I can easily see how this might be scoffed at by serious record hounds, which I maybe aspired to once upon a time but haven't been for decades, as too obvious, the samples too popular. Unoriginal: 'Where are the esoteric DJ Shadow samples that nobody knows but me and my cool friends?' But as post-hiphop Frat Rock, witty party music, the copyright vandalism of Girl Talk is absolutely exhilarating dancefloor fodder. It's like Gregg Michael Gillis', aka Girl Talk, loves hiphop, sees a crossover rap and hard rock song like maybe RunDMC/Aerosmith's "Walk This Way (1986) as a fountainhead event in a new electronic hybrid genre, and sets out to produce club mix versions for all his 1990s and 2000s rap favorites. This is about as populist rock & roll in the original 'it's got a good beat and you can dance to it' sense as I've found in the 21st century. The Kids Are Alright, if oversexed as the 16-24 set will tend to be. In short, this is sweaty hot party music. For the excitable of all ages, but with a big parental advisory label. Okie-dokie?
One thing I especially identified with the book Music is History by Questlove was how as he ages the new music wouldn't always hit him right off like it did when he was coming up and hot for EPMD or anything by the Bomb Squad. During his coming of age youth music wheelhouse; 16-24, usually. Eventually the hot new records or New Styles sound, initially, maybe too derivative, or somehow off, maybe disorienting, you're not sure you even like whatever hyped music until, not always but on special occasions, it incandescently gels into something epic and undeniable. J Dilla's Donuts is like that for me. I think I first thought more Neo-Soul DJ retrosheen. Okay, that's fine. The smeary production felt at first like a little bit of a put on; a primitivist affectation. Now it sounds like a break with the literalness of '90s sampling. Abstract shards of scratching playing the melody or punching the mix with dramatic jabs of sound. J Dilla's production style has been hugely influential on acts as different as Canadian rap superstar Drake or British dubstep ambient pioneers Burial. Donuts is a 21st century master DJ cut-up abstraction of Isaac Hayes's 1969 classic album Hot Buttered Soul. It's a Blaxploitation soundtrack of retro-Afrofuturist Black Power, without the politics. Like the perfect vibes music for a backyard party. When I try to name a great hiphop album from this century my go to for awhile now has been Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D City (2012). But Donuts has to be up there.
English DJ, George Herbert Evelyn, better known as Nightmares On Wax, in his heyday, the late '90s, Smoker's Delight and Carboot Soul, the latter a personal favorite, he was as big a deal as most DJs get. I mean he packed clubs. He was not EDM stadium DJ big but he was big with the DJ music heads, the people into DJ Shadow and The Avalanches records. I'm pretty sure this one, NIGHTMARES ON WAX in a space outta sound, 2006, can fairly be called middle or later NoW, and by middle '00s a trip hop/downtempo backlash had set in, but the NoW sound system powered on. Rolling out deep salubrious ambient dub vibes, leaning too heavy on old Blue Note and Neo-Soul falsettos at times maybe, but in peak songs like "FYL"* the secular churchy deep soul techno groove is a DJ funky dub gold universal. Play on repeat and it is a hypnotic trance: "What are we supposed to do living in a time like this?" My best okay boomer translation: imagine Booker T & the MG's came up in England in the 1990s, rave music, massive reggae sound systems, and funky underground hiphop. Or perhaps better NoW is a churchy secular soul inflected homage to '90s underground crate diving hiphop, with oodles and oodles of left liberal peace & happiness vibes (overcoming too much pain and misery). Anyway, another deep track masterpiece from NoW. Discerning dad rockers with a taste for groove music should be counting them up. Hup two.*-other peak cuts, "You Wish," "I am You," "African Pirates."
