It was quite a week for President Obama. On Monday, we all got to hear the revealing interview Obama recorded in the Los Angeles garage of comedian Marc Maron. Midweek, the Supreme Court rejected the latest legal challenge to the Affordable Healthcare Act, his signature piece of legislation. Now on Friday — the same day that Obama welcomed the court’s landmark decision on gay marriage — the President solemnly presided over the funeral of Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine African-Americans murdered in a Charleston church last week.
You can watch his eulogy above in its entirety, but we’re fast forwarding to the end, when, rather unexpectedly, the president led the congregation in singing Amazing Grace, a Christian hymn written in 1779 by John Newton. In an ironic historic footnote, Newton was the captain of English slave ships and wrote the spiritual song when his ship, buffeted by a storm, nearly met its demise. This marked the beginning of a spiritual conversion for Newton, during which he remained active in the slave trade. Only years later did he repent and focus his energy on abolishing slavery. He would write ‘Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade,’ an influential tract that “described the horrors of the Slave Trade and his role in it.”
Like many things, the descendants of slaves took the good from “Amazing Grace” and made it their own.
Note: the singing starts at the 35:20 mark if you really need to move things along.
Four months earlier, roughly 10,000 Confederate and Union soldiers perished—and another 30,000 were wounded—during three days of fighting in the area. The Battle of Gettysburg ended in a major victory for the North, though Lincoln was frustrated that General George Meade failed to pursue Robert E. Lee’s retreating forces. (Whether or not such a move could have shortened the war is a matter of some debate.)
Lincoln welcomed the invitation to the cemetery’s dedication as a chance to frame the significance of the war in terms of the Declaration of Independence. Slave owners frequently cited the constitutionality of their actions, for unlike the Declaration, the Constitution did not hold that all men were created equal.
The day’s other speaker, former Harvard President and Secretary of State Edward Everett, praised the “eloquent simplicity & appropriateness” of the president’s two minute speech, perhaps blushing a bit, given that he himself had held the podium for two hours.
A year and a half later, when Lincoln was assassinated, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts summed it up:
That speech, uttered at the field of Gettysburg…and now sanctified by the martyrdom of its author, is a monumental act. In the modesty of his nature he said “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.” He was mistaken. The world at once noted what he said, and will never cease to remember it.
(How sorry those gentleman would be to learn just how little most Americans today know of the the Battle of Gettysburg. Fear not, though. A restored version of Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary is coming to PBS this fall.)
Please note that Lincoln’s brief remarks were carefully prepared, and not scribbled on the back of an envelope during the train ride that took him to Gettysburg. As a nation, we love folksy origin stories, and depending on the size of one’s penmanship, it is indeed possible to fit 272 words on an envelope, but it’s a myth… no matter what Johnny Cash may say in his introduction.
Opportunities to meet one’s heroes can go any number of ways. They can be underwhelming and disappointing, embarrassing and awkward, or—as Tom Waits found out in meeting Keith Richards and Charles Bukowski—completely overwhelming. Both encounters became too much for Waits for the same reason: when you “try to match them drink for drink,” he says in an interview, “you’re a novice, you’re a child. You’re drinking with a roaring pirate.” Waits “wasn’t able to hang in there” with these veteran imbibers—“They’re made out of different stock. They’re like dockworkers.” But of course it wasn’t just their legendary drinking that impressed the sandpaper-voiced L.A. troubadour.
Waits calls both Richards and Bukowski artistic “father figures”—two of many stand-ins for his own absent father—but it’s Bukowski who had the most profound effect on the singer and songwriter. Both Southern California natives, both keen observers of America’s seedier side, as writers they share a number of common themes and obsessions.
When he discovered Bukowski through the poet’s “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column in the LA Free Press, Waits observed that he “seemed to be a writer of the common people and street people, looking in the dark corners where no one seems to want to go.” Waits has gone there, and always—like his literary hero—returned with a hell of a story. His songwriting voice can channel “Hank,” as Bukowski’s friends knew him, and his speaking voice can too—with sharp glints of dry, sardonic humor and surprising vulnerability, though much more ragged and pitched several octaves lower.
