Category Archives: music

Sylvester and set theory

Do Ya Wanna Funk (1982) Sylvester [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Gay icon Sylvester James would have turned 60 today if he had not died from AIDS 20 years ago.

“Over and Over [1],” released in 1977 on Fantasy Records is WMC#75.

From a set-theoretical point of view, the Venn diagram of “Over and Over“intersects via whatlinkshere with the following compilations:

François Kevorkian‘s Choice: A Collection of Classics

Dave Lee‘s Jumpin’ series

Brian Chin‘s Club Classics & House Foundations series

Norman Jay‘s Good Times series

—Sholem Stein, musicologist, dance music connoisseur and genre theorist

What S. Stein means in the above quote is that “Over and Over” is featured on the mentioned albums.

Sylvester was firmly planted in the American disco scene but was popular too in Europe at the time and the rest of the jet set world.

His best-known songs are the Hi-NRG classics “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)“[2] (a previous WMC) and “Do You Wanna Funk,” songs of simultaneously gay liberation in the United States and Saint-Tropez chic in Europe.

“Do You Wanna Funk“[3] is World Music Classic #76.

The bawdy origins of rock and roll

“You probably don’t doubt that the origins of rock and roll are bawdy in nature. You’ve read Gershon Legman and his fellow travelers to take note. You know why Scheherazade was not killed by the king.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlALQf3fahM]

Yet you don’t know American record label Federal Records and their 1951 “Sixty Minute Man“[1], on which a male singer boasts of being able to satisfy his girls with fifteen minutes each of “kissin'” “teasin'” and “squeezin'”, before “blowin'” his “top.” The single reached #1 [2] on the R&B chart in May 1951 and stayed there for a 14 weeks. “Sixty Minute” defined what was to become rock and roll which has always been about wine, women and song. —The bawdy origins of rock and roll, Sholem Stein, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1998, in a Pleasantville review.”

Note by the editor: “Big Long Slidin’ Thing” is another example in the category “dirty blues,” an often-overlooked category in rock and roll historiography.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTyMuxTyfiI]

“Sixty Minute Man,” “Big Long Slidin’ Thing“[3] and “Number One” (the Patrice Rushen song, which I managed to sneak in by footnote) are WMC #72, 73 and 74.

I’m not much of an album man

“Take 4 parts blues add 2 parts country and give it to a poor white boy and you have rock.”–Duane Allman

I’m not much of an album man, I prefer singles and compilation albums. Nevertheless Sweetheart of the Rodeo is one of my top 50 albums (I feel a new series coming on).

[Youtube=http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=One9fHq-3qc&]

Sweetheart of the Rodeo was the sixth album by American rock band The Byrds, released on July 29 1968. It serves here as the seminal recording of country rock. It was the most commercially unsuccessful album recorded by the group at the time of its release.

Country rock is a musical genre formed from the fusion of rock with country music, with its roots in the American folk music revival.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK70vImXkgY]

After the darling of the young enthusiasts, Bob Dylan, began to record with a rocking rhythm section and electric instruments in 1965 (see Electric Dylan controversy), many other still-young folk artists followed suit. Meanwhile, bands like The Lovin’ Spoonful and the Byrds, whose individual members often had a background in the folk-revival coffee-house scene, were getting recording contracts with folk-tinged music played with a rock-band line-up. Before long, the public appetite for the more acoustic music of the folk revival began to wane.

Enough facts already.

“Hickory Wind“[1] is WMC #69 and “Blue Canadian Rockies“[2] WMC #70.

The United States of Unconsciousness

The United States of Unconsciousness is how cultural pessimists (most recently the dim-witted Roger Scruton) would like to label the olympic sport of “couch potatoing,” better known as television. That is if they (the likes of Scruton) had the fine wit, ardor and imagination of the likes of Gil Scott-Heron and Michael Franti to come up with phrases such as “Television, the drug of a nation,” poetic but seemingly straight out of Mao’s The Little Red Book (cfr Opium of the People).

However, it will take a nobrow cultural optimist to point out that many television studies have failed to point to interesting quality television such as Civilisation: A Personal View; and entertaining cult television such as South Park and Série Rose, programming which has lead to a genuine postwar global television culture.

Nevertheless, I have sympathy for the alarmists, especially if by voices of distinguished pedigree:

I give you World music classics #67[1] and #68 [2]

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08x34xtdzlU]

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” —Gil Scott-Heron, 1970

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOWTM5R2DA]

“Television, the drug of a nation, feeding ignorance and breeding radiation.” —The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, 1992

Contact with a beast must not be kept secret at confession

Twenty three years ago, the French film The Beast premiered in France.

