Lists, memes, Necks and postpunk articulations

Not sure if anyone visits here, but in case someone pokes their head around the door for a quick look - and listen - there are some posts on musical matters over at the blog that I give most of my procastinating time to -eurhythmania

audio meme

One of them tag games that gets passed around - name current 7 favourite songs. I've put u-tube links up for most of these.

a couple of long necks

Sydney experimental trio have some live performances available for downloading - free. Post-fordist improvisation that moves me to purple prose and widely extravagant interpretations. Better to have a listen or even go and see them if you get the chance. 'Nuff said!

independents day
A poll of Australian independent Record Label releases currently being taken, which will be announced 4 July 2008. Ironic much! The short-list is heavily slanted toward the golden age of Independent records: 1980s to mid 1990s. Excellent.
&

Christos Tsiolkas and post-punk
Tsiolkas is a brave and ferocious writer of fiction. His debut novel Loaded is one that features in the thesis I should be working on now rather than writing this up for fuck knows who. This post links to a talk he gave at the recent Sydney Writers' Festival on the theme of influences, of which he mentions postpunk music of the 1980s. Go Christos!

"Dude.

Meeting over."

- Anthony Junior to Meadow Soprano after dropping one.
The Sopranos

Notes on sociology of musical form and rhythm

from Bill Martin Avant rock: experimental music from the Beatles to Bjork, Open Court: Chicago. 2002

In the first half of the twentieth century, a good deal of ink was spilled in comparisons of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Indeed, there is a dynamic to this comparison that describes well what happens when traditions seem on the verge of exhaustion. Schoenberg was extolled by Theodore Ardono for his systematic deconstruction of tonality, while Stravinsky was sometimes denigrated for his expressivism and exoticism. . . Schoenberg's move to the dodecaphonic (twelve-note) system can be seen as the next step in the progression from the extreme chromaticism of Mahler. . . In some sense Stravinsky, who comes after Mahler . . . instead of asking what the next step was for "the scale" and for harmony, asked what this "scale" was all about, anyway [:] a desire to be liberated from Western tonality altogether. [9-10]

[P]art of what came out of the attack on "the scale," and the concomitant turn to other scales and sounds, was an elevation of percussion. . . .In some sense, even in "classical music" . . . the "rhythm section" steps forward [11]

Robert Fink Repeating Ourselves: American minimal music as cultural practice, U California P, 2005

repetitive music implicates creators, performers, and auditors in repetitive commercial culture like advertising and television [xi]

[We] trace the presence in minimalist music of both Eros and Thanatos, of dialectical entrainment to desire as well as libidinal liberation from it, never forgetting that these lofty psychoanalytic terms are just metaphors for the bodily effects of material social constructions. [7]

[T]he repetition-structures of American minimal music broke into the Western cultural mainstream around 1965, the precise moment that the complete transformation of American network television by commercial advertising established the medium's distinctively atomized, repetitive programming sequence. Minimalism, whatever judgement of taste one might pronounce upon . . .takes on a unique cultural significance: it is the single instance within contemporary art music of what Raymond Williams called "flow," the most relentless, all-pervasive structural trope of twentieth-century global media. The sheer scope and intensity of this media torrent index an aesthetic effect that we might call the media sublime. Minimal music turns out to structure its repetitious desiring-production in much the same polyphonic way as a spot advertising campaign spreads out across diversified media vehicles . . .; its effect on the listener is the sublime perception of all those campaigns and all that desire creation perpetually coruscating across the huge expanse of mass-media flow . . .[I]n an aesthetic effect absolutely characteristic of consumer society, the sheer excess of processed desire turns out to be the biggest thrill of all. [10-11]

Justin Winkler, Space, Sound and Time: A choice of articles in Soundscape Studies and Aesthetics of Environment 1990 - 2003, 'Rhythmicity (2002)'

Rhythm is defined by the approximate repetition of a cycle – thus standing out from measure, the precise, identical repetition of a cycle. I would like to make the point thatalthough rhythm thus implies many kinds of elasticity and resilience it is actually a structure of extreme robustness. We can, together with Lefebvre, imagine that rhythmic systems develop a strength similar to those well entwined paper fibres which serve as a bridge capable to support heavy weights. Rhythm is concrete, worldly time, rhythmicity its systematic aspect. [2]

Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of representational time Princeton UP, 1992.

