what you’d be listening to this weekend if you were 18
Listen to ‘Latitude’ by Kanye and Drake and Lupe.—my son Luke (last night on the phone)
Kanye West with Drake & Lupe Fiasco, “Latitude”
looking back
Today, celebrating our 200th post, we revisit a few favorites.
If I didn’t have kids, would my ears be stuck, forever, on “repeat”?
Here’s something my younger son Luke, who just started college, played for me recently, after first pronouncing it, with quiet but absolute authority, the best thing this guy has done (already Luke’s learned that what’s important isn’t to be right; it’s to seem right).
Lupe Fiasco, “Hip Hop Saved My Life,” live, Los Angeles, 2008
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And here’s a track my older son Alex played for me a couple weeks ago, before heading back to school.
Dirty Projectors, “Stillness Is The Move”
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Koan for aging parents: What is the sound of a childless house?
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How to be both solid and fluid, both fat and delicate. How to make the beat breathe. These are things that, as a child, Philly Joe Jones began to learn while dancing—tap-dancing. Just watch the way Thelonious Monk, listening to this solo, rocks back and forth (1:25-1:50), as if he’s about to break into a little dance himself.
Philly Joe Jones, live (with Thelonious Monk), 1959
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lagniappe
He breathed our history as/his walking beat . . . The Man/So Hip/A City/Took/His/Name.—Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones, in Eulogies [1996])
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The first time I stood before a judge at Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building at 26th and California—this was back in the ’70s (when I was working at Alligator Records)—it was to speak on behalf of this man, Hound Dog Taylor. The day before, during a drunken argument at his apartment, he’d shot his longtime guitarist Brewer Phillips (who survived). In his own way, Hound Dog was a pretty canny guy. When he told me about this incident over the phone, shortly after it happened, he put it this way: “Richard, they say I shot Phillip.”
(No, don’t touch that dial; these stills are way out of focus—which, for Hound Dog, seems just right.)
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Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers, live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973
“Wild About You Baby”
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“Taylor’s Rock”
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“I Held My Baby”
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Here’s Arthur Russell, the “seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songer-writer, cellist, and disco producer” who died in 1992 at the age of 40 (of AIDS-related complications) and is the subject of both a recent documentary, Wild Combination, and a new book, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992.
Arthur Russell
“Get Around To It”
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“You And Me Both”
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“This Is How We Walk on the Moon”
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“That’s Us/Wild Combination”
(Yeah, the fact that I’m posting four tracks by this guy shows how much his music, which I just encountered recently, has been getting under my skin.)
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Here one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century (composer Morton Feldman [1926-1980]) pays homage to another (painter Mark Rothko [1903-1970]).
Morton Feldman, “Rothko Chapel” (composed in 1971; first performed, at Houston’s Rothko Chapel, in 1972)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
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I first heard this guy back in the mid-1970s, after reading a review in the New York Times, by the late Robert Palmer, of his first album, The Gospel Saxophone of Vernard Johnson—and I’ve been listening to him ever since.
Vernard Johnson, saxophone
Live, Texas (Roanoke)
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reading table
Music . . . helped me to go deeper inside myself, to find new things there: the variety which I had vainly sought in life and in travel, yet the longing for which was stirred in me by the surge of sound whose sunlit wavelets came to break at my feet.
—Marcel Proust, The Prisoner (Trans. Carol Clark)
Listen to dreams by j cole—text message from my 18-year-old son Luke
J. Cole (featuring Brandon Hines), “Dreams” (2009)
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commercial for next week’s made-for-TV movie
J.’s got a plan to get the girl of his dreams.
And it just might work—if it doesn’t land him in the electric chair.
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lagniappe
reading table
You can’t tell everyone the truth all the time, and you certainly can’t tell anyone the whole truth, ever, because it would take too long.—Lydia Davis, “Our Trip” (Samuel Johnson Is Indignant)
Listen to “Sunny Day” by Akon and Wyclef.—Luke (my 18-year-old son, on the phone the other night)
Akon with Wyclef Jean, “Sunny Day” (2008)
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One of the things I find intriguing about contemporary popular music is the widespread practice (particularly in hip-hop) of featuring guest artists, usually, it seems, people whose style and approach are very different from one’s own. Implicit in this is the notion that hearing two different musical personalities can make for a more interesting and rewarding experience than hearing just one. And including another artist opens a song up, making it less a fixed, static thing and more a vehicle for improvisation and variation, something subject to different takes, whose content and texture ultimately depend to a large extent on the identity and contributions of the featured guest.
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My son called from Minnesota the other day to tell me that the weather was terrible, his car had been towed, he didn’t like his job, and he had a cold and a sore throat. Is it bad that the only motherly advice I could think to give him was to listen to Fats Waller [2/9/10]?
