B.I.A.

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Floyd Westerman, "B.I.A. (alternate version) (download until 2/28/09), from "Custer Died for Your Sins/The Land Is Your Mother."

Great political music has to be completely authentic, whatever that means, or else it loses its effect and in fact becomes counter-productive. You can tell in a song if the writer said to herself or himself, "gee, I want to make a statement about this issue." When political music reflects the real course of a musician's life, it takes on a completely different power, because it is itself the issue.

I wouldn't want to suggest that it's not possible for a writer to do real justice to a subject that she or he hasn't exactly lived, because one's mental existence, one's ability to step, so to speak, in another's shoes, is as real in its way as the physicality of going to the supermarket or to work. At the same time, anyone who is serious about political music, who, while perfectly happy to make a lot of money, wants to take a musical gift and try to help people with it, treads very cautiously when writing outside of one's direct or, possibly semi-tangential experience. One needn't have lived a precise experience, the stuff of which constitutes the political song, but it helps to have lived next door to it or at least in the same neighborhood.

So having finished the preface, we can look at Floyd Westerman, whom I only came across in the last year--last six or seven months actually, not to my credit--and who made some of the best political music of the 20th century. The politics of his music are on the surface pretty easy to explain. He was involved in AIM--American Indian Movement--and made songs as part of that movement. He didn't release a ton of music, and got into acting which is, it's pretty clear to me, where he actually made most of his money. His first record took its title from Vine Deloria's "Custer Died for Your Sins," often referred to as the AIM manifesto, not without reason.

So all of this, for anyone who's not Indian, or in AIM, could very easily be misunderstood or misused. I don't purport to be an expert on AIM, and I don't want to do the hip white guy "I'm not an insider but I'm aware that I'm not an insider so I can judge other white people as if I were an insider" thing, but what got me to buy Westerman's music was a number of things I read and a couple podcasts I heard in which people in the movement responded to his death. Really, the affection with which people wrote or spoke about him and the sense people communicated that "he was really ours" gave the impression that this was a musician to check out. Indeed he was.

However, what is--this is more from a socio-political angle than a musical one--so fantastic about Floyd Westerman is that he was/is a Johnny Cash fanatic, and has a brilliant bass voice to boot. He doesn't make "Indian sounding" music in any way that one would expect from the stereotypes one gets out of Hollywood or run-of-the-mill U.S. history books, though he did record more traditional music as well. Rather, he played music like he liked, and it's worth noting that Vine Deloria, too, was a country music buff.

People are, each in their own way, completely authentic. Making music as you hear it is really the way to go, especially if you want to be political. Country music, in its appeal to the bulk of its audience, has--this is more of an industry issue than about any individual musicians--taken some pretty foul political stands in the past, and makes an appeal to whiteness that has been and continues to be totally retrograde. It doesn't fit the white hipster liberal assumption to have the great Native political musician be not only a country music buff but a veritable country music master, with his own very real voice. But this just shows that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy, or politics as the case may be.

Wear Clean Draws

Cover of Party Music

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The Coup, "Wear Clean Draws" (download until 2/23/09), from "Party Music."

So I'd heard of the Coup for some time, but never listened to them. A very good friend of ours, one weekend we were staying with them on a visit, played them for us and bam!, I was hooked. This particular song my wife latched on to, and her fantastic taste in music is of course spot on.

This, to me, is hip-hop, and it's worth stressing that this is Bay Area hip-hop. There was a little hip-hop boutique run by a kid in Daly City that we'd go to, that we actually patronized--bought a number of very cool t-shirts there, and even a painting that now hangs in my classroom. In any event, we would talk, to this really cool kid--really, a young man in his early 20's. We'd just moved up here, and I'd been teaching a bit, and had only just started to get a sense of the whole Hyphy thing. As in, student sitting in the middle of class bouncing up and down shaking his head insisting he was "going dumb" and not "going spastic." I wasn't, nor am I now, impressed.

Anyway, this cool kid with the boutique lamented Bay Area hip-hop and praised L.A. L.A. had a more diverse hip-hop scene, he said, with more room for "positive" and political music. I knew this, despite appearances, because I had some students years ago (Speak, for one) who made beautiful hip-hop and who would go in from Riverside County to L.A. and became participants in that whole process. They'd clue me in to things, and I paid them back with encouragement.

