peace organization Tiffany founded. “What does Tiffany think of neoliberal politics?” asks the reporter. He’s smirking, the sonofabitch. I want to intervene, but can’t. The fan continues. He describes how Tiffany has threatened to fire managers because of their rudeness to him. How he called her a month ago, and she told him she would always be his guardian. At that moment, he doesn’t seem demented at all, but perfectly sane and honest. It hits me. I couldn’t find the strength of will to step in and save him, but Tiffany could.

I’m struck dumb with this revelation, and nearing the front of the line I see that Tiffany’s makeup hides some significant facial blemishes. A fan is chatting on a cellular phone and Tiffany takes it from him. “Hi? Who’s this? Erica? Hi, Erica, this is Tiffany.” At the front, I give her my two 7″ singles to sign. She’s almost hurt, that she’s moved on but we won’t let her. “Would you like something… newer?” Sure, I get a postcard signed as well. This whole afternoon I’ve been letting her down, but she’s never stopped giving.

Just like that fan, I realize that we all need a Tiffany. That people can construct meaning and approximate the truth with whatever broken materials we’re given, and that perhaps this is as close as I can come to understanding what it means to be human. To find a Tiffany, and to create one if we can’t. And that the truly astonishing magic of humanity is how we find what we need in places where others don’t always think we should.

Now, listening to the new album, “The Color of Silence” I’m hearing stories from a woman who’s learned the same thing. There’s something solid and vital in her voice, something roughly tempered and just slightly worn.

I never met a diva, and I guess I still haven’t. But I have met Tiffany, and right now I think that’s even better.

Sterling Clover

Americana In Pieces

HANNAH MARCUS - Black Hole Sun

INTRODUCTION

I was attracted to this album by a clever letter that Ms. Marcus wrote to Pitchfork, in response to a reviewer who was clearly trying to emulate Richard Meltzer and review albums only by their covers — except that this was hardly a “fuck you” to the major labels, as he was doing it with good product from small, quality, indie labels. Anyway, I knew that I was dealing with a smart and self-aware character, which meant that the album would be interesting if nothing else. But what Black Hole Heaven did was remind me of a genre of music I had given up on, and lend it a new lease on life.

This genre being Americana. And this project, then tying in with the coincidence of much recent thought on “America” (or as Mailer called it, “The Great Bitch” — he called lots of things that, though) also helps me get together my thoughts in a period where I’ve watched numerous westerns, listened to all sorts of early folk, country, and blues, and then just seen Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou, all in a relatively short span of time. (The last, as with all Coen brothers films, telling me nothing new, but throwing all the old stuff into an entertaining mix. Folk culture - social basis + the emptiness of smug artists = epic which is not in past, but rather outside time and meaning altogether?)

And anyway, this is an exercise in methodology — of throwing concepts at an album and seeing which stick, seeing whether I learn about the album, about the concepts, both, or neither.

GENRE

In a general sense, Marcus seems to be approaching post-punk music from a folkie background. This is meant in the sense of adopting an ethos, but using an existing toolset to capture this ethos. Distinct and contrary is the Ani diFranco approach of adopting stylistic measures (hello ska! goodbye contents of my stomach!) while leaving the ethos to rot. Punk is perhaps too limiting a term. We approach what Bakhtin would term “novelization” which is the remaking of genre (in this case folk) and incorporative spirit. Which had at a certain point been the point of all alt-country for me.

As a side note, the term Americana is perhaps more appropriate, because what we are encountering is not counter-Nashville, but almost parallel to Nashville, and perhaps would carry on as it does had Nashville never existed. Americana is more general as well, because it seems to encompass an ethos and attitude towards America, and a self-consciousness of this attitude. DeLillo’s first novel was aptly named Americana for just this reason, as a reworking of traditional narrative device (in this case the search for the self — bildungsroman) over a fragmented and hollow (modernized) social reality.

Returning to topic, at a certain point I felt that the innovative spirit of Americana, dealt with below, had departed for other climes. That there were a certain number of tropes which could be resurrected and reborn, but the general abandonment of forward looking work in favor of endless rehash and reification of tradition had killed the genre. This was compounded by the tendency of this genre to disguise its innovation behind a reclamation of tradition, which left the ever-present danger of tradition swallowing the whole thing back up.