In this conjugating rhythm, each move forward is also digressive, also a sideways move. A postmodern narrative submits to the sequential nature of language grudgingly and at every juncture keeps alive for readers an awareness of multiple pathways and constantly crossing themes. Rhythm is parataxis on the horizontal and in motion: a repetitive element that doesn’t “forward” anything, one that is always exact but never “identical.” Narratives where time is rhythm give readers an opportunity to take up a new kind of residence in time, a way of staying in the narrative present – often literally or effectively in the present tense – that requires new acts of attention.
Rhythmic time – the time of experiment, improvisation, adventure – destroys the historicist unity of the world by destroying its temporal common denominator. In rhythmic time mutual reference back and forth from one temporal moment to another becomes impossible because no neutrality exists between temporal moments; on the contrary, each moment contains its specific and unique definition. Each “time” is utterly finite. [53-4]

[P]ostmodern narrative forces readers into a new kind of present: not the dematerialized present of historical time but what Nabokov calls the “Deliberate Present” of rhythmic time. [54]

Jacques Attali, Noise: the political economy of music, U Minnesota P, 1985.

Composition thus leads to a staggering conception of history, a history that is open, unstable, in which labor no longer advances accumulation, in which the object is no longer a stockpiling of lack, in which music effects a reappropriation of time and space. Time no longer flows in a linear fashion; sometimes it crystallizes in stable codes in which everyone’s composition is compatible, sometimes in a multifaceted time in which rhythms, styles and codes diverge, independencies become more burdensome, and rules dissolve. In composition, stability, in other words, differences, are perpetually called into question. Composition is inscribed not in a repetitive world, but in the permanent fragility of meaning after the disappearance of usage and exchange . . . It is also the only utopia that is not a mask for pessimism, the only Carnival that is not a Lenten ruse. [147]

un-hooked on classics: Beethoven after tonality and recording

Professor Robert Walker from School of English, Media and Performing arts University of NSW, Sydney responds to Mark Bahnisch's opinion piece in The Australian 'Fable of the Cultural Elite'.

Walker isn't interested in the political and social context into which Bahnisch's essay is situated: the current round of culture wars that are in play, albeit with less vigour than before the ALP victory last November, and how battles in these wars turn around issues of public funding, the politics of recognition and redistribution, and History and English curricula. Walker's riposte instead contents itself by rehearsing the Kantian discourse of judgement of the sublime: the discourse which Pierre Bourdieu has done so much to historicise and to analyse for its use in the reproduction of stratified social classes. Walker will have none of this sociological infection invading the religious experience of sophisticated art: the sort of art that only an emotionally, intellectually, musically and aesthetically educated, and thereby sophisticated, person is capable of understanding and appreciating. Not the three-minute pop song (philistine, rubbish, appealing to the base emotions), but rather a Beethoven symphony.

I have some sympathy for Walker's view. I'm interested in literary and musical form, too. But Walker's Adorno-esque disdain for 'uneducated-art' stops short in a number of ways. Walker's elitism is ignorant of the sociology of form.

An example. Adorno's sociology of musical form saw him support Schoenberg's modernist innovations in advancing musical form into a break with harmony and tonality: twelve tone music. How an audience heard this music would, of course depend on how they heard the tonal music of Beethoven. That said, Adorno wasn't content to talk of the sophistication and education of the experience of Schoenberg's performances (where Walker ends his formal-cultural lessons). For Adorno the break with tonality marks a break with the logics of commodity exchange and reificiation.

Now the point here is that there is a homology established between musical and social forms, and that the dominant nexus (harmony and commodity exchange) is broken by a new organising logic: twelve-tone music. But while Adorno's sociology of musical form is exemplary it is only one version of how the logic and order of harmony and tonality in musical form is broken with.