I was really surprised and very disappointed in Bay Area hip-hop. I suppose teaching high school gave and gives me a perspective that more or less necessitates that I oppose Hyphy. Yes, we love localism, but "going dumb on the yellow bus" is not going to help anyone. I should add that because of various circumstances I ended up, my first year teaching up here, taking a Special Ed position because there were literally no history jobs to be had. Talk about the "yellow bus" does nothing to help kids in Special Ed actually use the considerable intellectual abilities they all have. Remember--most Special Ed kids have perfectly normal IQs but have some learning disability. Like I was a history ace who blew math problems. But because I was a white kid, I was "idiosyncratic" rather than "Special."

While it's true that lots of people pronounce Hyphy dead, and have for years, I can attest that the kids still go on about it, though not as often as a couple years ago, and that there hasn't been a massive movement in Bay Area hip-hop toward real positivity, back to real hip-hop. One must always look, though, to the antithetical examples to look forward to a more positive synthesis, and the Coup, simply by being the Coup, points the way forward.

Just some quick praise: I don't think I know of a more straightforward, loving piece of music than this one. Che pointed out the fact--not "made the argument," but "pointed out the fact"--that revolutionaries are motivated by love. No love, no revolution. This is an excellent case-in-point.

Gravity Rides Everything

Cover of The Moon & Antarctica

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Modest Mouse, "Gravity Rides Everything" (download until 2/23/09), from "The Moon and Antarctica."

I was told once by a good friend to check out Modest Mouse, as he said their writing and singing reminded him of me. I bought this record. Truth be told, I wasn't insulted by the comparison and I appreciated a number of the tunes on it. Unfortunately, it was a small number. That said, there certainly are some tunes on it that I still, after some years now, come back to, and this is one.

I have a long pattern of actively avoiding the indie flavor of the month, going all the way back to when R.E.M. broke to the extent they did. I think I first read about R.E.M. in Rolling Stone around the time of "Reckoning," so it should be said that I was paying attention but I wasn't so cool as to get into them around "Murmur" time. What I can say, though, is that one of my good enough friends in high school--or was it middle school?--was into R.E.M. enough, and she was going on and on about how cool they were, and so I avoided them like the plague, even though she was cool and we thought at the time that Rolling Stone actually had valid points to make. I didn't end up getting into R.E.M. at all until "Lifes Rich Pageant," when they got so popular I couldn't avoid them.

Now, Modest Mouse are, like basically all indie flavors of the month, overrated. The question in this case is, "how overrated." R.E.M. is the most overrated band of all time, as far as I can tell. Even U2, seriously, seriously overrated, or Radiohead--wow...now there's an overrated band--has more to offer than R.E.M. The thing with R.E.M. is that there's not really anything they're great at. Certainly not lyrics. That crap might have impressed people in the high school lit mag, but putting them to the public takes some serious chutzpah, or plain idiocy. Likely both. Musically, they're fair, at best. It comes together for them in a moderately original way, about as original as you can be while remaining fundamentally derivative. That's really the indie flavor of the month formula: derive the music from a particular combination of sources that the hipsters already know. The particular combination is what's new, not the sources.

So if you mixed this track a little differently, you'd have an outtake from My Bloody Valentine, something left on the floor while they were recording "Loveless." Drop the vocals way down so you can't make out the words--not a bad idea in this case--add a log drum, overdub the guitar swoops so that there are a number of tracks playing close to the same thing so that the slight variations in performance, slightly out of sync with each other, have that beautiful feeling of comfortable, vague disorientation you get with Kevin Shields, and there you go. The structure of the song itself is much more conventional than anything MBV would do, but that doesn't mean it's not good.

I wonder if someday we'll go back to the point where popular music is great and great music is popular. Maybe, if only on a microscopic level. Each producer of great music will be able to reach the small social network she or he has through Myspace, Facebook, or whatever, and we'll each have our own little click. Not a bad world, but a world without the Beatles, for sure.

My Carolina Sunshine Girl

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Jimmie Rodgers, "My Carolina Sunshine Girl" (download until 2/22/09), from "The Singing Brakeman."

I'll begin by noting that the Amazon.com links for this record are to the six-disc collection that Bear Family put out of Jimmie Rodgers' music, not to a smaller collection. It's worth it. I have it. Please, note that there are some really reasonably-priced used copies for sale there, too. Get it. You will not regret it.

