Tom Morello Responds to Angry Fans Who Suddenly Realize That Rage Against the Machine’s Music Is Political: “What Music of Mine DIDN’T Contain Political BS?”

I, Danc­ing Bear,” a song by an obscure folk artist who goes by the name Bir­d­engine, begins thus:

There are some things that I just do not care to know

It’s a love­ly lit­tle tune, if maudlin and macabre are your thing, a song one might almost call anti-polit­i­cal. It is the art of solip­sism, denial, an inward­ness that dances over the abyss of pure self, navel gaz­ing for its own sake. It is Kaf­ka-esque, pathet­ic, and hys­ter­i­cal. I love it.

My appre­ci­a­tion for this weird, out­sider New Roman­ti­cism does not entail a belief that art and cul­ture should be “apo­lit­i­cal,” what­ev­er that is.

Or that artists, writ­ers, musi­cians, actors, ath­letes, or whomev­er should shut up about pol­i­tics and stick to what they do best, talk about them­selves.

The idea that artists should avoid pol­i­tics seems so per­va­sive that fans of some of the most bla­tant­ly polit­i­cal, rad­i­cal artists have nev­er noticed the pol­i­tics, because, I guess, they just couldn’t be there.

One such fan just got dunked on, as they say, a whole bunch on Twit­ter when he raged against Tom Morel­lo for the “polit­i­cal bs.”

That’s Tom Morel­lo of Rage Against the Machine, whose debut 1992 album informed us that the police and the Klan work hand in hand, and that cops are the “cho­sen whites” for state-sanc­tioned mur­der. That Rage Against the Machine, who raged against the same Machine on every album: “Bam, here’s the plan; Moth­er­fuck Uncle Sam.”

The poor sod was burned so bad­ly he delet­ed his account, but the laughs at his expense kept com­ing. Even Morel­lo respond­ed.

Why? Because the dis­grun­tled for­mer fan is not just one lone crank who didn’t get it. Many peo­ple over the years have expressed out­rage at find­ing out there’s so much pol­i­tics in their cul­ture, even in a band like Rage that could not have been less sub­tle. Many, like for­mer lever-puller of the Machine, Paul Ryan, seem to have cyn­i­cal­ly missed the point and turned them into work­out music. Morel­lo’s had to point this out a lot. (Dit­to Spring­steen.)

This uncrit­i­cal con­sump­tion of cul­ture with­out a thought about icky polit­i­cal issues is maybe one rea­son we have a sep­a­rate polit­i­cal class, paid hand­some­ly to do the dirty work while the rest of us go shop­ping. It’s a recipe for mass igno­rance and fas­cism.

You might think me crazy if I told you that the CIA is part­ly respon­si­ble for our expec­ta­tion that art and cul­ture should be apo­lit­i­cal. The Agency did, after all, fol­low the lead of the New Crit­ics, who exclud­ed all out­side polit­i­cal and social con­sid­er­a­tions from art (so they said).

Influ­en­tial lit­er­ary edi­tors and writ­ing pro­gram direc­tors on the Agency pay­roll made sure to fall in line, pro­mot­ing a cer­tain kind of writ­ing that focused on the indi­vid­ual and ele­vat­ed psy­cho­log­i­cal con­flict over social con­cerns. This influ­ence, writes The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion, “flat­tened lit­er­a­ture” and set the bound­aries for what was cul­tur­al­ly accept­able. (Still, CIA-fund­ed jour­nals like The Paris Review pub­lished dozens of “polit­i­cal” writ­ers like Richard Wright, Gabriel Gar­cia Mar­quez, and James Bald­win.)

Then there’s the whole busi­ness of Hol­ly­wood film as a source of Pen­ta­gon-fund­ed pro­pa­gan­da, sold as innocu­ous, apo­lit­i­cal enter­tain­ment….

When it comes to jour­nal­ism, an ide­al of objec­tiv­i­ty, like Emerson’s inno­cent, dis­em­bod­ied trans­par­ent eye, became a stan­dard only in the 20th cen­tu­ry, osten­si­bly to weed out polit­i­cal bias. But that ide­al serves the inter­ests of pow­er more often than not. If media rep­re­sents exist­ing pow­er rela­tion­ships with­out ques­tion­ing their legit­i­ma­cy, it can claim objec­tiv­i­ty and bal­ance; if it chal­lenges pow­er, it becomes too “polit­i­cal.”

The adjec­tive is weaponized against art and cul­ture that makes cer­tain peo­ple who have pow­er uncom­fort­able. Say­ing “I don’t like polit­i­cal bs in my cul­ture” is say­ing “I don’t care to know the pol­i­tics are there.”

