The Post-Rockist

[Editor’s note: We’ll be at Pitchfork this weekend, but since we’re going to miss Friday, we wanted to give Public Enemy some much needed preemptive lovin’.]

Public Enemy - “Bring the Noise”
(from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back)

When I first heard It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, I thought it sounded outdated and a little too old school for my tastes. After all, it had been a little over a decade since it was released, so it wasn’t surprising that it didn’t seem incredibly relevant to me at the time. The reason I picked it up was because it was one of those albums that consistently made all the Best Albums of All Time lists, in everything from The Source to Time magazine. From what I could tell, its importance and cultural impact weren’t up for debate and it was a classic in every sense of the word. Being a curious music fan with limited knowledge and taste, I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about and see if it could live up to the hype. So after hearing it a few times, I was a little disappointed that it hadn’t changed my life.

That would come later.

It Takes a Nation sat on my shelf for a couple years before I listened to it again. It had become one of those albums in my collection that I set aside before fully absorbing, as I waited until I was in the right mood for it. After all, you can’t force music to reach you when you aren’t ready for it. Like wine, music can require a bit of patience, but oftentimes it’s well worth the wait. So that year I decided I was going to listen to as much hip hop as possible, since it was a genre I enjoyed, but didn’t know a whole lot about. Being a middle class white kid from a small town in Michigan, the only hip hop I was exposed to growing up was whatever I saw on MTV in the nineties. As I was making my way through classics I had missed like Raising Hell, Paid In Full and Three Feet High and Rising, I figured it was time to give Public Enemy another try.

So I put It Takes a Nation back on my stereo and it felt like I just got punched in the face. I was immediately struck just by the sound of it. I’d never heard production as dense as this before. It felt like all my senses were being bombarded at once. How could I have ignored this before, I mean physically? There were samples colliding all over the place from police sirens to James Brown horns and beats to Malcolm X speeches to guitars from Slayer and David Bowie. Plus they were even sampling themselves! It was music that forced you to pay attention to it since there’s so much going on and it’s never pretty. Production team The Bomb Squad wasn’t interested in creating music that was even remotely pleasing to the ears. They wanted to hit you over the head repeatedly and without mercy. Their production assault mixed with DJ Terminator X’s up front scratching technique created a sound that was totally relentless. (Continued)

Bob Dylan
Modern Times
[Columbia Records; 2006]

This is the first time I have ever attempted to write about Mr. Bob Dylan.  He has always been one of the most important people in my life and has gotten me through numerous hard times, but I have never been able to come up with the words to describe my sincere appreciation and gratitude.  Add that to the fact that there are far too many people already writing about Dylan and not even getting close to describing the depth of his power and influence.  I never would have even considered writing about him in the past, but after watching him exist in the 21st century, I feel that I can now attempt to see if my words do him justice. 

It’s true that Dylan has always been accessible in that he is able to appeal to the masses, but in a spiritual way that prophets like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. have been able to do.  There is an enormous myth that surrounds him and has been ever since he wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” in the early sixties.  However, it seems like the myth has become even more exaggerated among the younger generations, who see Dylan as a sort of father figure of the twentieth century.  When Dylan was just a baby-faced kid performing folk songs in Greenwich Village, other people could sense his importance, but he was still thought of as being just a kid.  To the younger generations today, it is nearly impossible to imagine him in this way, since we see him as a holy paternal figure, instead of just as a gifted artist.  Jack White was recently quoted saying, “I have three fathers: God, my biological father, and Bob Dylan.”  This mentality is prevalent among the X and Y Generations, who grew up listening to their parents’ records while hearing a mystical quality in Dylan’s artistic voice.   Young people are finally getting the opportunity to hear Dylan’s new records at the time in which they are made, instead of hearing them decades after they’ve been released.  This has allowed me to see Dylan as a human being for the very first time.  I have suddenly realized that this person actually exists on earth, in the present, along with me and everybody else.

