This Week in Jams: Dakota to Decatur edition

Patty Griffin ft. Robert Plant.  “Ohio” from American Kid.  New West, 2013.

Heavily atmospheric Americana built on guitar harmonics, deep drum patterns and buzzsaw bass, this is folk music via Jesus and Mary Chain, bhangra via the Appalachian Trail.  The opening notes of the song flow like the Ohio River of the title, accompanied by clicking rhythms like a chorus of crickets at nightfall.  Patty Griffin’s voice is at once angelic and worn as she evokes a summery scene of star-crossed lovers, faces lit by moonlight and fireflies, half-hidden beneath the branches of an old oak tree.   Maybe the most beautiful new song of the summer.

Lorde.  “Royals” from The Love Club EP.  Universal, 2012.

It’s no wonder that Lorde’s first big US single features the teen songwriter telling us she can “be our ruler/you can call me Queen B”, as her story really does read like a fairytale.  She was signed to Universal on the strength of a high-school talent show video, has toured all over her native New Zealand and Australia, and released an EP that could easily produce four top 40 radio singles –all this and she’s SIXTEEN years old.  The Love Club EP sounds great, wedding some of the youthful energy of Ke$ha with the moody sonic palette of The XX, but the strength is in pop outsider Lorde’s refreshing lyrics, like the arresting chorus of “Royals”:

Gold teeth, grey goose, dripping in the bathroom.  Blood stains, ball gowns, trashing a hotel room.  We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams.  Krystal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece, jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash, we don’t care.  We aren’t caught up in your love affair.

All the tropes of a Ricky Rosé song, turned on their head and turned into an exhortation to get your damn priorities straight.  That’s gangsta.

Robin Thicke ft. Pharrell and T.I..  “Blurred Lines” from

Being seduced by Robin Thicke just sounds so nice.  Even when he’s trying to be a bit dirty, he’s just a little sweetheart — I mean, look at those baby blue eyes!  The video is clutch, just Robin, T.I. and Pharell vamping and being really goofy with a bunch of models, climaxing with a inflatable sculpture informing us that “Robin Thicke has a Big D”.

By the way, when did Robin Thicke infiltrate every aspect of music culture?  It’s like one minute he’s fishing in upper Saskatchewan with Jason Seaver, and the next he’s writing every good pop song of the 00s, singing the chorus on perhaps the greatest Lil’ Wayne track, and guest coaching on The Voice.  #thicke indeed.

 

 

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This Week in Jams: But Everyone Just Calls Me Giorgio Edition

Without question the big news in pop this week has been the release of Daft Punk’s new album Random Access Memories, their first LP in 8 years (excluding the Tron: Legacy score).  A lot of folks I respect seem to agree with Sasha Frere-Jones’ review in the New Yorker.  I definitely think Frere-Jones nailed the key fact about the album: in turning away from largely sample-based compositions in favor of almost all live instrumentation for this record, Daft Punk is engaging in a form of musical archaelogy, reconstructing the very albums which they had been sampling in the first place.  Random Access Memories is a beautiful, abstract disco album, reconfiguring the language of early 80s disco and dance music into a satisfying meditative chug.  I am afraid that many people who got turned onto Daft Punk by their more energetic EDM album Discovery or their blockbuster Alive tour will be turned off by this more ambient album which borrows from such unsexy influences as Phil Collins, Alan Parsons Project, Hall & Oates, and of course early Eurodance producers such as Gary Numan and Giorgio Moroder.

The track that I keep coming back to, and I think the key to understanding the whole album, is the nine minute centerpiece, “Giorgio by Moroder,” which begins with a short narrative by Mr. Giovanni Giorgio himself about how he got his start in the German discotheque scene of the early 70s.  It focuses on the moment when Giorgio combined a click track with a modular synthesizer and somewhat inadvertently introduced one of the two most influential techniques in late-2oth/21st century music — the other being the sampling and record scratching that was being developed around the same time in Jamaica and the Bronx.

From there, the song veers off, first into a long baroque-inspired synthesizer solo, then gradually bringing in more and more elements, including breakbeats, arena-rock guitars, and strings, and eventually reaching a cacophonic crescendo that resembles nothing so much as Trans-Siberian Orchestra.  Although this may actually be the *least* old-school disco song on the whole record, by starting with Giorgio and then sort of telling the story of the development of electronic dance music through the rest of the song, “Giorgio by Moroder” really places Random Access Memories in the context of the Euro/Italo disco tradition, which has lately been championed by such acts as College, Chromatics, Glass Candy and Sally Shapiro.  What is surprising, to everyone, is how well that old ZYX Records sound has aged, and how rich of an artistic palette it has proven to be.  Disco is Dead, Long Live Disco.

Kanye West premiered two songs from his upcoming Yeezus album on this past week’s SNL.  I was very surprised by the songs themselves and especially, aspects of their performance.  Kanye incorporated many elements from noise music, riding some of the sames vibes that Death Grips has been pioneering, and, although Kanye has always been somewhat outspoken about the plight of the poor and black, these two tracks contain his most radicalized lyrics yet.  One strain of criticism of these performances is that Kanye has once again gone too far, letting his own sense of his own genius get in the way of making listenable music.  The performances, featuring projected images of barking dogs and price tags and featuring quite a bit of screaming, were alienating and, for many viewers, pretentious.

I’m not going to go along with the narrative that Kanye has become too arrogant or elitist and he’s just dissing his own fanbase now.  I would rather celebrate the Narrative that ‘Ye has consistently pushed not just rap but popular music further and further, especially in the second half of his highly productive career.  College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation are great albums laden with good beats and tracks that will remain perennial favorites, but all three of those straight-forward studio rap albums are dead-boring compared to the emoting synths on 808s and Heartbreak, the operatic science fiction of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, or the hyper-aggressive punk’n’DUBlic production style of Watch the Throne.

So whether these two tracks are particularly entertaining or popular in their own right (I think “Black Skinhead” has a lot of potential and I look forward to hearing a studio version) is really beside the point for me.  I continue to applaud Kanye for what he’s doing, shining a spotlight on the hypocrisy of wealth and fame even as he acknowledges that he may be the biggest hypocrite of all.  But honey, it aint trickin’ if you got it.

I’m curious to hear from some country radio listeners out there — are Florida Georgia Line as much the poster child for capital “P” Pop Country as Nelly is (or was?) for Pop Rap?  Whatever, I don’t really care if these guys have “cred” or not, this song is super catchy and it got me to listen to their whole album Here’s To The Good Times, which came out back in December but has definitely earned a place near the top of my summer car stereo playlist.  I actually like the Un-Nellified version of the track better, but I’m glad this version is all over the radio to let people know that a hip-hop/country collaboration can work out a lot better than “Accidental Racist.”  Now I’m off to throw a lift-kit on my Kia Soul and find some mud to drive around in.

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