If, after decades of pump­ing “Killing in the Name,” you final­ly noticed them, then all that’s hap­pened is you’ve final­ly noticed. Cul­ture has always includ­ed the polit­i­cal, whether those pol­i­tics are shaped by mon­archs or state agen­cies or shout­ed in rap met­al songs (just ask Ice‑T) and fought over on Twit­ter. Maybe now it’s just get­ting hard­er to look away.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pol­i­tics & Phi­los­o­phy of the Bauhaus Design Move­ment: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

Love the Art, Hate the Artist: How to Approach the Art of Dis­graced Artists

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Is This the Most Accurate Fan Cover of the Beatles Ever? Hear a Faithful Recreation of the Abbey Road Medley

I once thought I might be from the last gen­er­a­tion to have spent a good part of their youth in front of a pair of speak­ers, play­ing their par­ents’ Bea­t­les records until they mem­o­rized every note. Abbey Road was a spe­cial favorite in our house. I must have heard the out­ro med­ley a hun­dred thou­sand times or more. Now that reis­sue vinyl is every­where, or some­thing resem­bling the orig­i­nal records, there are loads of peo­ple who can say the same thing—and loads more who have streamed Abbey Road on repeat until it’s seared into their mem­o­ries.

I ask those peo­ple now, young and old and mid­dle-aged, whose famil­iar­i­ty with Paul McCartney’s voice on “Gold­en Slumbers/Carry that Weight/The End” comes from this kind of obses­sive lis­ten­ing: do you think the cov­er ver­sion above post­ed on YouTube by Andy­Boy 63 sounds exact­ly like the record­ing made at EMI Stu­dios (renamed Abbey Road after the album) in 1969? Answer before lis­ten­ing to the orig­i­nal “Gold­en Slum­bers,” below. A fair num­ber of YouTube com­menters say they mis­took this for the album ver­sion or an out­take.

DUDE I THOUGHT I WAS LISTENING TO THE REAL THING I DIDNT REALIZE IT WAS A COVER!!! YOU SOUND JUST LIKE PAULIE

By far the most accu­rate cov­er ever of any song.

I thought this was the Bea­t­les for about three min­utes.… I knew it was­n’t Abbey Road but thought it was some track off the anthol­o­gy. This is good enough to make me think it’s actu­al­ly the Bea­t­les!

It sounds to me like a cov­er ver­sion that approx­i­mates the tim­bre of dynam­ics of the orig­i­nal, impres­sive­ly so, but is also clear­ly not The Bea­t­les.

We can hear the dif­fer­ences between Sir Paul’s voice and piano and Andy’s record­ing in the first few phras­es, but it’s not as if Andy has set out to deceive lis­ten­ers, mark­ing the songs as cov­ers in the descrip­tion. His inten­tion is to pay trib­ute. “As a child,” he writes on his YouTube chan­nel, “I always want­ed to learn to play gui­tar, bass, drums and piano so that I could play and sing my favourite Bea­t­les songs.” You’ll find sev­er­al more, includ­ing “Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band/With a Lit­tle Help from My Friends,” just above. Again, it sounds to me like a faith­ful­ly earnest cov­er cre­at­ed as a labor of love. And again, for many rea­sons, not the Bea­t­les. (His cov­er of “Help!” on the oth­er hand is scar­i­ly good. I think he does a bet­ter Lennon impres­sion.)

You’ve got to hand it to Andy for tak­ing his fan­dom to this lev­el of imi­ta­tion. The sin­cer­est form of flat­tery may not pro­duce the best cov­er ver­sion, but it is an excel­lent way to show off one’s musi­cian­ship. Still, no one does McCart­ney bet­ter than McCart­ney (see him play him­self below).

Oth­er artists play­ing his songs might sound best doing it as them­selves. But as an exer­cise in stu­dious recre­ation of Bea­t­les arrange­ments, Andy­Boy 63’s proves he’s even more of a fan than those who can hum every bar of Abbey Road with­out miss­ing a note. While we war­ble “Here Comes the Sun” in the show­er, he’s sin­gle-hand­ed­ly, per­sua­sive­ly rere­cord­ed some of The Bea­t­les’ most famous songs. He’s also cov­ered Lennon’s solo hits and songs by Bud­dy Hol­ly and Elvis, as well as releas­ing orig­i­nal music. Check it out here.

And for an absolute­ly fab ver­sion of the Abbey Road med­ley, watch the Fab Faux’s pret­ty impec­ca­ble ver­sion right below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Paul McCartney’s Con­cep­tu­al Draw­ings For the Abbey Road Cov­er and Mag­i­cal Mys­tery Tour Film

Bea­t­les Trib­ute Band “The Fab Faux” Per­forms Live an Amaz­ing­ly Exact Repli­ca of the Orig­i­nal Abbey Road Med­ley

Hear 100 Amaz­ing Cov­er Ver­sions of Bea­t­les Songs

209 Bea­t­les Songs in 209 Days: Mem­phis Musi­cian Cov­ers The Bea­t­les’ Song­book

The Band Every­one Thought Was The Bea­t­les: Revis­it the Klaatu Con­spir­a­cy of 1976

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When Lucy Lawless Impersonated Stevie Nicks & Imagined Her as the Owner of a Bad Tex-Mex Restaurant: A Cult Classic SNL Skit

What we wouldn’t give to trav­el back in time to Sedona, Ari­zona for a non-social­ly-dis­tanced $2.99 Tues­day night bur­ri­to spe­cial at Ste­vie Nicks’ Faji­ta Roundup, the hun­dredth best restau­rant in this 161-restau­rant town accord­ing to one rat­ings site.