It is amazing that Dylan’s music is so human and accessible to people of all different ages, yet he still maintains this aura of divinity.  In that way I guess he could be considered Christ-like, being 100 percent divine and 100 percent human at the same time.  His music reaches deep into the spiritual realm and the nature of existence, while his songs take and ache and make love and break just like a little girl.  In recent years it seems like he has attempted to shed some of his mystery and present himself in a more mortal way.  There have been several projects that Dylan has been involved with in the new century that are different from anything he’s done in the past.  Every week for the last few months he has been playing DJ and hosting “Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan” on XM Radio, in which he seems to be having the time of his life.  On this program you can hear his great sense of humor shine through, with lines like “I bumped into Charlie Sheen last weekend and he had this to say about fathers.”  It is quite bizarre to hear Dylan talk so much while he raves about the music that is nearest and dearest to him.  On this show he plays a lot of the music that had inspired him in his younger years, along with artists of today that he seems to appreciate like Beck and The Streets.  By hearing him talk about his tremendous love of music, it reminds us listeners that he is a music fanatic just like you and me.  We also got to see the human Dylan in last year’s Martin Scorsese-directed documentary No Direction Home, which portrayed Dylan as a kid being exploited by the people around him during his formative years as an artist.  It featured a surprisingly frank Dylan of today looking back on this difficult time when the role of “spokesman of a generation” was thrust upon him.  The film allowed us to see from his perspective and removed our fixation on the mythic Dylan of the sixties and forced us to focus on the young artist who frequently felt used and abused during this period.  The year before that he released part one of his autobiography, Chronicles, which also offered a glimpse into how he felt during different eras of his career.  He wrote about the time in the seventies when obsessed fans would stalk him and go through his trash and look in the windows of his house.  After hearing him talk about the toll this took on him and his family, you can’t help but feel awful for ever putting him up on a pedestal. 

In 2003, Dylan co-wrote and acted in the film Masked And Anonymous, in which he played a character that is expected to save the world.  The story takes place in a decaying futuristic society in which Dylan’s character Jack Fate gets sprung from prison in order to put on a concert.  The film was full of unusual characters and situations in a world gone wrong, and the best part was seeing Dylan play an exaggeration of himself who was regarded as some mythical hero.  Dylan has also managed to shock his fans by making bizarre television appearances over the last several years: he was a guest star in an episode in the sitcom Dharma & Greg, he was featured in a Victoria’s Secret commercial, and most recently he performed in an iPod commercial.  Judging from these strange appearances, it is clear that Dylan does not take his messianic stature too seriously and has no intention of maintaining his mystique.  In fact, Dylan has spent his entire career trying to convince people that he is not God or any other ridiculous role that has been thrust upon him.  He’s always just wanted to be an artist and a musician that had no responsibility or obligation to try and save the world.  On one of his early albums he sang, “Ain’t no use a-talking to me, it’s just the same as talking to you.”  Since the beginning of his career, Dylan had a humility about him that people chose to ignore while they made him their personal savior.

With his latest album Modern Times, Dylan has again managed to write terribly moving songs about the human condition while questioning the spiritual world around him.  The songs offer tremendous insight into what it is like to be a living, breathing human being existing in a world that seems like it is falling apart.  The album is full of imagery of impending doom, but it also offers redemption somewhere along the line.  This is a reccurring theme that is evident from the beginning of the album. The first two songs are given the titles “Thunder On The Mountain” and “Spirit On The Water,” which include classic spiritual terms that depict the presence of God in the physical world.  Dylan begins by predicting the coming apocalypse in “Thunder On The Mountain” while he searches for a way out.  The song is filled with fear and chaos over reeling and rocking Chuck Berry-guitars while Dylan plays the prophet and also the drunk who finds it funny that the world is ending.  By the end of the song you feel overwhelmed with the madness of the world, but you manage to have a smirk on your face.  Dylan cools it down with the next track “Spirit On The Water” where he plays the heartbroken romantic who thinks love, or at least sex, is the answer, while the music swings to a charming beat.  Early on he sings, “When you’re near it’s just as plain as it can be. I’m wild about you gal, you ought to be a fool about me.”  But just when you think Dylan is writing a simple love/lust song, he plunges deep into the darkness.  Later on he sings “I wanna be with you in paradise and it seems so unfair.  I can’t go to paradise no more, I killed a man back there.”  This is just the type of image Dylan loves to use and this album is filled with all sorts of these lines.  These opening songs set the pace for the entire album, which goes back and forth between love and death and mystery and murder and God and the Devil and innocence and corruption and the spiritual and the physical and humor and heartbreak.   