When I was a little kid, the first poet I remember really liking, even more than Shel Silverstein, was Robert Frost. I did a report on Frost in the fifth grade, and I can remember typing it--my handwriting was so bad that I started typing in the third grade, I kid you not. I really liked "Fire and Ice" because I was already having nightmares about nuclear war and it of course spoke to me. But I also dug his bit about two roads diverged in a wood, and I of course (like everyone else) knew that I, too, was on the road less traveled. In hindsight, that poem's a bit stupid, because everyone is on their own path and therefore everyone's road is the road less traveled. Frost must have been quite blind to human experience to miss that fact.

He might, however--Frost, that is--been referring not to himself, but have been writing in the persona of Jimmie Rodgers. Here we have the "Father of Country Music." Country is a pretty problematic genre if one looks at it as a social question rather than a musical matter, because country is so inextricably wrapped up with whiteness. I play country music, I love country music (not indiscriminately, of course), and I'm white, so I make these points from, I would think, the inside. I often make a point to friends that the most critical musical comparison one can make, looking at the 20th century, is between bebop and bluegrass. Both are virtuoso musics, but bebop innovated itself into the cool, then into post-bop, and into free. Bluegrass set up a structure against which musicians' worth was judged according to how strictly they conformed to it. Bluegrass became not really a tradition, but a straightjacket. The vested interest the bluegrass audience had in maintaining the social status quo manifested itself in a musical conservatism, even reaction. Bebop was always about change.

So it's really quite depressing how thoroughly country music missed the boat that Jimmie Rodgers got going, despite the fact that so many fantastic musicians came out of country. Jimmie Rodgers was eclectic and cosmopolitan, one might imagine because of the travels he had on the railroads. Listening to his collected works on the Bear Family collection, I can't help but think of Prince. He's that wide-ranging. Yes, it's true that jazz was just becoming popular when Rodgers' musical career began, but unlike most white people who imitated jazz, Jimmie Rodgers did his own thing with what he heard. I can't think of a more natural combination of different genres than "My Carolina Sunshine Girl."

Country as a social phenomenon seems to me to have followed the Carter Family model, to its detriment. We love the Carters, no doubt, and appreciate all the traditional tunes they preserved in their recordings, even if A.P. Carter took writers' credit for traditional tunes. The precendent, though, that the Carters set looked backwards, rather than forwards, quite the contrary of Jimmie Rodgers.

Part of Jimmie Rodgers' secret--this will be a quick observation--is his sense of form. I don't know another popular musician with a more unique sense of musical form outside of Duke Ellington or possibly Brian Wilson. In this, as in his most interesting tunes, we don't have simply a repeating form, like in a folk tune, or a Tin Pan Alley formula. Any number of Jimmie Rodgers tunes--"Daddy and Home" is another good example, or "I'm Sorry We Met"--follow no particular pattern, but move bar to bar along a musical logic unique to each tune. This is an almost absolutely lost art in popular music.

Audio Player issue

Hey all--I am aware that the audio players have for some reason started all playing at the same time. This is a drop.io question. Drop.io works brilliantly for my purposes but this obviously isn't what we want on this blog. I'll figure something out but until then, accept my apologies and just hit "stop" on the players.

Breathe and Stop

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Q-Tip, "Breathe and Stop" (download until 2/22/09), from "Amplified."

I never happened to get really into A Tribe Called Quest, wrongly feeling I think that I didn't have room in my brain for both De La Soul and these their colleagues, and probably also because while I was really into hip-hop at the time I was into so many other things too, like in 1988 or so especially Ornette Coleman, that I really only approached hip-hop like someone who likes to eat at a different restaurant every night. I enjoy the meal but it's not a staple. It's not a question of like or dislike, but simply of time and space. Both are limited, and so I don't pursue everything deeply. Thus, I never really got into Q-Tip.

I was in the Guitar Center in San Bernardino one afternoon, looking if I remember for a mixing board, a cheap mixing board, and in the room that equipment was in they were playing this song. I was immediately bowled over. There is something one gets in really stellar hip-hop--and while I wouldn't say that this is strictly a legacy of Rakim, Rakim manifests this tendency archetypically--of excellence for excellence's sake. That is to say, "Breathe and Stop" is not, like "Fight the Power" or something like that, going to change the world in an obvious, political way. But what we have here is excellence, and excellence, for a Black man in America, is a political act, among other things. This is why there are so many great rappers. Rapping well, in a country that has since its inception functioned against your humanity, is an assault against the system.