Alas, the clos­est this Fleet­wood Mac‑flavored Tex-Mex estab­lish­ment has ever come to phys­i­cal exis­tence was in Octo­ber 1998 when actor Lucy Law­less, famous then as now for play­ing Xena the War­rior Princess, was host­ing Sat­ur­day Night Live.

The day before the Wednes­day table read to deter­mine which sketch­es will make it on air, writer Hugh Fink got wind of Law­less’ Ste­vie Nicks imper­son­ation (she also does a mean Chrissie Hyn­de…)

Fink thought this was some­thing to build on, inspired by his dad’s Fleet­wood Mac fan­dom, and the fact that Nicks’ star had dimmed a bit since the band’s 70’s hey­day, when its mem­bers’ inter­per­son­al rela­tions were a hot top­ic and Rumours, still the 8th best sell­ing album of all time, dom­i­nat­ed.

He joined forces with fel­low staff writer, Nicks fan Scott Wainio, tar­ry­ing ’til the wee hours of Wednes­day morn­ing to begin cast­ing about for com­ic ideas of how the sexy, shawl-draped fairy god­moth­er of rock ‘n’ roll might spend her off duty hours, now that “Lind­say Buck­ing­ham and cocaine” were in the rear view.

They decid­ed that hav­ing her own a bar­gain-priced local eatery sim­i­lar to the ones Fink remem­bered din­ing in as a tour­ing stand up was their best bet…and what more fit­ting locale than New Age mec­ca Sedona?

Plot-dri­ven SNL skits often peter out en route from a strong open­ing premise to the end­ing.

As a com­mer­cial par­o­dy, Ste­vie Nicks’ Faji­ta Roundup has no such trou­ble.

As Fink recent­ly recalled in an inter­view with The Ringer’s Dan Devine:

I want­ed this com­mer­cial to come off as not a classy, nation­al­ly pro­duced ad, but clear­ly a cheap, local­ly pro­duced com­mer­cial for a shit­ty restau­rant and that’s why, even in the script, at the time, I put in those cut­aways of, like, real­ly unap­peal­ing, bad-look­ing food with the price, and adver­tis­ing spe­cials. Comed­ical­ly, I thought it’d be even fun­nier if the restau­rant was cheap. The research depart­ment had to get me pho­tos of the Mex­i­can food, which I would approve. I would tell them, ‘No, I want it to look shit­ti­er than that. That looks too good.

The research depart­ment def­i­nite­ly deliv­ered. As did New Zealan­der Law­less, though she lacked the cul­tur­al ref­er­ence points to get the joke, and game as she was, dis­creet­ly tried to get pro­duc­er Lorne Michaels to pull the skit, wor­ried that it was a lead bal­loon.

It came by its laughs hon­est­ly in per­for­mance, the audi­ence eat­ing up retooled Fleet­wood Mac hits pro­mot­ing bur­ri­tos and nachos, but with Youtube some 8 years away, Ste­vie Nicks’ Faji­ta Round Up fad­ed into obscu­ri­ty….

It took a man with vision and a long mem­o­ry to bring it back.

In 2012, Matthew Amador truf­fled up the fond­ly remem­bered clip and start­ed a Face­book page for the hypo­thet­i­cal restau­rant, large­ly so he could claim it had catered the end-of-year intern-appre­ci­a­tion buf­fet at the cast­ing agency where he was work­ing.

The first likes came from the duti­ful interns, but even­tu­al­ly the page attract­ed oth­er like­mind­ed fans, who’d caught the orig­i­nal per­for­mance over a decade before.

It has since migrat­ed to Twit­ter, where “Stevie”—the first female dou­ble inductee to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame —is eager­ly await­ing reopen­ing while remind­ing her fol­low­ers that the Roundup’s tables “have always been a MINIMUM of 6’ apart, giv­ing you a safer din­ing expe­ri­ence you’ll nev­er for­get and giv­ing me plen­ty of room to twirl depend­ing on the length of my fringe.”