MORE GENERALLY

The nature of art is in constant formal innovation and incorporativity, because the role of art is to challenge abstractions which have been socially reified. In other words, art must move, like a shark, or die. We face in this incorporativity an evolution driven by the relation between structural form and elemental composition. Changes in one drive changes in the other — overall subordinated by the relationship of the work to itself, which is defined by its form. Form in turn is what Bakhtin would term “chronotope” — the resolution of narrative with sequence of time and place — and Bakhtin argues that “chronotope” is the basis of genre. Which would just be a fancy way of saying that art defies genre, except that the deeper analysis lets us describe a particular genre.

So Hannah Marcus’ songs have the structure of folk songs, in the way they capture place and time as static, with the movement of language driving an event already unfolded — retrospective rather than immediate, and with lyrics driving song structure itself, song peaks coinciding with emotionally affective rather than narratively significant points. This chronotopic structure remains in place, thus far. However, the production and stylistic innovations lead to an album-wide arc and cohesion which, if Marcus continues along this path, will have to be reflected on the level of individual songs. This has already begun, approaching dissolution, in the most produced songs, into ambience.

Because a work of art is, by nature, viewed as a unity, the point of innovation is whether the work’s attitude towards itself calls into question the unity of the world it seeks to represent, or whether it, by representing a particular subset of the world, reifies that false unity. Deconstruction fails by asserting the disunity of a work, neglecting the subordination of disjoint elements into an artistic whole, with a consistent overall attitude towards itself, and thus denying the very existence of art as a meaningful term — by bringing disjoint art into a disjoint world, all abstractions cease to be useful.

A World So New

The Avalanches - Since I Left You

It’s summer in Melbourne, and stinking hot. I take solace where I can find it: stealing my sister’s fan any time I can, sculling bottles of juice at three in the morning, and listening to The Avalanches’ Since I Left You almost constantly, because context is everything and I’m determined to have a good time.

And I could end the review right here by telling you that this is what Since I Left You promises: the ability to infuse wonder back into everyday life, to make context where there was none. It’s a rare trick managed by few albums, though off the top of my head I can also think of Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden, Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld and Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. Three wildly divergent albums perhaps, but what they all share is a very unassuming presentation of brilliance that you can drown in or merely let it wash over you as you get on with your life. Call it background music maybe, but instead of it fading into the background, it transforms it. Whatever you plan to do today will turn out differently merely because Since I Left You is playing. Needless to say, I’ve been using this album as medication to stave off depression when going to work.

The listener begins to understand some of the band’s aesthetic on the second track, “Stay Another Season”, which announces itself by stealing the bass and guitar parts from Madonna’s “Holiday” and transforming it into a lazy disco-funk number with Jamaican chanting, before suddenly veering off into an eerie, cavernous dub-groove of minor key piano cadences and horses neighing. The first rule of this album is that everything is sampled (apparently they can reproduce it live, and I’d be fascinated to know how). The second is that just as the listener thinks the band has settled into a comfortable groove, they’ll suddenly flip over to something improbably different. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to “Two Hearts In 3/4 Time” which is divided between old men chanting and whispering “money” , then the sound of guys moaning a waltz of “Ooh yeah/Oh yeah” and then a girl absent-mindedly singing “la la la” over a gorgeous french disco-pop backing Saint Etienne would be proud of, only with a Jaco-like fusionist bassline. Perhaps you could think of this album as DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing with pop aspirations, or Public Enemy’s Fear Of A Black Planet if Public Enemy were camp, or The Beta Band’s self-titled album with production values. Any of these conceptions would be limiting.

It’s plain from the outset that The Avalanches have a love of sound construction, and the unifying theme behind the swirl of styles that pours through the speakers with montage-like rapidity is a desire to let the sounds do the talking. And so, with some exceptions (the Bacharach influenced pop of the title track; the LSD-racked country-blues torchsong of “Tonight Will Have To Last Me For The Rest Of My Life”; the My Bloody Valentine haze of “Extra Kings”), the band generally draw on primarily electronic styles marked by their familiarity with sound itself: house, hip hop and armchair techno reminiscent of Plaid or Boards Of Canada. That list implies a fractured scramble between styles, but the album is in fact made up of one track, and the flow is so natural and unforced that when listening it’s just easier to mentally divide it up between the fast moments and the slow moments. The edges of the genres are blurred as well ≠ the segue from the raggafied bounce hip hop of “This Flight Tonite” (complete with awesome Kraftwerk synthesisers, computer game bleeps and a surprisingly limber sampled breakbeat) to the thumping house of “Close To You” is so cunning that it’s hard to remember that the band is flitting between two distinct styles.

