Not to be confused with this "Serendipity", which everyone has decided is crap.
Driving home today, I heard the following on the radio.
That's Sly and the Family Stone's "Hot Fun In The Summertime" from 1969. A fantastic song for a summer day like today. Hearing Sly Stone is usually a great experience and I highly recommend it.
As I was listening to the chorus, the encyclopedia of pop music in my head was cross referenced to the volume "L":
That's Led Zeppelin's "Fool in the Rain" from 1979's In Through the Out Door. Strikingly similar? You betcha...and I can guarantee those English blokes had heard a Sly record or two by the late 1970s.
As the Family Stone continued another volume of my inner encyclopedia of pop music was brought down from the shelf...Volume "G":
That's Genesis' "Misunderstanding" from 1980's Duke. No hiding here...more English blokes, led by a drummer (Phil Collins), taking liberally from an English band with a pretty damn famous English drummer (John Bonham of Led Zeppelin), who took liberally from a pretty damn famous American band (and really, who made a career out of 'taking liberally' from anyone and everyone who wrote a song and didn't become famous for it). I think serendipity might be out on this one.
Then there's this piece to the puzzle:
That's Toto's "Hold the Line" from 1979's Toto. As far as it fitting into the lineage (before Genesis), here's what Toto's famous drummer (Jeff Porcaro) had to say: That was me trying to play like Sly Stone's original drummer, Greg Errico, who played drums on "Hot Fun In The Summertime." The hi-hat is doing triplets, the snare drum is playing 2 and 4 backbeats, and the bass drum is on 1 and the & of 2. That 8th note on the second beat is an 8th-note triplet feel, pushed. When we did the tune, I said, "Gee, this is going to be a heavy four-on-the-floor rocker, but we want a Sly groove." The triplet groove of the tune was David's writing. It was taking the Sly groove and meshing it with a harder rock caveman approach - from Modern Drummer Magazine, 1988
So, I can further guarantee that Genesis knew of Toto (since they were a band made up of very famous, very employed session players that got together to lay down all-too-perfect music of their own), and just ripped them off too.
Nothing against Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford, and Tony Banks, mind you, I like "Invisible Touch" as much as the next guy...I'm just hoping Sly got his props.
Jacques Derrida - the father of deconstructionism, is probably not interested in how I apply it to Hip-Hop.
As the title indicates, Hip-Hop is a very important art-form for most of us that came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. It was the first truly 'new' form of music in some time for America, and it came with an entire cultural artistry (in graffiti, b-boying, and DJing) that was particularly American. That it was thought to be a 'fad' (much in the way rock n' roll was deemed a fad) is further evidence that it was something 'new', though it could be technically classified as 100% derivative. I distinctly remember watching Run DMC and Aerosmith perform on the MTV Music Awards back in '85 or '86, and my father saying, "What is this? This won't be around for long." Such was the feeling for this new art form.
Some things in hip-hop were a fad, thankfully.
With that argument firmly in place, and the notion that there can be something new even when largely derivative, I bring you a tale of how I learned a ton about important music, that up to that time was probably going to be forgotten by my generation, and especially my generation that also happened to be white kids.
To wit: Hip Hop DJs take 4 - 8 bar loops from 2 copies of the same record and turn them into songs. Thanks to Kool Herc and his progeny (Grandmaster Flash, Jazzy Jay, et al.),
DJ Kool Herc - he invented the technique of using two copies of the same record to extend the break. As a result, Lil' Wayne and Rick Ross have an outlet to make music.
this "merry go round" effect turned a DJ into an instrumentalist, a technique of dancing into an alternative for gang fights, and an MC into a party-rocker and cultural historian. [Author's note: For a better history of how all this fits together, I recommend Can't Stop, Won't Stop by Jeff Chang, as I cannot begin to tell the tale as well or in this limited space.]
He may be no Howard Zinn, but Flav's a cultural historian nonetheless.
After this technique of looping parts of other songs to make new songs caught on (deconstruction here we come), a new piece of equipment made it all the more easier...the sampler. With the sampler, DJs cum producers could now loop their favorite parts of James Brown's music (it was all JB back then) and make records. A new appreciation for old records then came from this, as one can only loop "Funky Drummer" about 100 times before people start catching on, so crate digging became a new art form in itself.