View the full tran­script here. And yes, you are cor­rect, that’s Jim­my Fal­lon at the piano, in his 3rd SNL appear­ance.

via The Ringer and Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ste­vie Nicks “Shows Us How to Kick Ass in High-Heeled Boots” in a 1983 Women’s Self Defense Man­u­al

How Fleet­wood Mac Makes A Song: A Video Essay Explor­ing the “Son­ic Paint­ings” on the Clas­sic Album, Rumours

Actress Lucy Law­less Per­forms the Pro­to-Fem­i­nist Com­e­dy “Lysis­tra­ta” for The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Pod­cast

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

How Jazz Helped Fuel the 1960s Civil Rights Movement

Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em stab us!
Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em tar and feath­er us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

—Charles Min­gus, “Fables of Faubus”

In 1957, Arkansas Gov­er­nor Orval Faubus decid­ed that integration—mandated three years ear­li­er by Brown v. Board of Ed.—constituted such a state of emer­gency that he mobi­lized the Nation­al Guard to pre­vent nine black stu­dents from going to school. An out­raged Charles Min­gus respond­ed with the lyrics to “Fables of Faubus,” a com­po­si­tion that first appeared on his cel­e­brat­ed Min­gus Ah Um in 1959.

Those who know the album may be puzzled—there are no lyrics on that record­ing. Colum­bia Records, notes Michael Ver­i­ty, found them “so incen­di­ary that they refused to allow them to be record­ed.” Min­gus re-record­ed the song the fol­low­ing year for Can­did Records, “lyrics and all, on Charles Min­gus Presents Charles Min­gus.” The iras­ci­ble bassist and bandleader’s words “offer some of the most bla­tant and harsh­est cri­tiques of Jim Crow atti­tudes in all of jazz activism.”

Min­gus’ expe­ri­ence with Colum­bia shows the line most jazz artists had to walk in the ear­ly years of the Civ­il Rights move­ment. Sev­er­al of Min­gus’ elders, like Louis Arm­strong and Duke Elling­ton, refrained from mak­ing pub­lic state­ments about racial injus­tice, for which they were lat­er harsh­ly crit­i­cized.

But between Min­gus’ two ver­sions of “Fables of Faubus,” jazz rad­i­cal­ly broke with old­er tra­di­tions that catered to and depend­ed on white audi­ences. “’If you don’t like it, don’t lis­ten,’ was the atti­tude,” as Amiri Bara­ka wrote in 1962.

Musi­cians turned inward: they played for each oth­er and for their com­mu­ni­ties, invent­ed new lan­guages to con­found jazz appro­pri­a­tors and car­ry the music for­ward on its own terms. Can­did Records own­er Nat Hentoff, long­time Vil­lage Voice jazz crit­ic and colum­nist, not only issued Min­gus’ vocal Faubus protest, but also that same year Max Roach’s We Insist! Free­dom Now Suite, which fea­tured a cov­er pho­to of a lunch counter protest and per­for­mances from his then-wife, singer and activist Abbey Lin­coln.

Roach record­ed two oth­er albums with promi­nent Civ­il Rights themes, Speak Broth­er Speak in 1962 and Lift Every Voice and Sing in 1971. Jazz’s turn toward the move­ment was in full swing as the 60s dawned. “Nina Simone sang the incen­di­ary ‘Mis­sis­sip­pi God­dam,’” writes KCRW’s Tom Schn­abel, “Coltrane per­formed a sad dirge, ‘Alaba­ma’ to mourn the Birm­ing­ham, Alaba­ma church bomb­ing in 1963. Son­ny Rollins record­ed The Free­dom Suite for River­side Records as a dec­la­ra­tion of musi­cal and racial free­dom.”

Every Civ­il Rights gen­er­a­tion up to the present has had its songs of sor­row, anger, and cel­e­bra­tion. Where gospel guid­ed the ear­ly marchers, jazz musi­cians of the 1960s took it upon them­selves to score the move­ment. Though he didn’t much like to talk about it in inter­views, “Coltrane was deeply involved in the civ­il rights move­ment,” writes Blank on Blank, “and shared many of Mal­colm X’s views on black con­scious­ness and Pan-African­ism, which he incor­po­rat­ed into his music.”

Jazz clubs even became spaces for orga­niz­ing:

In 1963, CORE—Congress of Racial Equality—organized two ben­e­fit shows at the Five Spot Café, [fea­tur­ing] a host of promi­nent musi­cians and music jour­nal­ists.

In the wake of Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech at the March on Wash­ing­ton and with the church bomb­ing in Birm­ing­ham that killed 4 lit­tle girls only the month before, the ben­e­fit attract­ed a host of musi­cians like Ben Web­ster, Al Cohn, and Zoot Sims in sup­port of the orga­ni­za­tion, which, along with the NAACP and SNCC, was one of the lead­ing civ­il rights groups at the time.