Waits’ artistic kinship with Bukowski makes him better-suited than perhaps anyone else to read the down-and-out, Dostoevsky-loving, alcoholic’s work. At the top of the post, hear him read Bukowski’s “The Laughing Heart,” a poem of weary, almost resigned exhortation to “be on the watch / There are ways out / There is light somewhere,” in the midst of life’s darkness. Below it, Waits reads “Nirvana,” a poem we’ve featured before in several renditions. Here, the poet tells a story—of loneliness, impermanence, and a brief moment of solace. For comparison, hear Bukowski himself, in his high, nasally voice, read “The Secret of My Endurance” above. Waits almost became more than just a Bukowski lover and reader; he was once up for the role of Bukowski’s alter-ego Henry Chinaski in Barbet Schroeder’s 1987 Bukowski adaptation, Barfly. “I was offered a lot of money,” says Waits, “but I just couldn’t do it.” Mickey Rourke could, and did, but as I hear Waits read these poems, I like to imagine the film that would have been had he taken that part.
Here, we have a series of taut and stone-simple Neil Young songs that fit together under a catchall concept (about companies wielding extraordinary influence over many aspects of our quality of life), each powered by its own supply of righteous fury. Enjoyment of it probably depends less on whether you agree with Young’s positions than on how much tolerance you have for a mantra, repeated frequently, using the three syllables that make up the trade name Monsanto. It also helps to like your harangues set to three-chord rock and expressed through triadic melodies. This is not subtle, Harvest Moon Neil, brooding at the piano. This is ornery, snarly Neil.
Meanwhile, if you actually do side with Neil’s political positions, you’ll probably find some amusement in today’s news that Young, having blasted Donald Trump for using his 1989 song “Rockin’ in the Free World,” turned around and gave Bernie Sanders free license to use the song. And that he did.
Music is dangerous and powerful, and can be, without intending to, a political weapon. All authoritarian regimes have understood this, including repressive elements in the U.S. throughout the Cold War. I remember having books handed to me before the Berlin Wall came down, by family friends fearful of the evils of popular music—especially punk rock and metal, but also pretty much everything else. The descriptions in these paranoid tracts of the bands I knew and loved sounded so ludicrous and hyperbolic that I couldn’t help suspect each was in fact a work of satire. They were at the very least anachronistic, yet ideal, types of Poe’s Law.
The mechanisms of state repression in the Soviet Union on the eve of perestroika overmatched comparatively mild attempts at music censorship made by the U.S. government, but the propaganda mechanisms were similar. As in the alarmed pamphlets and books handed to me in churches and summer camps, the Komsomol list describes each band in obtuse and absurd terms, each one a category of the “type of propaganda” on offer.
Black Sabbath, a legitimately scary—and politically astute—band gets pegged along with Iron Maiden for “violence” and “religious obscurantism.” (Nazareth is similarly guilty of “violence” and “religious mysticism.”) A great many artists are charged with only “violence” or with “sex,” which in some cases was kind of their whole métier. A handful of punk bands—the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Stranglers—are cited for violence, and also simply charged with “punk,” a crime given as the Ramones’ only offense. There are a few oddly specific charges: Pink Floyd is guilty of a “distortion of Soviet foreign policy (‘Soviet aggression in Afghanistan’)” and Talking Heads endorse the “myth of the Soviet military threat.” A couple hilariously incongruous tags offer LOLs: Yazoo and Depeche Mode, two of the gentlest bands of the period, get called out for “punk, violence.” Kiss and the Village People (above), two of the silliest bands on the list, are said to propagate, “neofascism” and “violence.”