Clyde Stubblefield - JB's Funky Drummer. Progenitor of the funkiest 8 bars of modern music.
This is where we get to me...growing up listening to these hip-hop inventions, starting to play drums myself, I got very interested in these songs. In particular, when I bought my first 'rap tape', I would pour over the liner notes to see where these guys got their ideas. I kept coming across the same thing:
"Contains a sample of ..."
I think I had some vague notion that these records were made from other records (I knew James Brown when I heard it, even at 10 years old), but I had never heard of these people: George Clinton, Pee Wee Ellis, Fred Wesley, Parliament, Funkadelic, Parliament-Funkadelic, Bob James, David Axelrod, The Winstons, etc. I had a desire to hear the songs that these rap records were sampling, where the impetus for this new music was coming from, because it was unlike anything I had ever heard. As a result, I did some digging of my own...I remember purchasing "The Bomb: Parliament's Greatest Hits" on cassette at Camelot Music in, like, 1991. From that point on I was a different person. I didn't know anything about the craziness of P-Funk (as there was no internet to look that stuff up on), but I knew they made some great music that I wanted to hear more of, since it contributed to the music I was currently listening to. Imagine if a 7th grader told you they really liked Parliament and Public Enemy. That was me.
Typical, yet somewhat tame, cover art for Parliament-Funkadelic. Should a 7th-grader know what this is?
So this sort of "reverse deconstruction" continued...if I heard a new song that I liked, I knew it probably came from somewhere else, so I would try my best to track that down. I was taking a Hip-Hop song that had deconstructed a number of other songs into 4 bar loops, and reversing the process to find out where this "new" song originated. As a result, I learned a lot about funk and soul music in America, and really a lot about producers and DJs in Hip-Hop, given that these records were in their collections. I also gained an appreciation for the ingenuity involved in the production of these songs. They would take the drums from one break, the bass line from another song, the melody from another, and put it together to make a new work altogether. Some people don't see the art in this, or they think that it's easy, but I have the utmost respect for it - imagine the intimate knowledge these folks have with the music out there. It's staggering. Once the internet showed up, and Napster (shout out to the 90s indeed...) this task was much easier. Also, DJs were getting deeper in their own digging, and the art form was pushed further. (see DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing..." and "Private Press" for some great examples of this).
So what does that have to do with today's post? A little "sample example" of my own:
Ghostface Killah - Shakey Dog (from Fishscale)
First of all, this song kicks ass. Second, it is largely "I Can Sing a Rainbow/Love is Blue" by Johnny Johnson.Now I had never heard this particularly hard-hitting piece of soul music, but it came from here, and didn't start out all that hard-hitting:
Vicky Leandros (performing as "Vicky") - the first recording of "L'Amour est Bleu"
After that gem, it was covered by Paul Mauriat, a French orchestra leader and "easy listening specialist". His version was wildly popular and actually hit number 1 in America, still remaining the only French artist to do so (sorry, Daft Punk).
Although Vicky also recorded an English language version, when you search "Love is Blue" on Youtube, you'll invariably get this Al Martino version. As you can see, it takes liberally from the Mauriat arrangement...
Al Martino - Love is Blue...this is the guy that played Johnny Fontane in The Godfather:
"There's too much goddamn harpsichord in that song!" - Vito Corleone to Johnny Fontane
Now, the "I Can Sing a Rainbow Part" doesn't come in until "Love is Blue" starts getting covered by soul acts...according to wikipedia (forgive me), "Rainbow" is a children's song by Arthur Hamilton used to teach children their colors (though not all colors are represented). Thanks, wikipedia. Here's a terrible version of it:
So, let's put these two together, eh? I mean, they both deal with colors, they both seem to be in the same key, how ironic? This is where it starts to hit a little harder...The Dells put the two together and made it a much more lamentable and heart-aching sort of number...and it broke into the top 30 in 1969.