Robert Fink has written, in the shadow of Adorno (the new musicology), about the emergence of pulse-pattern-minimalism music: Steve Reich's compositions, for example. Fink's argument, which sits alongside that of Jacques Attali's in Noise: the political economy of music, is that Reich's music is a form in which we can think the media sublime. The way Fink puts this is to argue that Reich's Music for Eighteen Musicians, like Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's "Love to love you baby", are both musical performances of a refiguring of the desires that advertising's repetitions play through us.

Anyone that has heard that extra-diegetic musical section (music that is incidental to the action) in an American sit-com, or movie, even in Australian movies and dramas, where mallett instruments (vibraphones, xylophones etc) play a motiff that is counterpointed and repeated (often signifying the repetition of everyday cyclic time, and often what is experienced in a city-office job) will have heard the after-echoes of Reich's piece. This form has entered popular culture and it's condescending for Walker to invoke the elitism of his Kantian judgement while not recognising that we use the forms of Reich's, and let's admit it, disco's, music to make sense of a world in which media repetition is constantly shaping our desires.

Another break with tonality is that which arises out of the drone-noise movement, of which John Cale's mentor, Lamonte Young, was a practitioner. Cale, trained as a classical viola player, moved into the Andy Warhol Factory orbit in the mid 1960s, joining up with Lou Reed and formed the popart band the Velvet Underground. While the VU did employ pulse pattern music ("Waiting for my Man") it was Cale's electrified viola drones, overdriven valve amplifier noise, that has had such a lasting influence on popular music. The drone and noise, also break with the tonality which Walker's examplar - Beethoven - would, on this (the post-Adorno sociology of musical form) account, be locked into. And the drone, the electrified noise, are now commonplaces of popular music.

That we make sense of the contemporary world through the forms of popular music that we experience through TV shows, as disco and its afterwards, as the electrified noises and drones of a million pop songs, doesn't mean that we cannot experience the sublime. It's just that unlike Walker, we learnt how to live with, sometimes resist, sometimes negate and get around the media and commmodity sublimes of the contemporary world by taking these forms and putting them to work in our everyday lives. To call us lovers of the pop sublime uneducated, philistine, capable of only appreciating the *spits* music of base instincts is precisely the performance of distinction that Bourdieu exposed as deelpy imbricated in class stratification.

Loosen up Professor: there's not much you can do for the barbarians have long ago moved into the house of fine music and locking the gate won't stop us from getting out.

After Fordism: Australian textual and American musical cultures

This is a riff on a quote from former editor of the Melbourne Left literary journal Overland, Ian Syson. Syson both articulates a sociological explanation for these dirty realist novels of inner-urban angst, and also takes a swipe at the name 'grunge' which he dismisses as marketing hype. While I agree that the labelling was indeed 'marketing spirit' I also think that as the label still adheres to some of these novels, it might be worthwhile to refigure the meaning of grunge itself away from the fairly obvious and, let's face it, fairly shallow critical formula: pop/rock music = expression of authentic teenage emotion. Syson forecloses on any homology of cultural form, and thereby sociology of cultural form, shared by grunge music and grunge literature, when he poses what his argument takes to be the absurd attempt to equate rock with fiction: a modernist or realist guitar solo doesn't make any sense!

Underscoring the fragmentary points made below is the notion that fordism in the USA is sensually experienced due to the sheer weight and size of industrialization in the American North. Conversely, in Australia Fordism is less urbanly concentrated and it is industrial citizenship as a form of script-text culture which dominates: hence the importance of The Bulletin in forming keystones in Australian Labourism and the radical nationalist movement in the post-war period. By thinking grunge music as Fordist, Grunge lit becomes more comprehensible as a response to the decline of industrial citizenship in Australia.
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What our band did was basically make a big noise and create some movement with that noise. Slowly I came up with a kind of concept. A lot of it was based on the attitude of juvenile delinquency and general mental grievance that I'd gotten from these dropouts I was hanging out with, mixed in with the sorts of music I like: hard r&b, hard rock and roll, and the exciting elements of jazz, 'cause I was starting to listen to John Coltrane, and the unpredictability of that. And then an added element was to find something simple, monolithic, metallic, like a big machine - like the drill presses at the Ford plant, stamping out fenders. I'd listen to that and think. 'God those are impressive sounds, big sounds.' And they're so regular and simple, I thought, 'Those are sounds that even we could master.’ Iggy Pop