The new jazz, hot or cool, became more deeply expres­sive of musi­cians’ indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ties, and thus of their whole polit­i­cal, social, and spir­i­tu­al selves. This was no small thing; jazz may have been an Amer­i­can inven­tion, but it was an inter­na­tion­al phe­nom­e­non. Artists in the 60s car­ried the strug­gle abroad with music and activism. After a wave of bru­tal bomb­ings, mur­ders, and beat­ings, “there were no more side­lines,” writes Ashawn­ta Jack­son at JSTOR Dai­ly. “Jazz musi­cians, like any oth­er Amer­i­can, had the duty to speak to the world around them.” And the world lis­tened.

The first Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val, held in 1964, was intro­duced with an address by Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. (who did not attend in per­son). “Jazz is export­ed to the world,” King wrote, and “much of the pow­er of our Free­dom Move­ment in the Unit­ed States has come from this music. It has strength­ened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich har­monies when spir­its were down.” Music still plays the same role in today’s strug­gles. It’s a dif­fer­ent sound now, but you’ll still hear Min­gus’ vers­es in the streets, against more waves of hatred and brute force:

Boo! Nazi Fas­cist suprema­cists
Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your Jim Crow plan)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Coltrane Talks About the Sacred Mean­ing of Music in the Human Expe­ri­ence: Lis­ten to One of His Final Inter­views (1966)

Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Explains the Impor­tance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val (1964)

Nina Simone’s Live Per­for­mances of Her Poignant Civ­il Rights Protest Songs

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Gil Scott-Heron Spells Out Why “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”

Con­sid­er the influ­ence of tele­vi­sion, even in the dig­i­tal age. Con­sid­er the pow­er that net­works like Fox and CNN con­tin­ue to wield over that neb­u­lous thing called pub­lic opin­ion; the con­tin­ued dom­i­nance of NBC and CBS. These giants don’t real­ly inform so much as sell pack­aged ide­o­log­i­cal con­tent paid for and approved by cor­po­rate spon­sors. There’s real­ly no need to update poet and musi­cian Gil Scott-Heron’s rad­i­cal, 1971 clas­sic “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised,” unless we want­ed to change the names. His voice still speaks direct­ly to the moment we live in.

We exist on a con­tin­u­um of con­di­tions that have wors­ened since the late 1960s—despite promis­es and appear­ances to the contrary—until they have become intol­er­a­ble. Scott-Heron wrote and sang about those con­di­tions since his fiery 1970 debut.

“Dubbed the ‘God­fa­ther of Rap,’” notes Brook­lyn Rail in a 2007 inter­view, “Scott-Heron has become a ubiq­ui­tous and prac­ti­cal­ly de rigueur influ­ence for every­one from hip hop­pers and indie rock­ers to aging literati and dyed-in-the-wool aca­d­e­mics.”

One might think Scott-Heron’s clas­sic spo­ken-word tes­ta­ment “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised” speaks for itself by now, but it still cre­ates con­fu­sion in part because peo­ple still mis­con­strue the nature of the medi­um. Why can’t you sit at home and watch jour­nal­ists cov­er protests and revolts on TV? If you think you’re see­ing “the Rev­o­lu­tion” instead of curat­ed, maybe spu­ri­ous, con­tent designed to tell a sto­ry and gin up views, you’re fool­ing your­self.

But Scott-Heron also had some­thing else in mind—you can’t see the rev­o­lu­tion on TV because you can’t see it at all. As he says above in a 1990s inter­view:

The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. The thing that’s going to change peo­ple is some­thing that nobody will ever be able to cap­ture on film. It’s just some­thing that you see and you’ll think, “Oh I’m on the wrong page,” or “I’m on I’m on the right page but the wrong note. And I’ve got to get in sync with every­one else to find out what’s hap­pen­ing in this coun­try.”

If we real­ize we’re out of sync with what’s real­ly hap­pen­ing, we can­not find out more on tele­vi­sion. The infor­ma­tion is where the bat­tles are being fought, at street lev­el, and in the mech­a­nisms of the legal process. “I think that the Black Amer­i­cans are the only real die-hard Amer­i­cans here,” Scott-Heron goes on, “because we’re the only ones who’ve car­ried the process through the process…. We’re the ones who marched… we’re the ones who tried to go through the courts. Being born Amer­i­can didn’t seem to mat­ter.” It still doesn’t, as we see in the killings of George Floyd and Bre­on­na Tay­lor and so many before them, and in the griev­ous injuries and deaths from uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, mil­i­tary-grade police esca­la­tions nation­wide since.

