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Waterproof Jacket & Gonna Gay Marry You
Waterproof Jacket
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I’ve been working on this for a while, but I think it’s where I want it to be now. Made mainly from loop manipulations, most of which originally standard garageband loops if I remember correctly. It is contrived, but at least I mean what I’m saying.
Iggy Pop is angry and Johnny Rotten is Sigmund Freud.
I happened across this while doing a little research. I’m trying to get to the root of what separates the labels New Wave and Post Punk. Obviously they’re useless as a means to segregate music, but I think the way the labels are used and by who is significant.
In this interview, it’s hard to get past Iggy Pop’s intentional, passionate naivety, but I think the point he’s trying to express is strong, if cloudy and overtly confrontational. Which could also be said of the new popular music of that (and possibly this) era. More on this later.
But, Are You Advanced Enough?
Lou Reed, singing with the Blind Boys of Alabama AND he’s singing a Velvet Underground song AND appears to be enjoying it.
Foam Rubber, USA
Chris Frantz thought of the titular chorus after seeing a Parliament-Funkadelic show where the crowd chanted “Burn down the house.” The initial lyrics were considerably different, however. In an interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered” aired on December 2, 1984, David Byrne played excerpts of early worktapes showing how the song had evolved from an instrumental jam by Tina Weymouth (bass) and Chris Frantz (drums). Once the whole band had reworked the groove into something resembling the final recording, Byrne began chanting and singing nonsense syllables over the music until he had arrived at phrasing that fit with the rhythms— a technique influenced by former Talking Heads producer Brian Eno— “and then I [would] just write words to fit that phrasing… I’d have loads and loads of phrases collected that I thought thematically had something to do with one another, and I’d pick from those.”
According to Byrne in the NPR interview, phrases he tried but ultimately didn’t use in the song’s recorded “verses” included “I have another body,” “Pick it up by the handle,” “You travel with a double,” and “I’m still under construction.” As for the title phrase in the chorus, one early attempt (as heard on a worktape) had him singing a different line, “What are we gonna do?”, and at another point in the process, “instead of chanting ‘Burning Down the House,’ I was chanting ‘Foam Rubber, USA.’”
House!
The one that’s not a TV show about medical-specific Sherlock Holmes.
Coming soon from the Criterion Collection. Huzzah.
And while we’re at it… How badly do you want your TV to be more like this?
The Dub Side
After reading this passage From Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, it occurred to me that I tend to seek out and emphasize the dub version of culture:
While singers and DJs offered words of mourning or escape for the sufferers, dub reggae-the mostly wordless music of dread-ran directly into the heart of the darkness. In Perry”s “Revelation Dub,” time was creakily kept by a distended, phasing hi-hat and Romeo’s vocal was either reduced to the low hum of some distant street protest or chopped into sudden nonsensical stabs-“Warinna!” “Balwarin!”- as if all words, even warnings, could not be trusted. The riddim-which Marley would later version for “Three Little Birds,” with its bright chorus, “Don’t worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing’s gonna be alright”-was swung off its moorings, the textual integrity and authority was undermined. Perry’s sound was the epitome of sipple[meaning slippery, precarious]. Dub answered the question: what kind of mirror is it that reflects everything but the person looking into it?
Reggie Watts Is About to Explode
He just did a battery commercial and this Pepsi product tie-in. I have no objections because I think he rightfully deserves to be the most famous and well paid man in the American ecosystem.
The Sinking of the Titanic
A composition by Gavin Bryars. A year after first hearing it, it’s still my favorite piece of music. The recorded version is below, a live performance is available at the linked site.
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I am not a poster, but a positive toaster.
Watch as Lee Scratch Perry confuses Jools Holland:
about the author
Mark Elliot Cullen is "relaxed", he's a movie star, he's a television celebrity, he's a nightclub sensation, he's a social issue and, of course, he's one of the world's most successful recording artists. All in all, he's an entertainment phenomenon the likes of whom emerge only a half-dozen or so times in the course of this century. So where does that leave us?