The early electric guitar emerged out of the role the acoustic guitar played in Hawaiin music forged from the desire for volume in the swing and big bands of the 1930s and 40s. The innovators of the electric guitar solo, at this early stage, were Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker. Can these early solos be interpreted as realist or modernist? To take the simplist understanding of the musical context here, the answer would have to be modernist, due to the jazz and blues context in which Christian played. While the electric guitar is and has played a role in jazz, it is the blues line in which its power and dominance over much post-war music has occurred. And in travelling up this line, effectively up the Mississipi to the heavy industry manufacturing towns of the American North, we can perhaps begin to hear that the electric guitar, even rock’n’roll, is fundamentally best understood as Fordist – a intimate part of a whole way of life, that sexualises, twists and rolls the rhythms and timbres of what Zygmunt Bauman calls heavy modernity with a loud, distorting electricity – the Chicago Blues.

~

A modernist guitar solo can be theorised – it is the guitar solo as most western ears know it: Charlie Christian, Chuck Berry, Robert Fripp. But this is the wrong question [Ian Syson’s question about modernist and realist electric guitar solos], put in the wrong terms, and it's here that the sense of incommensurable paradigms lead less to a knowing mocking, and more to a different way to conceptualise that might permit a smoother jump between what I’d like to argue are the shared structural tropes of Praise and Nirvana’s Lithium. For rather than attempting to set up a realism to modernism shift, it makes sense to begin with the notion that the electric guitar, and its solos, are only understandable within modernism. Indeed, what I want to suggest is that the forms and sonics of the electric guitar solo are intimately wound into that aspect of modernism, and modernity, Gramsci named Fordism.

~



Rock’n’roll takes the repetition of the train, the cars on the motorway whizzing past, the monolithic machinery thumping out car fenders in time, in tempo, and re-stages these textures, rhythms and timbres in a Chicago or Detroit bar. Rock says –‘yes, this is the rhythm and timbre of our modernity, but we can still be free, we can still feel the blues, take this car, this train, and fly – we can make love like a fleshy-machine.’ The guitar solo is the romanticism that gets released by the rhythms of the factory – we can live with and subvert the rhythms of the factory – this machinic repetition: we can keep our human feeling, move faster and with more freedom than the factory. Modelled on the Fordist factory, Berry Gordy’s Motown, marks the Fordist dream as a black dream of creative capitalism: a production line of stars and hits. The avant-garde, the inversion and ‘reframing’ of Fordism in culture, enters popular music slowly, but its hard to shy away from the profound influence that Andy Warhol’s factory plays in this stream of post-Fordism.



~

If the new pop of the 1980s (ABC, Scritti Politti, Human League, Frankie Goes to Hollywood even Prince and Madonna) celebrated, if not attempted to subvert, commodity culture, then the return to authenticity (over this ‘artifice’) is most measured in Grunge – real, true, authentic. Ironically, Grunge draws genealogical lines into post-punk, punk itself and the rock and pop bohemians – Iggy Pop/ Stooges and the Velvet Underground: artifice pop art, art rock. Cobain’s aspiration to meld aspects of the Beatles with Black Sabbath, heavy metal with modernist rock/pop, confirms that his musical head was in sync with that of the US’s (and by extension UK, Australia’s) white, male, suburban teenage heartlands. But what Nirvana also brought into the mix was this post-punk legacy – the pop art subversion and artifice that had been enacted as an accumulating endless loop through bands like the Pixies; the stockpiling of records and CDs; and MTV. What Grunge promised to deliver was the underbelly, the dirt and heaviness of authenticity – the antithesis to the gloss and surface sheen of pop.

~

Was America, then, like Australia, working with a sense of industrial citizenship as its basic subjectivity? Clearly not in the same way. The historic compromises in Australia, its lack of overt civil war and sense of manifest destiny, its lack of clearly sanctioned citizenship (compared with the U.S. Bill of Rights and constitution) produce a much thinner version of liberalism in Australia than in the U.S, and yet a version of liberalism that is more textual, more read than the American version which is more felt.