A lot of people who criticize hip-hop as a monolithic enterprise--I know these critics are straw men of a sort, but bear with me--miss this real point. Above all, yes, one can and should call out misogyny. "Breathe and Stop," is not at all, we are clear, however, misogynistic. It's on the surface a seduction piece, a little bit ribald, maybe a lot ribald. Now right there, anyone who would shy away from this is either a hypocrite or a freakish prude. If you've never been seductive, feel free to critique but get yourself quickly to a psychologist. There's no hatred in this rhyme, so it's just fine.

What is interesting, though, and what is radical, is the pairing of the explicit subject matter with the raw excellence of the technique. "We are excellent in all things, at all times," is the implicit message of the piece, the explicit message of which is, "it's nice being in your pants." Both are human experience, and--anti-dualistic thinking is becoming a theme on this blog--this is the point not just of Q-Tip here but of great, real hip-hop. One is great simply because one can be, and one does not compartmentalize one's greatness.

Hard Time Killing Floor Blues

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Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" (download until 2/21/09), from "The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James."

I remember reading when I was a kid, about 17 or so, some book about Delta blues, I think Robert Palmer the critic's "Deep Blues," or possibly it was Elijah Wald's "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues," or something like that, but I kept getting these impressions of Skip James as someone too hip and mysterious even for me to connect to. At least, that might explain why I didn't actually hear Skip James until I was 35. Nobody I knew had a Skip James record, even though his praises were sung in every single book I'd ever read about blues of any sort.

I got into Delta blues because a friend had gone from Clapton to Robert Johnson--this was back when it was cool to think that Clapton was actually serious, and anyway we were only in high school--and told me that I absolutely had to listen to Robert Johnson. I did, and was of course bowled over, though I still expected a type of virtuosity from "blues" that Robert Johnson didn't actually provide. Fast guitar licks like the white players play, etc. But that said I had ears enough to know beauty when I heard it, and while it took me years to really connect to what Robert Johnson had to offer, and especially what distinguished him from so many other players--it's his writing and arranging, how he creates structures as solid as Ellington's using just guitar and voice--I certainly loved his music from the start.

So when I say like so many hipster cognoscenti that my favorite Delta blues player is Skip James, I really want to stress that I came to this conclusion in a very un-hipsterish way and I take nothing away from any other players in the process. It's more about taste than quality, and it took me almost 20 years to actually hear Skip James from when I started listening to Delta blues. Not cool.

I got the Skip James record while in the middle of reading the aforementioned Elijah Wald book, on his recommendation. He sounded intriguing--a bit off his rocker given what were described as two completely different styles of blues on guitar and piano. Indeed, it is remarkable that he took such different approaches on the two instruments, but I'd be hard pressed to imagine that there are many people who prefer his piano work to his guitar work. I certainly don't, and while I don't skip the piano tracks when I listen to him, I wouldn't listen to him if all there were were the piano tracks. It's not entirely an accident that when he got "rediscovered" (what a pernicious term) in the 1960's, he got gigs as a guitarist rather than a pianist.

It's on pieces like this one that seem to me of such high quality that one can't describe them--I'll try in some way--but that they simply exist. I have never come across a more elegant and well-put lyric in my entire life. Worth including in their entirety:

Hard time here and everywhere you go
Times is harder than ever been before

And the people are driftin' from door to door
Can't find no heaven, I don't care where they go

Hear me tell you people, just before I go
These hard times will kill you just dry long so

Well, you hear me singin' my lonesome song
These hard times can last us so very long

If I ever get off this killin' floor
I'll never get down this low no more
No-no, no-no, I'll never get down this low no more

And you say you had money, you better be sure
'Cause these hard times will drive you from door to door

Sing this song and I ain't gonna sing no more
Sing this song and I ain't gonna sing no more
These hard times will drive you from door to door

I think much of the talk about Skip James' mysteriousness is a reflection of his work rather than his actual life, even if he hesitated to give too much biographical detail to people. I imagine, as I'm sure many people do, ghosts, like Buddhist wandering ghosts, drifting door to door, finding no heaven, when he sings that line. Find me a more powerful couplet in any music you choose and I'll buy the beer.

What nails it is that this is a completely concrete tune. He wrote this in 1930, and it's about current events, and I imagine that this tune pops into my head so often these days because of the historical resonance of the Great Depression with its current sequel. It takes a powerful mind to perceive in one's immediate world--surely James in describing people wandering door to door saw a lot of that in daily life, because it was happening all the time in 1930. It's more than seeing the transcendental in the mundane. Seeing the transcendental in the mundane is a very false kind of depth, or rather its not depth at all, only smugness. Skip James knows there's no mundane and there's no transcendental at all. Things are just there and he finds the words to pass them on.