Despite the strong grounding of memorable basslines on most tracks, the band also have a love high, trebly sounds: flutes, clarinets, recorders, strings, harps, xylophones, glockenspiels, sleighbells, synthesisers, computer bleeps, whistles, soprano opera singers and girls’ coos swoop through the mix like butterflies alighting on a melody for a moment, before vanishing in a flutter, only to reappear, nestled among the musical foliage. It gives the album a sparkly, spangly air: the title track opens the album, and is swathed in effervescent harp cascades and Tinkerbell tinkles, and a woman’s breathless gasp of a vocal, “since I left you/I found a world so new!” It sounds not so much like a cry of independence as the excited exclamation of a young traveller writing home. And indeed the whole album could almost be a piece of aural travel writing, a show-and-tell for a band themselves stunned at what they found in the world outside their original minimalist hip hop template.

The intermittent party vibe of the album is largely a result of the group’s incongruous leap into the world of house music. Their take on the style on tracks like “Radio”, “Close To You”, “Diners Only” and “Live At Dominoes” is something like a collaboration between The Beta Band and Basement Jaxx: at once both precise and ramshackle in its messy approximation of house’s sleek groove, and absolutely overburdened with a profusion of sonic detail. “Radio” is a squelchy riot riding on a deathless disco bassline and drenched in wah wah guitar. While the kickdrum keeps pace throughout, it sounds inexact and coincidental, as if a caveman were banging on a giant drum and only happened to be keeping 4/4 time.

“Close To You” and “Diners Only” (really the same track, although they have enough ideas for five) take this amateur-house aesthetic one step further, careening from shimmering flute and computer bleep driven phased disco to a sort of voluptuous swamp-funk of kitchen-sink percussion, latin piano and, bizarrely, jingles from the 50s. Toward the end the flutes flood back in, creating a hypnotic groove spiralling upwards into “A Different Feeling” , a rapturous mixture of a disco string loop and raining video game bleeps that surprises with its sheer unexpected loveliness no matter how prepared I am for its arrival. The album’s centrepiece numerically and emotionally, “A Different Feeling” turns poignant towards the end, easing it into a bittersweet coda of haunting strings and uneasy synthesisers. After constantly building for the first half of the album, The Avalanches now set-up the second for an uneasy comedown in the glorious tradition of Screamadelica.

When he next track, “Electricity”, combines a nasty Sly & Family Stone funk-groove with hauntingly ethereal aria vocals, you know that the spell has been broken, revealing an even wider palette of emotional material for the band to work with. And while there are real highs later on (the comically overblown Bacharach-meets-RZA-meets-turntablism of first single “Frontier Psychiatrist” or the heaven’s breath ambience of “Etoh” being prime examples), the tracks are infused with a sort of nervous knowledge that “this can’t last”, and correspondingly try to work even more ideas into their sonic templates.

It’s difficult to think of many albums as consistently ambitious as this, but this album seems to me to be spiritually in tune with landmark efforts like A.R. Kane’s I and Disco Inferno’s D.I. Go Pop; taking the former’s wide-eyed wonder and the latter’s revolutionary sampling aesthetic, Since I Left You also shares their sense of accidental importance, pointing a hundred different ways forward. Here is an hour’s proof that sampladelica is not a dead concept, an empty corpse left for vultures such as Beck with their post-modern inferiority complexes to pick at for passing value. And best of all it’s the most heartbreaking, eye-opening, pulse-setting, foot-tapping, ear-caressing fun to be had, this summer or any other.

Tim Finney

YOU DO WOO? DO STEAL MY VOODOO

D’Angelo - Voodoo

Love is in the air. Now, as everyone knows, there are two types of love. There’s love and then there’s love. Look at the cover of this album or at the steamy video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” and take a guess as to which one D’Angelo favors.

