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Friday Music Cue: Sentimental Walk

Vladimir Cosma's score for "Diva" hits a high note with this tentatively romantic interlude, as does the film. On a rainy cold day in New York somehow the rain in Paris looks-and sounds-more desirable. The clip is a bit dark, but you get the drift.

Liberation Theology

Erykah Badu's album "New Amerykah" gets a savvy review from Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker--it's a invaluable primer for where Badu is coming from and where she's going, both musically and thematically. The album is challenging and strange, angry and consoling, and if you manage to get past the strange, deliberately dissonant interludes between songs you'll find a potent and intoxicating array of music.

My current favorite is the metronomic "Soldier", a call to awareness and action for a populace numbed and pacified. There's a euphoric swell of organs behind "Baptized when the levees broke" that cuts into your heart. It's followed by this passage that refers to Harriet Tubman's practice of forcing slaves to participate in their liberation; pulling a gun on them she'd say, "you march or you die".

"we gone keep marching on/till we here that freedom song/and if you think about turning back/I got the shot gun for your back/and if you think about tunrnin back?I got a shotgun on ya' back/(harriet style)"

Friday Music Cue: I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself

Friday Music Cue: Henry Lee

This note about the song from roommate Kyle Hausmann:  

Murder Ballads, the Nick Cave's collaborative album which includes "Henry Lee" done with PJ Harvey, was released in 1996, around the same time that the two artists - so says the vague Internet - had a brief but intense relationship. Some accounts claim this was an affair while Cave was with another woman; others do not reflect any infidelity. (It was perhaps Harvey's only relationship known to the public, and may not have been very secretive very long). By all accounts, Harvey ends the relationship, and Cave is devastated.

The the story the lyrics tell, the history of the two singers (whatever that history actually is), and the way the two touch and look at each other...

"

Friday Music Cue: Superstar

Outside of the Luther Vandross version of the same song (Download luther_vandross_superstar.mp3)I’d say Sonic Youth’s ”Superstar” is the most rad and poignant Carpenters cover.

Friday Music Cue: Dirty Old Man

This week’s Cue is Dirty Old Man by The Three Degrees.  Amazing niteclub set, one tight Philly jam and what are perhaps the three greatest drag perfomaces ever committed to film. Bite it, Dreamgirls!

Friday Music Cues #1: ABC

Before marriage and fatherhood crushed John Jay's spirit he called every Friday morning on the way to work and played a rousing song for me through his Blackberry. The sound quality was terrible (why I gotta hate on Blackberry? Because they continue to ignore our overtures for sponsorship, that's why. But we're still open to discussion, Big Evil Berry!), but it was always a sweet and even moving gesture, and on certain caffeine-laced mornings JJ would break into his best Bill Murray style lounge singer voice and accompany New Order, The Smiths, or The English Beat. Pretty narrow repertoire, but a good one.

In homage to those halcyon days I’m going to try posting some musical clips each Friday a.m.. This little scene is from Clerks 2, which I completely missed when it came out, but flying back from London on Virgin Atlantic it was one of the movies you could call up on the tiny screen on the back of the seat in front of you (the best way to travel is immersed in films and back episodes of BBC series) and it really got to me. The film was a huge step beyond the charming and clever but lo-fi original. C2 is a living cinematic universe, geeky and irreverent (the anti-Lord Of The Rings rant is sublime) but surprisingly complex and ultimately quite moving. Rosario Dawson is also insanely hot here and reminds me of my super-fine cousin Allison. Maybe it’s the naughty librarian glasses they both wear or the fact that she too has all the fly dance moves down. In this scene, when she’s trying to teach Dante how to dance, you feel yourself falling in love with her as he so clearly is; the choreographed dance number midway through is a ballsy act of faith on Smith’s part that connects the whole film to a deeper realm--the place where the magic that old musicals believed in exists, and people break into song and dance and fall in love and are redeemed on a sunny afternoon-even in New Jersey. All in all: best sequel since Aliens.