Scott-Heron asked us to ques­tion the nar­ra­tives. “How do they know?” he sang in “There’s a War Going On” at Wood­stock 94, above. How do the self-appoint­ed guardians of infor­ma­tion know what’s real­ly going on? Tele­vi­sion spreads igno­rance and mis­in­for­ma­tion, as does radio and, of course, social media. This much we should know. But we’ve mis­in­ter­pret­ed “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised” if we think it’s real­ly about mass media, Scott-Heron always main­tained. Before we can engage mean­ing­ful­ly with cur­rent events, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary change must hap­pen from the inside out. No one’s broad­cast­ing the truths we first, most need to hear.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gil Scott-Heron, God­fa­ther of Rap, Rest in Peace

Nina Simone’s Live Per­for­mances of Her Poignant Civ­il Rights Protest Songs

How Nina Simone Became Hip Hop’s “Secret Weapon”: From Lau­ryn Hill to Jay Z and Kanye West

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When Afrobeat Legend Fela Kuti Collaborated with Cream Drummer Ginger Baker

At the end of the 60s, super­star drum­mer and angri­est man in rock Gin­ger Bak­er was on the verge of col­lapse. Strung out on hero­in, deeply griev­ing Jimi Hendrix’s death, and alien­at­ed from his for­mer Cream and Blind Faith band­mates, he need­ed a new direc­tion. He found it in Nige­ria, where he decamped after dri­ving a Range Rover from Alge­ria across the Sahara Desert. (A mad­cap adven­ture cap­tured in the 1971 doc­u­men­tary Gin­ger Bak­er in Africa). Once in Lagos, Bak­er start­ed jam­ming with Afrobeat leg­end Fela Kuti.

The meet­ing of these two musi­cal forces of nature pro­duced a suite of record­ings. “Baker’s drum­ming appeared on sev­er­al albums along­side the Niger­ian king of afrobeat,” writes Okay Africa, “includ­ing Why Black Man Dey Suf­fer (1971), Live! (1972) and Stratavar­i­ous (1972).”

Kuti’s long­time drum­mer and arranger—and inven­tor of the “afrobeat”—Tony Allen was high­ly impressed with Bak­er’s range, and Nige­ri­ans, as Jay Bul­ger writes at Rolling Stone, loved him.

Arriv­ing in Lagos, Nige­ria, Bak­er set up west Africa’s first 16-track record­ing stu­dio and formed a life­long friend­ship with Afrobeat star Fela Kuti. Per­form­ing with the musi­cal icon for crowds of 150,000, Bak­er became famous through­out Nige­ria as the “Oyin­bo” (White) Drum­mer. “If Gin­ger wants to play jazz, he plays jazz,” says the Niger­ian drum­mer Tony Allen. “If he wants to play rock, he starts Cream. If he wants to play Afrobeat, he moves to Nige­ria. What­ev­er he plays, he brings his own pulse and sound. He under­stands the African beat more than any oth­er West­ern­er.”

High praise, but Bak­er didn’t seek the spot­light, his enor­mous ego off­stage notwith­stand­ing. He trained and he learned. Always a col­lab­o­ra­tive play­er, by his own descrip­tion, Bak­er adapt­ed him­self to the needs of the music. In Kuti’s band, he found a well-drilled ensem­ble and in Fela him­self, a kin­dred spir­it with a per­son­al­i­ty as grandiose and cap­ti­vat­ing as his own, though Baker’s par­tic­u­lar charms were maybe best appre­ci­at­ed at a dis­tance. Hear the loose, sprawl­ing Live! above, with anno­ta­tions telling the sto­ry of the two leg­ends in brief.

Bak­er and Kuti first met in the ear­ly 60s in Lon­don when Fela stud­ied at Trin­i­ty Col­lege of Music. Once they final­ly con­nect­ed musi­cal­ly, the sound was explo­sive, thanks to Baker’s record­ing stu­dio and Fela’s New Afri­ka Shrine, the per­for­mance space where the live mag­ic hap­pened night after night. Then there are the war stories—not only sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but also the actu­al Niger­ian Army try­ing to shut down Fela’s com­pound, which he called the Kalaku­ta Repub­lic, and which housed his 27 back­up singers and his stu­dio. The band­leader was beat­en and jailed over and over, and the com­mune was final­ly burned to the ground in 1977.

The video above from YouTu­ber Band­splain­ing gives an enter­tain­ing syn­op­sis of the Baker/Fela sto­ry, though beware, as sev­er­al com­menters have point­ed out, it con­tains sev­er­al inac­cu­ra­cies, includ­ing at the out­set the sug­ges­tion that Fela has only recent­ly received wide­spread recog­ni­tion. This, of course, is total­ly false—Latin Amer­i­can musi­cians have cel­e­brat­ed his fusion of African polyrhythms, big band funk, and psy­che­del­ic rock for decades; in Nige­ria and else­where in Africa, Fela was as big a musi­cal god as Clap­ton in Eng­land, as well as a pow­er­ful spir­i­tu­al and polit­i­cal sym­bol of Pan-African social­ism; and in the US and UK, New Wave bands like Talk­ing Heads made entire albums build­ing on Fela’s inspi­ra­tion.