Did I just say there were two types of love? Well, scratch that, there are more. There is, of course, self-love (no, not that!), which isn’t necessarily bad when kept in moderation. Unfortunately, on parts of Voodoo, D’Angelo becomes overly enamored of his own voice and songs and band.

Far too many reviews of this album, I feel, have delved into just what exactly Voodoo is and how it relates to the record. Personally, I feel that these people are so desperately in seek of a soul savior and upset that Voodoo might not be what they hoped for that they’re trying to distract themselves from the mediocrity of a lot of this album by going on about the “depth” and “mysticism” of it all. So I’m not going to get into all of that; if that sort of thing can be used as justification for you to enjoy this album unequivocally, perhaps my review is not for you.

Here’s the story to date: In 1995, D’Angelo records an album called Brown Sugar that turns what passed for R&B at the time on its ear, has every critic in the country kissing his ass (and rightfully so!), and kicks off a revolution of sorts (one that, if not for Lauryn Hill, would’ve died while waiting for D’Angelo to release a new album). In the time between then and now, he’s released a number of covers on soundtracks and produced one atrocious original for the Space Jam soundtrack. Throw in that the album was delayed countless times and, oh yeah, it took him nigh on FIVE YEARS to finish it and things didn’t look at all propitious.

That brings us up to the present day. It’s a new millennium and D’Angelo has deigned to release a new album. When I first placed it in my player I was glad to see that, at 79 minutes on 13 tracks, it was a long album, at least (since then, I’m not so glad, but more on that later); initially, I had heard that it would be an album of 10 songs and include the song “Devil’s Pie” from the Belly soundtrack, a song I didn’t take to, really (perhaps because it had been so long since I had heard new D’Angelo material and was flabbergasted that that was what it took him 5 years to concoct).

Despite the build-up I’ve given it so far, there are some highpoints on this album, and perhaps that’s what fuels my vitriol for some of the less inspired moments on the album. “Send It On” is a great old-school inspired slow jam reminiscent of Prince’s “Adore.” “One Mo’Gin” exemplifies the type of song he did so well on Brown Sugar: It’s just the man and his organ (ha!) and an undulating bassline that just oozes with sex, though an album filled with this kind of song would show an utter lack of growth.

“Untitled (How Does It Feel)” is the best Prince song of the Millennium (depending on whether or not you thought it began in 2000), sounding like one of his unreleased cuts from the Controversy-era with its raw instrumentation and even rawer emotion. Unfortunately, like the recent output of the former Prince himself, the rest of the album is padded out with monotonous jamming (“Chicken Grease,” as one reviewer put it, “the most anti-social party song ever”) and songs that go on far too long (“The Line.”)

Yes, yes, I know he’s utilizing organic instrumentation, but when, for most of the album, the drummer sounds like a drum machine, what is the point? (Not necessarily a knock against ?love, also the Roots drummer, for when he’s allowed to stretch out on songs like “Spanish Joint” and “Send It On,” he embodies the very best of what this album *could’ve* been.) Essentially, it seems that D’Angelo will win plaudits for trying — well, damn it, I’m sick of people trying. In the immortal words of Yoda, “There is no try, only do.”

The aggravating thing about it is that you know what D’Angelo is capable of, and most of it is not on display here. I, personally, was unable to shake the impersonal feel of this album; one of the reasons why I love Stevie Wonder’s 70s records so much is that he makes you feel like he recorded the album especially for you — Voodoo sounds like a record made by a narcissist.

And yet, much of the album is redeemed when you get to the last track, “Africa.” It is a masterful evocation of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” with its shimmering vibes and backwards guitar. “Africa” has the intimate feeling of Jimi’s classic, but it is just brimming with hope and joy. The placement of this song couldn’t be better as it ends the album on such a high and such an auspicious sign for the future of D’Angelo’s music. The last track on the album signifying a return home, it makes you think that maybe this is just a transition album, bridging the gap between where D’Angelo has been and where he’s going to go. It calls to mind the old saying, “If you want to know your future, take a look at your past.” With a doff of the cap to the motherland, and to innovators past, I’d like to think that D’Angelo is at the beginning of a journey and Voodoo represents that tentative first step.

Fred Solinger

poll example

 Loading ...