Soft and Wet and Slightly Unformed

There’s an ace show of remarkable photos of a pre-fame Prince at the Black and White Gallery in New York, through March 17^th.

Photo: Robert Whitman

Shot in 1978 just before Prince’s music career really began, his look in the photos is Superfly/Beat Street and a little gritty, but those bewitching doe eyes haven’t changed. Prince’s musical hero at the time was Joni Mitchell, and she’s recalled saying she remembers seeing him in the front row, staring at her with his enormous eyes. It’s amazing to look at this young man on the street of Minneapolis and think of how much extraordinary music would come out of him.

 

Waiting In Vain (I Don't Want To)

On the way home from seeing Dean and Britta at the super-plush National Arts Club last night (more on that tomorrow, but check out Lorenzo’s pics here), I was delighted to come upon my favorite subway musician, Corey Frye, on the platform of the Union Square stop on the L. I’d first seen him last summer, on a Sunday afternoon in August when I’d been out too late the night before and the relentless summer heat had ceased to be something you could reckon with. It was the 14^th street stop on the Downtown F that day, and Frye was perched on a little stool, strumming his guitar and singing in a voice both plaintive and consoling, joyful and tremulous. It was that rare occasion where you’re glad the train takes forever to arrive. I can't quite recall the songs, but I think it was Van Morrison, Marley, the kind of things that sound nice around a campfire. He sang ‘Waiting In Vain’ that day, and the unfettered tenderness in his delivery caught the six or so of us standing around a little off guard. A lovely young woman with already-reddened eyes sitting alone on a bench began crying quietly.

I checked out Frye’s MySpace page and while his original compositions are sweet, on first listen they didn’t capture my imagination. However, I don’t think it’s his songwriting that lacks. Frye needs an audience to connect with, and even the harried, disinterested iPodded drones of the subway seem to respond to him, and he in turn opens up. A current is passed, and exchange completed. Like James Baldwin said about jazz music in a nightclub, ‘it was made and used on the spot’.

I saw him on one particularly raw day in early February and he looked sad and lost, as did everyone else. But last night he turned his face upwards when he sang, and his eyes radiated kindness, and his feet twisted and turned as he navigated the chords. I thought of the Joni Mitchell line:

Kids with the jitters in their legs
And those wide, wide open stares

Perhaps I was particularly attuned to such magic after the show I'd just seen, but as the Brooklyn-bound L and the 8^th Avenue-bound L both pulled in on opposite sides of the platform I could barely hear them, and Frye kept right on singing.

Palorazzi

Check out the array of new shots on Meerkat’s longtime associate Lorenzo di Flaneur’s flickr page. Lorenzo is the nom de photo of a fellow who’s worked in the indie film scene and camped out at some cool bars and music venues around the world for the last decade plus, leading me to define his job description at one point as “attending every important cocktail party in the world.”  He got friendly with a lot of cool cats along the way and snapped pictures all the time. I’m hereby coining the term ‘Palorazzi’ in reference to Lorenzo, which I define as the taking of photos of celebrated and talented people but  from the perspective of a fellow party-goer than a sweaty shouting man on the other side of the velvet rope. Lest this be confused with something fabricated like the patent unreality of reality TV, homeboy really is pally with a lot of these folks, and as a professional partygoer with an iconic photographer’s eye, you’ll often feel as though you were living his very rock and roll, very glamorous life, too. And he doesn’t discriminate on the basis of fame--to him the go-go boy at Eastern Bloc can be as fascinating as the Oscar nominee (has anyone else noticed the tattoos on Helen Mirren’s hands-very visible as she poses with all the awards she’s picking up lately? Could she get any cooler?). I’m so completely into his vision and am making it a project to promote his work—I’d so much rather see shots of these folk in their natural habitat, drinks in hand, than standing and posing for a bunch of soulless photographers in the employ of Bonnie Fuller. Check out his take on Helen, Parker, Jake, Lina, Madsteez, Antony, JCM, Yoko, and Joe G-L (above).