JF Archibald founder of the now defunct Bulletin & Henry Lawson.

Rufus Wainwright's Ineffable oscillating chamber music

We went to see Rufus Wainwright last night at the Wrest Point Casino. I'm a big fan and so is SO. Report following . . .

We got there in time to catch the beginning of support act Leena (Thavisin). With a strapless black evening dress, glittering, chandelier-length ear rings, and mostly capo-ed steel-string acoustic guitar, Leena is, as they say, a package. Well-tanned, elegantly svelte and with model looks, the girl can sing and write a song.
I gave her three songs to see if she could change gears from the mixture of wistful, wistfully defiant, and defiantly wistful songs she began with. No.

But that's the postpunk in me.Having supped at the alt.folk and alt.country altars of Gram Parsons, and Gillian Welch, and the junkyard cocktail-jazz-blues of Tom Waits, no Jewel-esque, post-Waifs ingenue will resonate much beyond platitudes like - 'She'd win Australian Idol, on looks alone.' Is she one to watch? Well, if you like Missy Higgins, or Jewel, then worth a look and listen, but I found her sophisticated folk-pop twee. She might end up on screen though.


And so, we left the flat-carpeted Tasman Hall, headed out to the foyer for a couple of overpriced 15oz Cascade Draughts and looked out onto Sandy Bay toward Hobart, some Pacific Gulls perched high on the roof behind us, squawking, and waited for Rufus.


When he did appear on stage, a simple grand piano in the front-centre and microphones over both the piano and closer to the foldback speakers near the edge, his boyish flop of hair and long sideburns sat neatly on a Peter Allen-style outfit: milkybar white jeans and a multi-colour short-sleeved body shirt, tucked in. 'I'm trying to get in the summer-feel' Rufus told us, comparing Hobart to the similarly changeable (cold) summers of his former hometown of Montreal. A touch of the warmth of Rio - especially with his first shirt-button ajar.


This was to be a solo performance, played mostly from the piano, although there were about seven or so songs perfomed on a variety of steel-string acoustic guitars - the crowd-favourite 'California' being one.

Rufus, rufus, rufus! The man can sing, write a song - lyrics and melody, and he can accompany himself on piano, exquisitely. There were moments here: the French-lyric tune with a waltz-time piano underneath that was performed with such a singular feel for tempo that I couldn't believe that the flowing vocal-melody was in the same time; and yet it synchronized, perfectly. Another highlight was a song from Release the stars sung in a falsetto, giving us the chance to hear his higher register, which was beautiful - not so much wistful, as transcendent.

But what struck me most was that his baritone vibrato, his perfect pitching melded with either guitar or piano mostly sounded orchestral. What I mean to say is that the harmonic overtones that are produced by and in his voice, I think, set in play oscillations and rhythms that counterpoint those emanating from the other instrument. Descriptions like, full, rich, orchestral, resonating, don't do justice to this sound. This is not to say that his baritone vibrato, especially at the volume we heard it, didn't at times become repetitive. It did, and when the third beer had me up and out the Hall doors, upon attempting to re-enter mid-song I was stopped by an usher who was then told by another patron that 'He's too nasal, for me', it hit me later that Rufus' nose is a key resonating chamber that can grate, sometimes, but mostly promotes this ineffable oscillating chamber-music. Another cliche that comes to mind is that the song begins to sing itself, and there is a choir of voices audible, and a chamber of instruments supporting.

And what songs - melodies that move with such certain grace, and lyrics that are by turns wry, ironic and vulnerable. I would liked to have heard 'Poses' or 'Tower of learning' from the Poses LP, but we left Wrest Point, satisfied. The sound of his voice, still resonating in my ears and, a little, in my blood.

[Image of Rufus from Sydney Morning Herald 31.01.2008 Photo: Domino Postiglione]

Sweet dreams are made of trees

Not one of my favourite bands of the 1980s, but Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox's Eurhythmics, ticked a few boxes: synthesizers, drum machine, songcraft, lush orchestration. While they began with an icy Germanic feel, their movement into pop-soul was much less interesting.