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The drummer’s comments were great [Brian Blade, 2/13/10]. You layin’ down a pretty good groove your own self, Richard.
What will 18-year-olds be listening to this week?
Here’s one take on that.
check out the new lupe
—Luke (email)
Lupe Fiasco, “I’m Beamin” (2010)
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Only in America
Lupe blogged last week about the passing of 87-year-old historian Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States), posting a photo of the two of them—Messrs. Zinn and Fiasco—together.
What’s old is new again.
Talib Kweli & Hi-Tek, “Memories Live” (2000; sampling Ann Peebles, “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” 1973 [yesterday’s post])
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mail
Very cool! [DeLois Barrett Campbell and the Barrett Sisters, 1/3/10]
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Great clip! Enjoyed seeing Jack Paar, too, and loved the way the camera eased back to show the drummer at work with the brushes. [Blossom Dearie, 1/7/10]
“Hey, Dad, listen to this . . .”—my 18-year-old son Luke
Mr. J. Medeiros, “Constance”
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wow, somehow i did not know Tommy Johnson [12/16/09], just fine. Luke’s guy [Passion Pit, 12/15/09] was good too.
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Responding a couple days late to your Passion Pit [12/15/09] posting. I was first exposed to Passion Pit last year when my son . . . wrote a paper on the role of bloggers in the distribution of music. He tracked Passion Pit’s hits on My Space in relation to hits on a well-respected music blogger, Stereogum, and a music blogging compilation Hype Machine. Although he started off on the premise that the blogs and internet distribution of music was a new and democratic form of distribution of music, I believe he ended up concluding that the music blogs were just another way to exploit artists. . . . I do not recall all of the details, but there appeared to be a number of examples where a music blog became successful (lots of hits – I couldn’t believe how may, like hundreds of thousands) off of the free distribution of music by up and coming bands. Then the blog was bought out and/or funded by one of the large music/entertainment conglomerates without anything going to the artists.
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i think feldman [12/5/09, 11/7/09] is the discovery i’ve enjoyed most thru your clips (which i consistently enjoy, but much of the other music i know). i played him for my students during the 3-week term, along with an Eno video installation and Malick’s Days of Heaven (still my favorite movie ever). it made for an interesting contrast between the few who appreciated such work and the many who were bored/nervous/offended because “nothing happens.”
Albino rapper from Minneapolis: sound like the setup for a joke?
Brother Ali, “Take Me Home”
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Brother Ali on growing up in hip-hop
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On SXSW, etc.
Want more? Here.
Saturday morning, driving down to Champaign-Urbana to visit my younger son Luke (Dads’ Weekend at the U of I), when the radio signal on Scott Simon’s NPR show started to fade (interviews this week with Wes Anderson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), I took out this CD and slid it into the dashboard player—something Luke gave me, a couple years ago, for Christmas.
Wyclef Jean, Carnival II: Memoirs of an Immigrant (2007)
“Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)” (with Akon and Lil Wayne)
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“Any Other Day” (with Norah Jones)
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“Fast Car” (with Paul Simon)
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A native of Haiti, WJ established a foundation to provide aid to the people of that country, which can be found here.
Haiti is my native country, one I know as the first black nation to gain independence in 1804. Most other people seem to know Haiti only by the statistics about how bad things are there. The majority of its 8 million residents live on less than $1 per day. Unemployment is close to 80 percent, and more than half the population is under 21 years old. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
I have been spending a lot of time talking with people in my native country to try and understand what is behind these statistics and the past escalation of violence, all of which brings tears to my eyes. I have had conversations with gang leaders, met with the police officers and sat down with the leaders of the militias and the army. I have talked with Haitians from all walks of life, all colors of skin, all backgrounds and beliefs. From all these people I hear only one thing in my head and feel only one thing in my heart–that there is only one Haiti. Every Haitian loves their country like a mother loves her child.
I see old women with large bags of rice on their heads and men on street corners selling sugarcane and mangos, all just trying to survive with a strong sense of pride. Walking past a church in my village, I hear the congregation singing an appeal to God to hear their cries and grant deliverance to Haiti. Through experiences like this, I sense where my mother and my father got their strength. Now the whole country needs to reach deep into the spirit and strength that is part of our heritage.
The objective of [my foundation] Yéle Haiti is to restore pride and a reason to hope, and for the whole country to regain the deep spirit and force that is part of our heritage.—Wyclef Jean
This guy’s music opened up for me once I started to think of him as a percussionist whose instrument happens to be his voice.
MC Busdriver with Kneebody, “Gun Control,” live, Los Angeles, 2008
(Here’s a shout-out to Rachael Zalutsky—the 20-something woman who cuts my hair [while we talk about music, among other things]—who first told me about MCB.)
music clip of the day 