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Friday Music Cue: Stardust

Like Thomas McCarthy's 'The Visitor', Neil Jordan's 1991 film 'The Miracle' is bursting with unspoken feeling and intense yearnings, and traffics in a kind of emotional currency that's too uncomfortable, or perhaps just too subtle for a lot of people. And like 'The Visitor' few people actually saw 'The Miracle'--now the film isn't even on DVD, a real shame--this is a perfect candidate for the Criterion Collection treatment. It's not a film that should be encapsulated but rather experienced--I will say it's about the pull and danger of imagination and storytelling, and the pain and liberation of discovering, at last, the truth behind deeply buried family secrets. It's also very much about music as a potent communication of things unspoken, as in this scene with a luminous Beverly D'Angelo singing 'Stardust'.

Friday Music Cue: Stand Back (Eli Escobar Remix)

Now, I post this 80s classic without the detached, ironic, blank posture that afflicts the hipster community as described in horrified detail in Adbusters here. These hipsters have helped keep all this 80s music in the cultural mix long past when I, who was a teenager the first time it rolled around, would have imagined. In 1984 there was a sharp divide between bubble gum pop and hair metal, and the cool stuff like Bowie, X, The Smiths and The Talking Heads. Pop was a guilty pleasure at best, insipid and grating at worst. Sometimes those two aspects overlapped, of course. See: Madonna. But the synth heavy hits that MTV persuasively sold with narcotic visuals felt trifling even if they were catchy, and I figured history would soon discard them, along with my adolescence. But after a brief respite in the 90s bars and parties welcomed Corey Hart and Pat Benetar and post-Fleetwood Mac Stevie Nicks back with open skinny arms, creating a bizarre musical Groundhog Day for those of us who lived through it all the first time around. A lot of catchy tunes, to be sure, but the layer of froth on top relegates much of it to mere nostalgia. Then I discovered Eli Escobar, who may be rewriting musical history and redeeming an entire decade.

DJ and remix artist Escobar strips these glossy pop concoctions of that synthesizer pulse that, too me, dates the material badly, and he brings the beat forward, crafting a more timeless, and certainly a more funky version of the original. I first heard his work on this insane mix of Janet Jackson's 'The Pleasure Principle', where he used the existing beats like a weapon against the keyboard hum that undermined the radical edge that drove the Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis produced jam--making it harder, stranger and certainly funkier. On Stevie Nick's 'Stand Back' he's outdone himself--the 7:46 verion here is tight, driving, fresh--he keeps the signature synthesizer hook but anchors it with a tighter, angrier beat and bassline. All these 80s artists should just commision Escobar to go back and remix their stuff, peeling away the sacharine icing and revealing the true song, and the true beat, beneath it. Escobar DJs Wednesdays at Bang! on Rivington Street in NYC; his website with other cheese--and irony--free remixes is here.

Man Walks Into A Bar, The Sequel

Roommate Kyle (above, after shaving his head this weekend) and his 15 minutes of fame that came after his accidental overnight stay in Trophy Bar was chronicled in the New York Times has a second act. Well, Act 2.5 is all the blog coverage was Act 2. Maybe blog coverage was 1.5, come to think of it. Anyhow, New York Magazine honors Kyle, sort of, in the annual Reasons To Love New York issue. (Do ignore the inexplicably sour review of Trophy Bar that the story links to--one wonders just how bad the writer's day was.)

Oddly, along with the morning batch of e-mails that included news of this was the invite for my next DJ gig with Samo. The last time we DJed together at Trophy Bar was the very night Kyle got locked in there. We return to the scene of the crime Sunday, December 21st.
 
 

Friday Music Cue (on Monday): Bonjour Tristesse

I'm so overwhelmed with projects that I've been super remiss on keeping Meerkat current-look to see that change next week. Three days late, here's a Friday Music Cue: 'Bonjour Tristess' by Juliette Greco, from the 1958 Otto Preminger film. Just saw BT for the first time and found the poor little perky rich girl played by Jean Seberg to be decidely annoying, and her near incestuous relationship with her dad (David Niven) dark but unexplored. A truly terrible job of looping Seberg's dialogue cast the character in an even less sympathetic light. For a movie set on the French Riviera that stars Seberg, Niven and Deborah Kerr to leave me cold takes some doing. Great intro section here though with Greco's song, and Seberg's (or whomever's) zombiefied voice actually works in the context of these lines.

Madchester

Just back from an amazing trip to Manchester where I toured a lot of spots of music lore. Sadly, the Hacienda has been replaced by an apartment building, but on the back of the building there's a timeline of all the acts who performed there, and this quote from Ivan Chtcheglov that apparently inspired the utopian, forward-dreaming Tony Wilson when he named the place that would transform club and music culture: "Now that's finished. You won't see the Hacienda. It doesn't exist. The Hacienda must be built".

One apocryphal spot I did not get to visit (next time) was the Salford Lad's Club of Smiths' fame. On a Smiths tip, however, I did find out that the elusive, silver-voiced contrarian Morrissey will be guest DJing on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic this Friday, August 29th. The time is not certain, but will probably be around 9 a.m. PST. You can tune in live through iTunes (listed under Public) or through the player at kcrw.com. What is Morrissey listening to now? This should be pretty key.

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.