Sirpa Lane in
The Beast (La bête) (1975) – Walerian Borowczyk [Amazon.com] [UK]

La Bête (Eng: The Beast) is a 1975 film written and directed by Walerian Borowczyk, starring Sirpa Lane, based on Lokis, a story by Prosper Mérimée. The film (originally conceived in 1972 as a film on its own, but then in 1974 as the fifth story in Contes immoraux) belonged to his later work, which was seen by many as a decline in the director’s career after Dzieje grzechu, except in France, where it was hailed by nobrow critics such as Ado Kyrou.

Here is some shaky Youtube footage:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV0xScJuYXc]

The music consists of harpsichord pieces by Domenico Scarlatti.

Music in Borowczyk films usually draws from the high art canon of classical music, for example, he uses Mendelssohn in The Story of Sin, Handel in Goto, Island of Love and Domenico Scarlatti in La Bête.

Incidentally, the term “classical music” did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to “canonize” the period from Johann Sebastian Bach to Beethoven as a golden age. The earliest reference to “classical music” recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from about 1836.

With regards to the title quote and the strange vocabulary of eroticism, Tim Lucas [1] gives the top 10 dialog lines from Massimo Dallamano‘s Venus in Furs (starring Laura Antonelli).

At ten is “I must resign myself to being normal.”

“This groove is out of fashion, these beats are twenty years old”

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu9LhFXymxs]

“Strange Overtones” is the first single by David Byrne and Brian Eno from their new album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

“This groove is out of fashion, these beats are twenty years old,” state the lyrics and yes indeed, it has been 20 years since the beat has been self-consciously celebrated during late 20th century electronic dance music revolution brought on by Japanese music machines such as the Roland 808.

But the beats (some of them by Robert Wyatt) in this track are actually very intricate and danceable too.

Most of the drumming and programming reminds me of “Riot in Lagos“[1], from B2-Unit, Ryuichi Sakamoto second solo album.

Jerry Wexler (1917 – 2008)

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kkgQHcdlZU]

“Respect“, a feminist anthem

Aged 91, American music journalist turned music producer Jerry Wexler died last Friday. While at Billboard magazine in 1947 Wexler coined the term “Rhythm and Blues” to replace the tainted term “race music.” He is one of the major record industry players to have marketed 1960s soul music to a white audience.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJM5K51peVw]

“Son of a Preacher Man“

He produced such hits as “Respect“[1] and “Son of a Preacher Man“[2], which are WMC #65 and 66.

Isaac Hayes (1942 -2008)

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpq5NHScsZc]

Isaac Hayes died a couple of hours ago. He was 65. His best known work was the soundtrack for the 1971 blaxploitation film Shaft.

I give you his a cult disco track “I Can’t Turn Around” (1975, above), which led 10 years later to “Love Can’t Turn Around” [1], something between a cover and a rip off of the original, but an altogether better track.

Hayes recorded the track for his Chocolate Chip album and it saw him embracing the disco sound with the title track and lead single. This would be Hayes’ last album to chart top 40 for many years.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEHodKS1JG4&]

“Love Can’t Turn Around” is WMC #64.

Here are two more of his cult favorites:

video

Isaac Hayes – Breakthrough

video

Isaac Hayes – Pursuit of The Pimpmobile

“Fellow Americans, we begin bombing in five minutes.”

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv13ZnkpWos]

24 years ago today, towards the end of the cold war, someone smuggled a recording of a voice test by then president Ronald Reagan to the outside world.

The soundbite is now commonly referred to as Reagan’s “We begin bombing in five minutes” joke [1] and ran like this:

“My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

On hearing the news, a leading Parisian newspaper expressed its dismay, and stated that only trained psychologists could know whether Reagan’s remarks were “a statement of repressed desire or the exorcism of a dreaded phantom.”

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPHDQLuZaGo&]

Reagan’s gaffe was sampled soon afterwards, most notably in 1984 on the appropriately titled “World Destruction“[2] by Time Zone (Laswell, Bambaataa and Lydon) and by Bonzo Goes to Washington, a one-off studio project that released “5 Minutes”[3] (“chopped and channeled by Arthur Russel) in the same year. I have no audio for the latter.

For the vinyl vultures, “World Destruction” is on Celluloid Records, “5 minutes” on Sleeping Bag Records, both cult labels.

“World Destruction” is WMC # 63. Enjoy.

For the record: Reagan was a funny president[4], although he did come over as a religious lunatic when you hear him on his 1984 presidential campaign where he comments on armageddon and mutual assured destruction:

“the biblical prophecies of what would portend the coming of Armageddon and so forth, and the fact that a number of theologians for the last decade or more have believed that this was true, that the prophecies are coming together that portend that.” … “no one knows whether those prophecies mean that Armageddon is a thousand years away or day after tomorrow. So I have never seriously warned and said we must plan according to Armageddon.”

Jahsonic

Burgemeester van Dodenstad