Then we get to Johnny Johnson's version from 1970, arguably the best and by far the hardest. I mean, you can just hear the pain and suffering in ol' JJ's voice. Further, it's as if all the musicians are feeling it, too, as it just sounds SO aggressive! Then there's the note that Johnson holds out for 25 counts towards the end of the song. Shit.
So, Johnny keeps some of all the elements in the chronology: Vicky and Mauriat's acoustic guitar; but axes others: the Mauriat harpsichord, sings better than that kid songs bullshit, and does the Dells one better in terms of darkening up the tone of the song and really making it about heartache and loss. This is more of a re-construction than de-construction, but in the hands of Ghostface Killah, the de-construction is completed into a new song.
The title of this post is "Genius at Work", and it in no way reflects the author, but people the author considers genius.
There's something about people that produce great things (whether they be works of art, music, literature, etc.) that I find completely compelling. In fact, I have no problem DVR-ing an hour-long documentary about the making of the Sydney Opera House (Jorn Utzen you clever bastard!) or full length features on the evolution of 8-track recording (about that rapscallion Tom Dowd, see "Tom Dowd and the Language of Music") or the making of Duran Duran's Rio on VH1 Classic.
Duran Duran: Genius comes a-yachtin'.
What intrigues me about these endeavors is the process involved. We look at something like the finished product of the Sydney Opera House, for example, and we see a cool looking building with some spheres and cones and shit. Pretty sweet. But what's more interesting to me, is how in the hell:
1. They came to that design. 2. They actually made it!
The Sydney Opera House, which its architect has never seen in person.
I think we take for granted the process of execution when we see the finished product. I don't have to be a world-famous (or relatively obscure) architect to appreciate how f***in' hard it must have been to create those spheres out of concrete, put them up, and make sure the building didn't crash down around them!
So, yeah, I'd say that's pretty genius. Now, that's genius by committee, but still pretty bad ass.
The same can be said for the way I approach music. Now, this is not to say that all musical endeavors are genius (see Michael Bolton, The Jonas Brothers, and Soulja Boy), but there are some that certainly are.
Now, it seems rather innocuous on its surface, as a lot of Beach Boys' songs do, but I ran across this, and it helped further embed Brian Wilson as a genius of popular music and music production. Take a look:
Listening to Brian Wilson direct that assemblage of studio musicians (that's the "Wrecking Crew" who played on just about every song that came out of LA in the 60s/70s) I am blown away at how he can put those layers together. Keep in mind that this is also 1966. At most they had 8 tracks (if Tommy Dowd was there, see supra note), but they probably had 4. So, they had to have all the music played live, no room for overdubs, no individual tracks to punch in and out of, and according to [*ahem*] Wikipedia, it only took 21 takes...pretty amazing. Then you've got the tight harmonies of the vocals, that blend with that overall production. It really is amazing (and this is before The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, too, an album that everyone tried to replicate once it came out in 1967...yet that album and Pet Sounds, from which "Wouldn't It Be Nice" comes, sound like peers).
My appreciation for it skyrocketed once I saw/heard the process of recording. There is so much value to the end product that is not seen because the end product is so good! The process is invisible, and you're left with a work of art. Also, I find this stuff incredibly interesting. To see Brian Wilson's process is to peer inside of his creative mind a bit. Obviously, he's not the best communicator, but the ends justify the means here, for sure.
I also think the construction of the song itself is pretty genius. To me, as is said in that short tube YouTube documentary above, it's "a happy song about not getting what you want". That's pretty apt. And pretty genius. Brian Wilson wrote a song that could come across happy, and yet be pretty depressing when you look at it through that lens.
Robert Smith of The Cure did not invent 'happy to be sad', after all.
That's how I've always viewed the song. Though, in my frame of reference, I don't even think it's all that happy.
Wouldn't it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn't have to wait so long, And wouldn't it be nice to live together, in the kind of world where we belong?
That's not really that "happy" of a sentiment, you know? It's framed by the "Wouldn't it", which really makes it a song that laments the current state of the singer, while couching it within an upbeat context. He's saying, it's not great or nice right now, but wouldn't it be if the following things happened? Really, it's no different than the lamentations of say, "Somewhere Over The Rainbow", "I'll Follow the Sun" by The Beatles, or "I Wish" by Skee-Lo.