Sex Pistols: punk, violence
B‑52s: punk, violence
Madness: punk, violence
Clash: punk, violence
Stranglers: punk, violence
Kiss: neofascism, punk, violence
Crocus: violence, cult of strong personality
Styx: violence, vandalism
Iron Maiden: violence, religious obscuritanism
Judas Priest: anticommunism, racism
AC/DC: neofascism, violence
Sparks: neofascism, racism
Black Sabbath: violence, religious obscuritanism
Alice Cooper: violence, vandalism
Nazareth: violence, religious mysticism
Scorpions: violence
Gengis Khan: anticommunism, nationalism
UFO: violence
Pink Floyd (1983): distortion of Soviet foreign policy (“Soviet agression in Afghanistan”)***
Talking Heads: myth of the Soviet military threat
Perron: eroticism
Bohannon: eroticism
Originals: sex
Donna Summer: eroticism
Tina Turner: sex
Junior English: sex
Canned Heat: homosexuality
Munich Machine: eroticism
Ramones: punk
Van Halen: anti-soviet propaganda
Julio Iglesias: neofascism
Yazoo: punk, violence
Depeche Mode: punk, violence
Village People: violence
Ten CC: neofascism
Stooges: violence
Boys: punk, violence
Blondie: punk, violence
The list circulated for “the purpose of intensifying control over the activities of discoteques.” It comes to us from Alexei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, which cites it as an example, writes one reader, of “the contradictory nature of Soviet life, where as citizens participated in the ritualized, pro forma ideological discourse, this very discourse allowed them to carve out what they called ‘normal meaningful life’ that went beyond the state’s ideology.” A large part of that “normal” life involved circulating bootlegs of ideologically suspect music on improvised materials like discarded and stolen X‑Rays. The Komsomol eventually wised up. As Yurchak documents in his book, they co-opted local amateur rock bands and promoted their own events as a counter-attack on the influence of bourgeois culture. You can probably guess how much success they had with this strategy.
See the full list of thirty-eight bands and their “type of propaganda” above.
Two years ago, in a post on the pioneering composer of the original Doctor Who theme, we wrote that “the early era of experimental electronic music belonged to Delia Derbyshire.” Derbyshire—who almost gave Paul McCartney a version of “Yesterday” with an electronic backing in place of strings—helped invent the early electronic music of the sixties through her work with the Radiophonic Workshop, the sound effects laboratory of the BBC. She went on to form one of the most influential, if largely obscure, electronic acts of the decade, White Noise. And yet, calling the early eras of the electronic music hers is an exaggeration. Of course her many collaborators deserve mention, as well as musicians like Bruce Haack, Pierre Henry, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, and so many others. But what gets almost completely left out of many histories of electronic music, as with so many other histories, is the prominent role so many women besides Derbyshire played in the development of the sounds we now hear all around us all the time.
In recognition of this fact, musician, DJ, and “escaped housewife/schoolteacher” Barbara Golden devoted two episodes of her KPFA radio program “Crack o’ Dawn” to women in electronic music, once in 2010 and again in 2013. She shares each broadcast with co-host Jon Leidecker (“Wobbly”), and in each segment, the two banter in casual radio show style, offering history and context for each musician and composer. Recently highlighted on Ubu’s Twitter stream, the first show, “Women in Electronic Music 1938–1982 Part 1” (above) gives Derbyshire her due, with three tracks from her, including the Doctor Who theme.
It also includes music from twenty one other composers, beginning with Clara Rockmore, a refiner and popularizer of the theremin, that weird instrument designed to simulate a high, tremulous human voice. Also featured is Wendy Carlos’s “Timesteps,” an original piece from her A Clockwork Orange score. (You’ll remember her enthralling synthesizer recreations of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony from the film).
The second show, above, fills in several gaps in the original broadcast and “could easily be six hours” says co-host Leidecker, given the sheer amount of electronic music out there composed and recorded by women over the past seventy years. This show includes one of our host Golden’s own compositions, “Melody Sumner Carnahan,” as well as music from Laurie Anderson and musique concrete composer Doris Hays. These two broadcasts alone cover an enormous range of stylistic and technological ground, but for even more discographical history of women in electronic music, see the playlist below, compiled by “Nerdgirl” Antye Greie-Ripatti for Women’s Day, 2014. Commissioned by Club Transmediale Berlin, the mix includes such well-known names as Yoko Ono, Bjork, and M.I.A., as well as foremothers Derbyshire and Carlos, and dozens more.
In lieu of the radio-show chatter of Golden and Leidecker, we have Greie-Ripatti’s post detailing each artist’s time period, country of origin, and contributions to electronic music history. Many of the composers represented here worked for major radio and film studios, scored feature films (like 1956’s Forbidden Planet), invented and innovated new instruments and techniques, wrote for orchestras, and passed on their knowledge as educators and producers. Greie-Ripatti’s page quotes a Danish electronic producer and performer saying “there is a lot of women in electronic music… invisible women.” Thanks to efforts like hers and Golden’s, these pioneering creators need no longer go unseen or, more importantly, unheard.