But after more than a quarter of a century it's their name that intrigues. Was it a neologism? Something to do with Europe? Clearly, rhythm is a separate word - but eurhythmics??

Here's Henri Lefebvre from Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life:

At no moment have the analysis of rhythms and the rhythmanalytical project lost sight of the body. Not the anatomical or functional body, but the body as polyrhythmic and eurhythmic (in the so-called normal state). As such, the living body has (in general) always been present: a constant reference . The theory of rhythms is founded on the experience and knowledge of the body; the concepts derive from this consciousness and this knowledge, simultaneously banal and full of surprises - of the unknown and the misunderstood.

Along with arrhythmia, isorhythmia (the equality of rhythms) completes this repertoire of fundamental concepts. With one reservation: iso- and eu-rhythmia are mutally exclusive. There are few isorhythmias, rhythmic equalities or equivalences, except of a higher order. On the other hand, eurhythmias abound: everytime there is an organism, organisation, life (living bodies).

In this respect, thought could return to the Liebnizian principle apparently abandoned by philosophers, logicians and scientific types. Were there isorhythmia between two temporalities, they would coincide. Equivalence entails identity (and reciprocally, non-identity implies difference); polyrhythmia is composed of diverse rhythms. Eurhythmia (that of the living body, normal and healthy) presupposes the association of different rhythms. In arrhythmia, rhythms break apart, alter and bypass synchronisation (the usual term for designating this phenomena). A pathological situation - agreed! - depending on the case; interventions are made, or should be made, through rhythms, without brutality. (67)

What does eurhythmia sound like? Is it limiting to narrow down rhythms to what we hear? What about the rhythms, the durations, the repetitions, of seeing birds flying between trees, of the taste of coffee every morning, of the smell of lavender in bloom, of rubbing shampoo into your scalp??

Eurhythmia, then. Polyrhythmic - multiple rhythms. But not iso-rhythmic or arrhythmic. Perhaps, as LeFebvre puts it: a harmony of rhythms.

Sounds like . . . Bill Evans' piano solo on Miles Davis sextet's All Blues.

Bill is pictured above. Dreaming of trees?

Stevie Wonder: Innervisions (Tamla Motown 1973)

My parents had a cassette version of this Wonder LP which was very well worn from repeated plays in the ice-blue Volvo 164TE Sedan. The vinyl here is from a small books & records shop 'Halfback' (sell the book or record back and get half what you paid), I think situated in a Northern Beaches of Sydney suburb - Dee Why, not far from where I grew up. A$3.99 from about 1987.

The record is in poor condition - constant static, and the occasional jump when played. But what great cover art! Very earthy, water colours with an American desert feel, suggesting that the inner visions Stevie sings of were those produced by injesting something in the desert? Song titles like Too High, Higher Ground, Visions suggest . . . Peyote?

Nevermind.

Why Stevie is a Wonder: Stevie plays all the instruments (including dubbed vox), on tracks marked * Have a listen to Living for the City and compare Stevie's multitracked solo efforts to say Enya's watery - skidmarked layerings.

Side One

Too High

Drugs are bad mmm-kay?! Stevie goes and asks Alice: did you hear the news about the girl today/ She passed away/ what did her friend say/ They said she's too high/ Too high/ Can't hang around anyway

The sound of the bubbling synth-bass, Stevie's phased vocals, and locomotive mid-tempo pace, still can't submerge the bright feel of the jazz-inflected scat do-doing, and the hi-hat swing that accompanies it. Harmonica solo(s), electric piano comping (Fender Rhodes), and Stevie works the drums well.

He can do syrupy-maudlin (Lately from Hotter than July for example) but in this middle-period his natural effusiveness bubbles up even in a 'don't do it' song like this one. Listen out for the pre-chorus psych-out breakdowns: 'And she's a tangerine'~~~~~~~~~~ brought back into the funk with a sharp James-Brown 'Yowww!'