One might think of Baker’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with Fela Kuti and the Afri­ka ‘70 as an ear­ly inter­na­tion­al super­group, of the kind that would become com­mon­place in lat­er decades. But Bak­er didn’t use Fela’s music as a back­drop for his own brand. He was thrilled just to be there in the band.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Why Gin­ger Bak­er (RIP) Was One of the Great­est Drum­mers in Rock & World Music

An Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Music of Fela Kuti: Rad­i­cal Niger­ian Band­leader, Polit­i­cal Hero, and Cre­ator of Afrobeat

Who Are the Best Drum Soloists in Rock? See Leg­endary Per­for­mances by Neil Peart (RIP), John Bon­ham, Kei­th Moon, Ter­ry Bozzio & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

What Makes a Cover Song Great?: Our Favorites & Yours

Many years ago I tried to per­suade friends I played with in a local indie band to debut a coun­try-punk ver­sion of Wu Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” live. No one went for it, and look­ing back, I’m pret­ty sure it would have been a musi­cal dis­as­ter. That 90s hip-hop clas­sic deserves bet­ter than our Weird Al-meets-Ween-meets-Wilco approach, which is not to say that such a cov­er couldn’t work at all, but that Neil Young was more our speed.

Great cov­er songs come in all styles, and the world’s best musi­cians (which my friends and I were not) can take mate­r­i­al from almost any genre and make it their own (cf. Coltrane). For most peo­ple, the cov­er song is tricky ter­ri­to­ry.

Hew too close­ly to an icon­ic orig­i­nal and you risk a com­pe­tent but total­ly unnec­es­sary remake, like Gus Van Sant’s ver­sion of Psy­cho—“all that’s miss­ing is the ten­sion,” as Roger Ebert wrote of that 1998 endeav­or, “the con­vic­tion that some­thing urgent is hap­pen­ing.”

Stray too far from the source, as I near­ly dared to do with “C.R.E.A.M.,” and the effort can seem hokey, tone-deaf, dis­re­spect­ful, cul­tur­al­ly appro­pria­tive, and so forth. For some rea­son, old­er artists seem to have more grace with oth­ers’ mate­r­i­al, per­haps because they’ve lived enough to under­stand it inside and out. Many of my favorite cov­ers, and yours, are in this vein, like two well-known from film and tele­vi­sion: Charles Bradley’s cov­er of Ozzy’s “Changes” and John­ny Cash’s cov­er of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt.”

The fact that both of these soul­ful, raspy singers have passed on gives these songs an extra-musi­cal poignan­cy. They were also two singers well acquaint­ed in life with grief, loss, and hurt. Oth­er cov­er ver­sions that stick with me include Cat Power’s “At the Dark End of the Street” and R.E.M.’s cov­er of art-punks Wire’s “Strange.” What makes them great? I could go on about  the mer­its of each one, but I don’t have a gen­er­al the­o­ry of cov­ers. You’ll find such a the­o­ry in the Poly­phon­ic video at the top, how­ev­er, which asks and answers the ques­tion, “how does an artist nav­i­gate the tumul­tuous waters of cov­er songs?”

The nar­ra­tor admits the ambi­gu­i­ty inher­ent in judg­ing a suc­cess­ful cov­er. “I don’t think there’s a clear set of rules you can stick to that will guar­an­tee suc­cess. But I do think there are lessons to be learned from look­ing at the great cov­ers of the past.” He does so by ana­lyz­ing three of the most suc­cess­ful cov­ers, both crit­i­cal­ly and com­mer­cial­ly, ever record­ed: Jimi Hendrix’s haunt­ed elec­tric take on Dylan’s “All Along the Watch­tow­er,” Aretha’s anthemic trans­fig­u­ra­tion of Otis Redding’s “Respect,” and Cash’s open wound cov­er of “Hurt.”

All of these songs, in their own ways, trans­form the source mate­r­i­al com­plete­ly, such that each became a sig­na­ture for the artist. Dylan, for exam­ple, was so impressed with Hendrix’s cov­er that his live ver­sions began to resem­ble Jimi’s arrange­ment. “Strange how when I sing it,” he wrote in the lin­er notes to Bio­graph, “I always feel it’s a trib­ute to him in some kind of way.” That’s a rar­i­fied “endorse­ment of a suc­cess­ful cov­er,” if there ever was one, Poly­phon­ic says. But there’s more to it than earn­ing the song­writer’s approval.

To under­stand how a suc­cess­ful cov­er works, ret­ro­spec­tive­ly at least, we have to go back to the source and find the qual­i­ty the cov­er artist extrap­o­lat­ed and expand­ed upon. In Hendrix’s case, that was a “sense of ten­sion and desperation”—announced in his pound­ing intro, the first howl­ing line of the song, and, of course, in Hendrix’s slinky, spooky, effects-laden gui­tar runs. He trans­lat­ed the emo­tion­al tenor of Dylan’s orig­i­nal into a musi­cal vocab­u­lary that was ful­ly his own in every respect.