When I first read Robert Christgau's memoir, Going into the City (2015), I was disappointed to learn that his favorite album of all-time had changed to Television's Marquee Moon, and was no longer The Clash's debut album; US version, that came out in 1979, for me, original 1977 version for him. (Thanks for the edit.) I'd had the impression for years, decades, that The Clash album was his favorite and one of mine too; I liked that we shared that. Claiming Marquee Moon now, although a good album, struck me as a lame homer gesture. Somewhat understandable as something people do as they get older, things closer to us grow more dear, but too damn austere an album for an Xgau number one, by my lights. I might have expected his move would have soured me a bit on his Stranded (1978) Desert Island faves the New York Dolls but not at all. Actually, either one of the Dolls original classic albums from the early 1970s, New York Dolls (1973) or Too Much Too Soon (1974), would have made more sense to me as his all-time album favorite: NYC homers but undeniably, quintessentially, irrationally exuberant rock & roll music. Todd Rundgren gives the debut the glam rock power pop sheen of a big loud (if somewhat rickety) runaway subway train. "Personality Crisis" and "Jet Boy" should have been hits; "Frankenstein" is an epic hard rock masterpiece. The second album, TMTS, wasn't the song album of the debut but Shadow Morton's production might have sounded even better. The band turns covers of Sonny Boy Williamson, The Coasters, and Philly International, really, everything they touch, into a gloriously big and trashy burlesque of 1950s rock & roll. The Cramps, for one celebrated example, were born of such lustful irreverence. My enthusiasm for everything Dolls even carried over into all Johansen's early solo albums, even the often maligned In Style (1979), and up to 1982's live album Live It Up, which I saw at the Euphoria Tavern in Portland, OR. Great show; and Johansen was a great showman. NYC's proud idiosyncratic version of Mick Jagger. I lost interest with Johansen's Buster Poindexter persona, however; found "Hot Hot Hot" more annoying than anything else, but still liked that he had found a niche in the music industry. He played in the SNL house band for years. And then I fell back into the fold with their 2006 comeback album, One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, and liked even a song or two on their subsequent last two studio albums, Cause I Sez So ('09) and Dancing Backwards in High Heels ('11); if overall each significantly less than the album previous to it. They were aging out of being able to play Dolls style rock & roll but deserve credit for still being able to do so convincingly for as long as they did. But I'll always think of Johansen lead style as going best with the sludgy feedback roar of Johnny Thunders' guitar; again, not unlike Jaggers and Richards. David Johansen was one of the great 1970s NYC rockers and, in the end, a consummate music biz pro, going from the lower east side all the way uptown and back. And represents some favorite music, inspired by his original Desert Island endorsement, I still share with Xgau.
"Looking for a Kiss," peak period Dolls. Click on the youtube connection.
Slowing down, relaxing enough, having enough room in your life for music is such a luxury. One I've learned to take for granted, savor, even protect, so when I lose that musical feeling, feel like I can't listen to music, whether crowded out by work or distracting emotional stresses, I grow manic, brittle, and burnout quickly. (Something like this happens with reading too.) I'm like a battery running down fast without regular recharging. Haven't felt like I could listen to music, beyond a few patches of very distracted background streaming, in two weeks or so, so splurging on underdog superhero Lil B and then some groove-oriented Krautrock and a double-shot of Frankie Knuckles' style House music.
"Vans," The Pack (2006): East Bay hybrid hiphop artists do skateboard raps. Lil B startup.
"Unchain Me," Lil B (2011): Lil B, The BasedGod, Im Gay (Im Happy) at a spiritual peak. On a short list of great ambient hiphop albums, as far as I know anyway which is admittedly very limited.
"Synthesist," Harald Grosskopf (1979): Percussionist with Ash Ra Tempel, Cosmic Jokers, and Klaus Schulz's solo work. Late Krautrock as ambient electronic groove music.
E+MC2 (Jelly & Fish remix), Giorgio Moroder (1979/2020): Peaked at number 4 on the charts. Moody, relentless, a cheap shabby beautiful grandeur. Elemental traits of robotic space disco like Kraftwerk and gothic disco like New Order.
"Move That Body," Marshall Jefferson (1986): "The House Music Anthem." Trax Records. Deceptively simple and catchy and fiercely vamping workout of piano, kinetic polyrhythms, clapping dub effects, and chanting "rock your body" dancers: "The music is going to set you free." You gotta believe it.
"Que Tal America," Two Man Sound (1979): This is the 12" version but also appears on an album called Disco Samba. In the squiggly sonic details, a thicket of melodic polyrhythms (uptempo funk, basically), churning, unfurling mesmerizingly elongated grooves and intoxicating repetition transcends monotony. Get it on and let Two Man Sound take you for a ride. Dance music ASMR.
Why isn't there a reality tv show where people dance around the kitchen to their favorite pop music while making a meal together? Aren't people doing that everywhere? If they're not wouldn't that be what they'd like to be doing while making something to eat? Or cleaning up afterwards. You know, household chores. Try playing these three bangers in a row; get jiggy w/ it. Sunshine pop in dark disco packages. Feel something, or not. They work every time for me.
Robert Crumb was "underground comix" in the 1960s, as far as I knew anyhow. So popular that I recognize his work without ever having read any of his comics: curvy, bulbous, strutting caricatures exploding with color. His "Keep On Truckin'" image was a near ubiquitous symbol of the time. Only slightly less to the 1960s than what the smiley face icon was to the '70s. Although, haven't seen any R. Crumb emojis yet. But maybe Crumb was too "underground," too countercultural, druggy, and sexual.
One might come to this watching Terry Zwigoff's (who writes the introduction to this book, by the way) fascinating and dark movie documentary, Crumb ('94), where we learn, amongst many curious things, of Crumb's fetish for women with large round bottoms, a kind of pear-shaped feminine ideal that he celebrates in his art and to remarkably precise dimensions manifests in his personal relationships.