Visions
Wistful Stevie on this ornate ballad: decorated by arpeggioed electric and acoustic guitar arpeggios, and bass that mostly pulses then dances up a short flight of stairs. As in most of Stevie's ballads the harmonic construction here is sophisticated, with runs of extended (flat 9ths and sharp 13ths) chords laid out on the Rhodes.

Stevie the idealist argues that he's also a realist: be realistic ask for the impossible; or at least imagine that love (which for Stevie is a concept that is almost pantheistic, as well as romantic) and freedom will conquer all. As a lead-in to what is perhaps Stevie's great Social-realist protest song, Visions prefigures the waste of life that is the 'Boy . . . born in hard-time Mississippi' by asking 'Do we have to find our wings and fly away/ To the visions in our mind?'In case you think Stevie is a romantic idealist only, check out . . .

Living for the City*

All Wonder here! A lyric that preceeds and would have certainly influenced both Grandmaster Flash's The Message and even Prince's Sign O' the Times: angry, funked tales of urban, racist realism.

There are amazing elements here. The massed choir of Stevie at the song's end, when the melody is re-harmonized; the multi-voiced street-scene dialogue of the drug-deal set-up, when the wide-eyed Mississippi boy gets set-up and sent down almost on arrival; the opening bass pulse over which arrives a panning Rhodes; the 'no' 'nos' of the ending.

While Prince begins Sign O' the Times (1987) with 'In France a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name/By chance his girlfrind came across a needle and soon she did the same/ At home there are seventeen-year-old-boys and their idea of fun/ Is being in a gang called th Disciples, high on crack and totin' a machin gun/ Times/ Times' and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message with 'Broken glass everywhere/ people pissing on the streets you know they just don't care'

Stevie's story is third-person narrative, from birth to gaol where the aspirational theme-mantra - 'Living(just) enough for the city' changes tone as the hopelessness that the central character's limited life-chances necessitate, grows. While Prince presents an angry apocalyptic commentary, and Melle Mel a mixture of second-person dirty-realist description with first-person despair/survivalist-affirmation, Stevie's more conventional story of a life wasted is musically leavened by the form of a Mass: if there is hope it is in redemption, for us all. And yet, the anger here teeters over into the desire to heal, and back to anger.

Golden Lady

Not a strong song, but again a solid melody and song construction. Lyrically a weak song, though, and considering the theme of romantic desire, a melancholic and grey tone in the overall affect here.

Cubist figures from the inside cover


Side Two

Higher Ground*
Great intertwined keyboard work here which multitracks about four lines. Worth listening to on headphones just to hear how skilled Stevie is in laying done not only something polyphonic (mulitple melodies) but polyrhythmic: like a small percussion ensemble. Probably overdubbed clavinets not on as sharp and bright a setting here as on Superstition. Shows off the uses Stevie puts synthesized Bass to: bending, and mirroring the vocal melody on the pre-chorus.

Jesus Children of America*
Another accusation song in the tradition of You haven't done Nothing from First Fulfillingness's Finale. There's something frantic about the voice here, reflected in the lyric: 'You better tell your story fast/ And if you lie it will come to pass.'

But the instrumentation here is amazing. Listening to the song on the head phones (again) there must be about four distinct keyboards in the mid to upper register, and of course the bending, funky synth bass. When the tambourine kicks in at the opening, the rhythm gets a roll-on that seems hard to stop.

What stands out here is how Stevie is a man of many voices. Apparently he could impersonate nearly anybody's speaking voice and at Motown would impersonate supremo Berry Gordy on the phone. Back in the 70s when my sister and I would hover around my parents' dinner parties (for the exotic food mainly - well pimenot rolls were exotic then weren't they?), a friend of theirs with a good musical ear but a weakness for evangelical christianity on hearing a string of Stevie songs asked who had put together the mixed reel? (8 Track reels were big in the early 1970s as you could put up to 2 hours of continuous music on the tape). No Uncle Tez - it was all Stevie, shape-shifting his voice, and here on Jesus Children of America Wonder comes across initially as full of air and smoothness,before ratcheting his timbre into something tighter and heavier as the lyrical tone shifts into, once again, anger.

All in Love is fair

Don't you Worry 'Bout a Thing

He's Misstra Know-It-All