Music

Come on down to the Mothership

Published on January 29, 2013Leave a comment

The Atlantic discovers Black musicians can be geeky too:

But what such cutesy nicknames obscure is that R&B music—and black American culture more widely—has embraced fantasy, sci-fi, or other “nerdy” subcultural tropes more often than many people realize. From the space-travel fantasias of Sun Ra and George Clinton in the ’70s to the Wu-Tang Clan’s Shaolin kung-fu obsession in the ’90s to the present day—when 2012’s most widely acclaimed album, R&B singer Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, includes a nine-minute odyssey imagining the ancient Egyptian empire reincarnated on the Las Vegas Strip— black musicians have drawn from the same wellsprings of imagination and popular culture as everyone else.

Well, yeah. Moreover, Black musicians have not just drawn on those wellsprings, they’ve replenished them as well. People like George Clinton or Sun Ra were not just influenced by fantasy or science fiction, they also composed their own epics. Clinton especially with his parliamentfunkadelicgroovethang was just as creative in developing their own cosmology as Jack Kirby was in developing his Fourth World. It’s just that these contributions often go unrecognised. Black geekdom, Black interest in science fiction and fantasy is still strange, still dangerous.

Pien

Published on January 23, 2013Leave a comment

I didn’t think it would’ve been possible to cover Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt in Dutch, but the Heideroosjes manage to pull it off; it’s almost as good as the Johnny Cash version below. The only difference is that Cash brought a history of a life lived with regrets and pain in a way that somebody in his mid-thirties, no matter how good a musician just cannot do. In both cases this is a very masculine song, a very male emotional mix of regret and crippling doubt, self pity and genuine pain, defiantly shouted at the world.

Bonnie and Clyde

Published on January 7, 2013Leave a comment

Effortlessly stylish.

The Holy Thrash Trinity

Published on December 4, 2012Leave a comment

Sepultura:

Slayer:

And of course, the masters, Anthrax:

What Fun!

Published on November 30, 2012Leave a comment

The Reggea and ska revival was not just a British movement, in holland too a lot of reggea and ska influences started creeping up in Dutch language pop music as the punk movement with its d.i.y. ethos led to an explosion of new and interesting groups, most noticably Doe Maar, a band that at its peak was as popular in the Netherlands as the Beatles had been in Britain in the sixties. It was the music I grew with in the early eighties and which still influences a lot of what I listen to today But of course since most of that took place in a language few people outside of Holland and Belgium speak, so most of it remained world famous in Holland only.

But every now and again there were glimpses of bigger things. What Fun! was a mixed race band from Haarlem (and hence banned from being played in South Africa), with a sound that wasn’t all that far removed from proper 2-Tone who had their one and only real hit in 1983 with the catchy tune above, “the Right Side One”. Doing well over here, it started getting some real airplay on the BBC as well, until somebody finally noticed, hey, this might just be a song about the Falklands War and yanked it from the playlists…