Skee-Lo probably wishes he had 8 'D' batteries.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could wake up, in the morning when the day is new, And after having spent the day together, hold each other close the whole night through?
Ouch. That right there is heart-wrenching, isn't it? I mean, if you've ever loved and lost (author's note: check that box, 'yes'), then this is a kick-in-the-stomach kind of line.When you find yourself in that category of people then that's how you feel: it would be nice to do those things, but they are past. So this can also be read as a lamentation of the past, when things were better, and you wish you could return to them (see also, "I Wish" by Stevie Wonder,and "Glory Days" by Bruce Springstein). And yet the music remains pretty happy throughout. Damn you Wilson!
5 out of 5 experts agree: getting dumped feels like this.
Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true, Baby then there wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do We could be married And then we'd be happy
Wouldn't it be nice?
Again, taken from the perspective of the singer that wants these things but can't have them, or has lost them along the way, this takes us further down the spiral of depression.He says "maybe if we wish and think and hope and pray"...so he's trying to be positive about the possibility of all these future things out of reach that might make him happy, yet he really can't bet on it. How true is that, Brian Wilson?
And again, it closes out with "wouldn't it be nice", which is a question, not an answer to all the problems the singer has presented us with throughout the song. Does the person he's singing about know he feels this way? Does that person want these things, too? Does the singer even want them, or is it just a comfortable nostalgia for a relationship that never was? At the end of the song, there isn't an answer to Brian Wilson's question; we don't know if it "would be nice". We think it would, but instead of answering definitively, he just lets it linger.
I'd call that genius.
Further proof of the powerful juxtapositioning this song can provide can be seen in Michael Moore's film, Roger & Me, a fantastic little piece about my depressing hometown of Flint, Michigan. Seen in the clip below is Ben Hamper, an auto worker who had a bit of nervous breakdown the day he lost his job and heard "Wouldn't It Be Nice" on the radio on the way home. He recounts a bit of the story below, and then Moore uses that to jump into a montage about the Flint of 1985. Check it out:
So, yeah, that's kind of what the song embodies for me, too: a lost ideal that we will still hold on to, even when everything around us begs us to question the ideal's very existence. But for me, I believe it does exist - and it would be nice.
I was inspired to write this after my latest trip to the mall. And by 'latest' trip to the mall I think I could mean 'last' trip to the mall. Especially on a Saturday. Where do all the worst things in American culture coalesce?
The mall.
Anyway, this is what I saw, and I am compelled to say something about it:
The Vibram Fivefingers.Do you want everyone to know you're a douchebag? We can help.
Dear America, Please don't wear these out. Please don't wear these while shopping. In fact, just don't wear them at all. I think it's fair to say that there is an assumption that goes along with seeing someone wear these in public: that person can't dress themselves. That, and: that person has $79.99 to waste on something that makes them appear to dress like a 4th grader.
In this instance, it was a 16 year-old girl wearing them, and they were white, but still, have some self-respect. For some reason they remind me of the Terminators from Terminator 2...not sure, maybe it's that they kind of create an exoskeleton for humans, that is a little too 'endo'-skeleton to be a serious fashion trend. I don't know, maybe I'm putting too much on it.
I did check out the "FAQ" on their website though, and it was enlightening:
CAN I WEAR FIVEFINGERS IF I HAVE WEBBED TOES OR SYNDACTYLY? Unfortunately the design of FiveFingers does not accommodate webbed toes or Syndactyly. We are unable to make custom FiveFingers to fit specific foot needs.
Man, that sucks for those with webbed toes or whatever-the-hell Syndactyly is. You'd really think that if Vibram wanted to be all things to all people (read: feet) they would have figured this out.
Oh, that's syndactyly.
So, in closing, you don't look cool if you wear these to the mall. In fact, there's already a certain amount of personal shame when you go to the mall anyway, so don't multiply it by wearing a sporty exoskeleton on your foot.