At any rate, I was drawn to Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz, & Country, a project he completed in 2006, because of its focus on the music of the 1920s and 1930s, a subject I'd been turned onto again reading books like David Wondrich's Stomp and Swerve ('03), Amanda Petrusich's Do Not Sell at Any Price ('14), Louis Armstrong's memoir about his early life in New Orleans, Satchmo ('57), and listening to records, especially and above all others, Harry Smith's seemingly bottomless rawboned treasure trove Anthology of American Folk Music ('52).
Crumb's book began as sets of trading cards released in the 1980s. Basically, Crumb a long time collector of rare pre-WW2 78 rpm records was cajoled by collector friends (including Zwigoff) to create illustrations of these lost artists in exchange for some particular choice 78 record he wanted bad enough, say, Mumford Band & His Itawambians, etc. This turned into separate trading card sets (36 Blues, 36 Jazz, and 40 Country artists) that were eventually compiled into this book.
The Blues and Country illustrations are done in a detailed etched style (maybe more characteristic of Crumb) and the Jazz subjects painted in simple watercolors, a difference Zwigoff speculates attributable to timing: the Blues and Country pieces were completed first by a painstakingly time-consuming process and that by the time he got to the the jazz stuff Crumb was looking for a shortcut. I like the illustrations fine. They're appealingly rustic mythologizing Americana without looking like the Sunday Comics or uber-Superhero comics, which is good by me and more than enough from me about comic art.
Another striking variation is the relative lengths of the texts, written by Stephen Calt, David Jasen, and Richard Nevins (Yazzo/Shanachie Records). All the Blues and Jazz entries are a concise paragraph, little more than you might find on a typical baseball trading card. But the Country write-ups are at least twice if not longer in length. And, correspondingly, it's curious that while many of the Blues and Jazz artists I had at least heard of, after say Jimmie Rodgers or Charlie Poole and a few others, the vast majority of the Country stuff were obscure string bands with crazy fun names, Cid Tanner & His Skillett Lickers, Paul Miles & His Red Fox Chasers, but entirely new to me.
You might expect these differences to show up in the quality of the material. Maybe Crumb was more into the White country stuff than the Black blues and jazz stuff? Maybe but shuffling for weeks a 100 plus song playlist I made of Crumb's Heroic pantheon, more or less equally Blues, Jazz, & Country songs, I can't hear much of one. The vigor and variety of the music Crumb spotlights is uniformly exhilarating. All this stuff grew out of 19th century minstrel music popularity, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and vague homespun racist allusions pop up; see "Where's your mammy?" below.
I see this unholy multicultural, miscegenated marriage as the source of nearly all my favorite music, as Nick Tosches reminds people in every book he wrote or at least all the ones I've read. My position: I'm for reparations, mixing (the more the better), and universal human rights; and opposed to segregation and discrimination in all the stupid bigot forms popular with MAGA people. Could some of R. Crumb's heroes be redneck racists? Very likely. The curious part is how much these haters get together musically; how much they influenced each other despite their bigotry. The emphasis in the Heroes' texts is on the inter-ethnic, polyglot influences in all these roots music styles:
"Melodically, many blues bear a notable resemblance to early white-fundamentalist religious music. The limited scales are almost identical and they share a common modality. If the speed of an archaic primitive Baptist hymn is doubled, the striking similarity to blues is apparent."
The authors marvel at the evolution of five or six fiddle styles from Scotland or Ireland exploding into hundreds of local, regional styles, Black and White, Christian, secular, Latin, all mixed together, after only three or four generations in America:
"The single most fascinating aspect of traditional American music is the endless variety of styles rural musicians could generate....The considerable isolation of the early American countryside was a major factor in creating this bountiful panorama of styles."
This is about as close to the central thesis of the Harry Smith collection as you'll find. For Smith 1926-1933 specifically, and the heyday of most of Crumb's musical Heroes, was a magic window into a lost Old, Weird America, capturing on record a final glimpse of oral traditions of American music before they were swallowed up by the homogenizing effects of electricity and radio.
There is overlap here with the Smith box (Blind Willie Johnson, "Dock" Boggs, etc) but a bounty of new to me, razor-edged and jumpy, howlin' at the moon laments and wood-floor barn dance stomping music jams with fiddles and banjos and forgotten voices that sound on records and CD transfers and now streaming uncannily unforgettable.
Hot Heroes Samples:
Blues--
"Police Dog Blues," by Blind Blake (1927)
Jazz--
"New Orleans Stomp," by Johnny Dodds, Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Roy Palmer, Earl Hines, Lil Armstrong, Johnny St. Cyr, Bud Scott, and Baby Dodds (1926-27). (Or the Hot Jazz All-Stars!!!)
Country--
"Little Rabbit/Rabbit Where's Your Mammy" by the Crockett Kentucky Mountaineers (late 1920s) is one of the finest rural string band performances, says R. Crumb's book.