Cov­ers also evoke a host of per­son­al asso­ci­a­tions, as the video con­cedes, that are dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate to firm con­clu­sions about what makes one a suc­cess. We form life­long rela­tion­ships with cer­tain songs and may accept no substitutes—or we might, on the oth­er hand, be more drawn to cov­er ver­sions through a love of the orig­i­nal. That’s espe­cial­ly true with cov­ers that alchem­i­cal­ly change a song’s sound, mean­ing, tem­po, and feel while keep­ing its intan­gi­ble emo­tion­al essence intact. Leave your favorite cov­ers in the com­ments below and tell us what you think makes them so great.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 100 Amaz­ing Cov­er Ver­sions of Bea­t­les Songs

Icon­ic Songs Played by Musi­cians Around the World: “Stand by Me,” “Redemp­tion Song,” “Rip­ple” & More

With Medieval Instru­ments, Band Per­forms Clas­sic Songs by The Bea­t­les, Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, Metal­li­ca & Deep Pur­ple

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

50 Songs from a Single Year, Mixed Together Into One 3‑Minute Song (1979–89)

The con­cept of gen­er­a­tions, as we cur­rent­ly use the term, would have made no sense to peo­ple liv­ing through­out most of human his­to­ry. “Before the 19th cen­tu­ry,” writes Sarah Leskow at The Atlantic, “gen­er­a­tions were thought of as (gen­er­al­ly male) bio­log­i­cal rela­tion­ships with­in families—grandfathers, sons, grand­chil­dren and so forth.” The word did not describe com­mon traits shared by, “as one lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er put it in 1863, ‘all men liv­ing more or less at the same time.’”

The the­o­ry was thor­ough­ly ingest­ed into mass cul­ture, as any­one can tell from social media wars and the fix­a­tions of news­pa­per colum­nists. One such cor­re­spon­dent weighed in a few years ago with a con­trar­i­an take: “Your gen­er­a­tional iden­ti­ty is a lie,” wrote Philip Bump at The Wash­ing­ton Post in 2015. (He makes an excep­tion for Baby Boomers, for rea­sons you’ll have to read in his col­umn.)

All this debunk­ing is to the good. While schol­ars rou­tine­ly inves­ti­gate the ori­gins of con­tem­po­rary ideas, too often the rest of us take for grant­ed that our present ways of see­ing the world are time­less and eter­nal.

Yet, whether gen­er­a­tions are a real phe­nom­e­non or a cul­tur­al con­struc­tion, glob­al­ized mass media of the past sev­er­al decades ensures that no mat­ter where we come from, most peo­ple born around the same time will share some set of near-iden­ti­cal experiences—of lis­ten­ing to the same music, watch­ing the same films, TV shows, etc. Giv­en the way our think­ing can be shaped by for­ma­tive moments in pop cul­ture, we’re bound to have a few things in com­mon if we had access to Hol­ly­wood film and MTV. Maybe what most defines gen­er­a­tions as we know them now is cul­ture as com­mod­i­ty.

Take the video series fea­tured here. Each one cuts togeth­er 50 songs released in a sin­gle year, begin­ning in 1979, along with video mon­tages of some of the year’s most pop­u­lar artists. Cre­at­ed by The Hood Inter­net, “a DJ and pro­duc­tion duo from Chica­go, known for their exper­tise in mashups and remix­es,” the series could serve as a lab exper­i­ment to test the emo­tion­al reac­tions of peo­ple born at dif­fer­ent times. We may have all heard these songs by now. But only those who heard them in their youth will have the nos­tal­gic reac­tions we asso­ciate with gen­er­a­tional mem­o­ry, since music, as David Toop  writes at The Qui­etus, is “a mem­o­ry machine.”

Every­one else could stand to learn some­thing about what the 80s looked and sound­ed like. As a his­tor­i­cal peri­od, it tends to get cast in a fair­ly nar­row mold, with syn­th­pop and hair met­al defin­ing the extent of 80s music. The pop music of the decade was fab­u­lous­ly diverse, with gen­res cross-pol­li­nat­ing in what turn out to be sur­pris­ing­ly har­mo­nious ways in these mashup videos. The cre­ators of the series worked their way up to 1987, and we get to see some dra­mat­ic shifts along the way that fur­ther com­pli­cate the idea of 80s music, even for those who heard these songs when they came out, and who have nine years of for­ma­tive moments to go with them. See all of the videos on The Hood Inter­net’s YouTube chan­nel.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1980s Met­al­head Kids Are Alright: Sci­en­tif­ic Study Shows That They Became Well-Adjust­ed Adults

A Soul Train-Style Detroit Dance Show Gets Down to Kraftwerk’s “Num­bers” in the Late 80s

How a Record­ing Stu­dio Mishap Cre­at­ed the Famous Drum Sound That Defined 80s Music & Beyond

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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