Saxophonist Ornette Coleman died yesterday at age 85, leaving behind one of jazz’s most interesting and illustrious legacies. Coleman strode into the fifties and sixties with a handful of vanguard artists—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck—and, as the New York Times writes, “widened the options in jazz.” This meant taking jazz places it had not been before, eventually into the psychedelic jams on Coleman’s 1971 Science Fiction album, which features one track with “a ‘Purple Haze’-styled bassline through a wah-wah pedal,” JazzTimes wrote in 2000, while “Ornette overdubs on trumpet and violin and Dewey Redman wails on musette over Ed Blackwell’s inimitable groove.” The track “Happy House” seems to bend space and time in new directions, pairing two trumpet players and two drummers—one for each ear in stereo recording.
Coleman’s free form willingness to experiment made him a sought after collaborator (at least once against his will) with artists who also bent, or invented, their own genre boundaries. Thirty-two years after Science Fiction, Coleman made an appearance on the 2003 Edgar Allan Poe-tribute The Raven, a late album by Lou Reed, the pioneering artist who took pop and R&B down a dark, psychedelic path.
The resulting collaboration, which you can hear at the top of the post, just barely holds together in a gospel/free jazz/funk groove that hypnotizes even as it bewilders listeners, giving us an ensemble of musicians each hearing slightly different rhythms and timbres in the repetitive drone of Reed’s lead vocal.
Reed was excited about Coleman’s contribution, writing on his website, “THIS IS ONE OF MY GREATEST MOMENTS.” The jazz great “did seven versions—all different and all amazing and wondrous.” You can hear four above. “Each take,” Reed explains, “is Ornette playing against a different instrument—ie drum, guitar 1 guitar 2 etc. Listen to this!!!” And listen you should. Try to figure out which of the seven takes made the album version above. Then listen to them again. Then read this interview between Jacques Derrida and Coleman in which he explains how he came to develop his sinuous style, one writes the New York Times Ben Ratliff, less beholden to the rules of harmony and rhythm” and more in tune with “an intuitive, collective musical language.”
Johnny Rotten aka John Lydon’s closing words at the last Sex Pistols gig (watch it online) seemed apt this week when Virgin Bank announced their current line of credit cards would feature the band’s signature artwork. That Jamie Reid’s famous cut-n-paste zine-cum-Situationalist aesthetic has turned into a bit of capitalist plastic for your wallet is an irony that the Sex Pistols might never have seen coming back in 1976, when they played the “gig that changed the world.”
Recreated above in a clip from Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, the June 4, 1976 gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall spawned the British punk movement and the post-punk movement that was soon to follow in a scant two years. For in the audience were future members of the Buzzcocks Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley (who organized the gig and opened for the Pistols); a nascent version of Joy Division; the two founders of Factory Records Martin Hannet and Tony Wilson; Mark E. Smith of The Fall, Mick Hucknall of Frantic Elevators and much later Simply Red; and a one Steven Patrick Morrissey, who would form The Smiths. (That’s Steve Coogan playing Tony Wilson in the clip, by the way.)
The Sex Pistols played 13 songs in their set, including covers of Dave Berry’s “Don’t Give Me No Lip Child,” Paul Revere and the Raiders “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone”, the Small Faces “What’cha Gonna Do About It,” The Stooges’ “No Fun”, and The Who’s “Substitute.” When asked for an encore, they played “No Fun” again.
Of their originals, their two most famous songs–”God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the U.K.” had yet to be written–but “Pretty Vacant,” “Problems,” “New York,” “No Feelings” are all here in their raw form.
A few songs never made it onto their first album, but can be found on their heavily bootlegged demo tape they recorded the same year.
Also of note is how non “punk” the members are dressed, not in the sense of how Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood would design, package and sell the fashion. The boys look closer to the working class jobbers of early Devo and the Stooges. Plus: no Sid Vicious. He’d come later. That’s Glen Matlock on bass, who left the band in early ’77 after clashing with Lydon. He went on to form Rich Kids with Midge Ure.
When the Pistols returned to London, everybody in Manchester and beyond had started a band, or at least that’s how it felt. By the time the Pistols got back to London, The Clash and The Damned had formed. And even if you hadn’t been at Lesser Free Trade Hall, you told your friends you had been and picked up a guitar.
The Sex Pistols would return three weeks later to play the Hall again, playing to hundreds this time and solidifying the dawn of the punk era.
Below is a BBC documentary on the famous gig, tellingly titled I Swear I Was There, which has an accompanying book.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
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