Comments on: #12: Every word seemed to date her https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/12-every-word-seemed-to-date-her Lollards in the high church of low culture Sat, 12 Sep 2020 12:03:48 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 By: koganbot https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2020/09/12-every-word-seemed-to-date-her/comment-page-1#comment-2465688 Sat, 12 Sep 2020 12:03:48 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=32592#comment-2465688 Been looking forward to getting to this writeup ’cause I wanted to see how you were rationalizing Manu Chao as “roots” or “Americana”; “the poll being what it is” is more accurate than “rootsy,” which though for all I know* may describe Chao at times, it sure doesn’t describe this song or the album it comes from. I’d categorize him as post-Clash indie-alternative and I associated him in my mind with Rancid or the Latin American rockeros or, well, Joe Strummer. And to the extent that that category often comes with a useful sense of history, I’d say either of the two Strummer songs better exemplify it. Actually, swapping one of those for the Manu Chao might have worked.

I hate the terms “roots” and “Americana” but you didn’t invent them, you’re just stuck with them, and I can imagine you retorting “What else can I call it?” I wager you’re plenty uncomfortable with them yourself. But anyway, a lot of the old and quasi-old material that “roots” music draws on was in its time experimental and about displacement, not rootedness – and that was exactly its appeal to performers like the Yardbirds or Dylan or the Holy Modal Rounders, who were restless and discontent themselves.**

When I heard Taylor Swift’s excellent and fucked-up “Look What You Made Me Do” I said, “Yeah, I never got over junior high school either.” So you could say that the origin experience of being bullied and losing my sense of place is part of the rich soil that nurtures people like me and Taylor – and if that were one of the shades of meaning that adhered to the word “roots,” then maybe I’d find the word usable. I once took someone I’d known in high school to Max’s Kansas City, and listening to the piped-in music she said, “This sounds like junior high but more intense.” “96 Tears” is my roots in the sense that I hated it and the way Question Mark said “cry” upset me so much it practically made me nauseous. But I came to see it and that time as crucial, fecund. (First song to ever be called “punk rock,” fwiw.)

But the word “roots” now has a sepia tone that can’t be scrubbed away. I can imagine Gillian Welch agreeing with what I’ve written so far, but she makes Starbucks music that can’t shed the tone which makes me underrate her I’m sure, and maybe there’s a sense in which she’s playing off of rather than capitulating to the staid singing, but I’m stuck in the staidness.

*Strange that I don’t know better, since I loved the album enough to put it ahead of Love And Theft on my Pazz & Jop; think I was disappointed by Chao’s followup and didn’t have the time or money to look back or forward in his catalog, and I should make up for that now because this track is head and shoulders above anything else in the bracket and it’s not even the best version of its melody on the album.

**I expand on this a little bit in this old Voice article. Go here and search “blip-hop”. Btw, the one thing in the 2001 poll that has anything like a blues form is the 8-bar pattern that Dre, Storch, and Elizondo came up with for Eve & Gwen’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.”

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