March 7, 2007
DB IS YOUR DJ
One of the greatest things about never having to drive is never being required to listen to the radio. I read an article the other month about how people were buying cars to accessorize their iPods, i.e. the first criteria a car had to fulfill was an iPod jack into the stereo system. Everything about the car after that was mostly gravy. I understand that line of consumer thinking. Suffering any commute longer than a half hour while being forced to listen to the "whack pack crazy morning crew" on WSUK is not a good way to starty anyone's day. Not that it's even possible to find a radio station with a half-decent music format anymore--and that's not just old-man crotchetiness talking. The last good radio station I listened to regularly was WHFS in Washington, DC. Sure, they were accused of being sellouts by then, but who doesn't love some good 'ol reliable modern rock, day in and day out by a station with enough cash on hand to sponsor some legitimately good shows in an otherwise musically dead town. 'HFS was killed off a few years ago when its format was switched without warning to all-Spanish one afternoon. No kidding.
Thank God for the Internet. Streaming audio over the Internet has let a million tiny stations bloom. One is no longer confined to a single market. You can tune into commercial radio stations across the country that make their feeds available online. Or you can find tiny boutique broadcasters running their own one-person Internet broadcast booths. While I can't say I've enthusiastically turned on an actual radio in years, I love listening to and looking out for all sorts of interesting Internet radio broadcasts.
My latest find comes from a well-known source. It's RADIO DAVIDBYRNE.COM The former Talking Heads frontman streams a great radio station from his own site (it's also available through iTunes Radio under the Eclectic category). Byrnes's formula is fairly simple. He picks a bunch of songs (March's playlist is 45 songs lasting 2hrs51mins) and he just streams them in a loop. Each month he picks a new overarching theme for the music he's playing and replaces the entire playlist. Examples:
March: Pop
Pop as in popular. That's where this playlist falls apart. Not all of these songs reached or will reach a wide enough audience to be considered truly popular, but it wasn't for want of being poppy, catchy or sticking to your brain pan.
February: Icicles
It's winter here in the Northern Hemisphere and our thoughts turn to Scandinavia. I'm kinda crazy getting ready for the Carnegie shows, but here's a quickly pulled together selection of Northern European artists — almost all of them female vocalists! (Hmmm, what's that about? Even the voice of the Sigur Rós singer often gets mistaken for being a girl's.) Don't know if they see any similarity amongst themselves; probably not, but others no doubt will. Here goes: The mixing of grand cosmic sentiments and the extremely personal — I'd hazard that the land, the extraordinary light and the cultural history all play a part in the sensibilities of these composers and singers. Think of the Northern "classical" composers: Sibelius, Grieg and more contemporaries like Per Nørgård and Part, and many others — well, I sense a cosmic mythic connection and tendency among many of them.
The North is also known for other music. Perfect pop, Abba and their descendents. And for Metal subgenres, which I would say are in sensibility not that different from some of this dreamy stuff here, though the metal genres — Nature Metal and others — evoke the same sky looked at as an ominous weight, a frightening portent. But the transcendent feeling is there in both cases.
January: Welcome to Dreamland
Full disclosure: many of these artists will be together in a concert that I am presenting at Carnegie Hall in February, so this playlist is a blatant plug.
I think one might trace the roots of these contemporary singers and songwriters back to John Jacob Niles, a singer who recorded in the 40s and 50s who interpreted traditional songs accompanied by a dulcimer. His interpretations were so unique — he changed the melody of a songs if he didn't like it — that in his case one could say interpretation is a form of creation. He sang in a high tenor voice, which sent some listeners round the bend, as do some of these artists.
"Over coffee and liqueurs we would sometimes listen to John Jacob Niles' recordings. Our favorite was 'I Wonder As I Wander,' sung in a clear, high-pitched voice with a quaver and a modality all his own. The metallic clang of his dulcimer never failed to produce ecstasy. He had a voice which summoned memories of Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere. There was something of the Druid in him. Like a psalmist, he intoned his verses in an ethereal chant which the angels carried aloft to the Glory seat. When he sang of Jesus, Mary and Joseph they became living presences. A sweep of the hand and the dulcimer gave forth magical sounds which caused the stars to gleam more brightly, which peopled the hills and meadows with silvery figures and made the brooks to babble like infants. We would sit there long after his voice had faded out, talking of Kentucky where he was born, talking of the Blue Ridge mountains and the folk from Arkansas..."
— Henry Miller, Plexus pp. 366-367.
I would then suggest that this musical line moved through the 60s via the Incredible String Band, Vashti Bunyan and many others who added sitars, flutes, harpsichords, cellos and anything else at hand to the musical mix. And they wrote songs about ducks, blades of grass, stars and cosmic bliss in a way that I have never been able to. Their choice of subjects echoes that of William Blake, the visionary poet:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
The poem (Auguries of Innocence) then continues for many many stanzas along these lines:
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill'd with doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thro' all its regions.
A dog starv'd at his Master's Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
Allen Ginsburg recorded the Songs of Innocence and Experience by Blake on a record that while not that well known may have had its influence, too. I found Allen's passionate wobbly singing voice very moving and inspiring on that record…and of course Blake's visionary spiritual and political messages struck a chord as well. When one sees the world going to hell in a handbasket, manipulated by cynical old men, one senses that seeing the world more clearly, through child-like eyes, might be one way out. The wisdom of babes, as they say…it's also a form of brutal honesty. There's anger in this innocence as well.
So, a few years ago there appeared an efflorescence of singers and songwriters, in a variety of styles and shapes, who shared a little of this attitude, or so I would suggest. Many, though not all of them, chose to make recordings that were somewhat rough, and slightly unpolished technically, thereby showing obvious disdain for the commercial indie pre-thought planned and considered careerist path. By being willfully uncommercial they attracted an audience tired of being marketed to and tired of the slick and beautiful but empty packages being offered by the music business. Their occasional eccentricity is unforced, honest.
Although I remember Talking Heads being lumped in with the punk bands to our repeated annoyance and continual protests, it didn't really hurt that much in the end. We did share a DIY attitude, though our musical expression of it may have been very different than that of other bands. I'd suggest that such an attitude exists here too — as it did in early hip hop — it has a resurgence every few years and produces a wave of innovators. Many of these musicians not only perform together, but they collaborate, play and sing in each other's concerts and recordings and generally create a floating and changeable sense of identity. Time passes, and some are exploring what their next musical steps will be — orchestral arrangements (Joanna Newsom) Indian tablas and chants (Coco Rosie) or larger bands and electronics (Animal Collective).
How cool is that? And unsurprisingly, Byrne's taste in music is fantastic. I haven't heard of most of what he's playing, but I like almost all of it.
NB: Of course, no good deads go unpunished. This was published Monday: "RIAA Pushes Through Internet Radio Royalty Rates Designed To Kill Webcasts".
Tagged: byrne, internet, radioPosted by Lexiphane at March 7, 2007 1:11 AM
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