(Continued)

Okay, listen up, gentle readers. If the Post-Rockist is a place for recovering music snobs, I think it’s high time we did a feature on today’s pop music, or, music that snobs wouldn’t be caught dead listening to. It is time to review current popular singles that most of us used to call “pop shit” or “guilty pleasures,” only, now that we are no longer snobs, we will simply call them songs. These songs deserve critical thought and attention since they are liked by so many people and are therefore valuable to our society. In the last few decades popular music has become so segregated that people are no longer willing to admit to liking certain types of music simply because it might be considered too pop or too mainstream. For some reason there is a newly established societal rule that implies that if something is liked by millions of people that it is probably invaluable as a work of Art. When did our culture get so elitist? In the sixties it seemed like everybody liked The Beatles, as they were both artistic and popular at the same time. Their music appealed to people across the board and it was never considered a sin to be a Beatles fan. Nowadays if you like an artist that has a video constantly being played on MTV or VH1, there is no way that you could be considered a “serious” music fan. This mentality has been around for quite a while, but it seems to have gotten worse with the rise of the Indie culture. Of course there were the rock fans in the seventies who attended the anti-disco rallies, and burned stacks and stacks of vinyl just to prove to themselves that rock was a superior genre. While this was totally ridiculous on many levels, at least rock fans still loved mega-popular groups like Kiss and Led Zeppelin.

I’ve been amazed at all of these music fans who turn their back on a band they used to love simply because they were able to reach a broader audience. For example, there were so many people who liked The White Stripes when they weren’t so popular, but now that they are superstars these fans could care less about them. This notion has absolutely nothing to do with the music. Music fans used to have loyalty and trust in the artists that they loved. When a favorite artist of yours put out a new album or came to your town, you spent your money on them just to show them support and gratitude. Now it seems that people have adopted such reactionary personalities that they are constantly looking for something new that no one else knows about. If your parent or your neighbor or your little sister likes the same song as you, then something must be seriously wrong. This way of thinking has plagued so many people, who are constantly using music as a fashion to define their personalities, and so if you like an artist that everyone likes, then basically you have the same personality as everyone else. Who are we to use artists to form our identities?

Let’s enjoy all of the music we can and not question it. If it gets your feet moving, your heart pounding, your fingers snapping, your gut aching, your mind expanding, or your hips telling the truth, then that’s what matters. Music is for the uplifting of the individual and collective spirit and does not need to be ranked.

So let’s drop all the pretenses and come to understand why these songs are bumping in every nursery, school yard, office complex, and retirement home across the country.

Paris Hilton - “Stars Are Blind”

Here is an artist that people would love to see fail miserably, but too bad for them. Despite all the negative expectations, this song is really good and has the potential to be quite a memorable hit song, especially since it sounds like nothing else out there at the moment. It has an insanely catchy chorus and reggae beat that has a similar feel to Blondie’s “The Tide Is High.” Ms. Hilton has a pretty and soulful voice that defines her sexuality as well as her sincerity, and every time she sings, “Let’s see what this love can do,” it’s surprisingly moving. It’s the kind of sentiment found in Bruce Springsteen’s early work, as it’s an embrace of the world’s mystery and a commitment to living and discovering love. Ms. Hilton was recently quoted in the press explaining how hearing her album makes her cry because “it’s so good.” Even she seems surprised at how good of an artist she actually is. Just from her first single, she has proven to have a lot more to her than people think. You gotta respect her boldness by putting so much of herself into her album, knowing that she could turn into a Kevin Federline-type punchline, even more so than she already is. ”Stars Are Blind” is one of the best songs of the summer and could quite possibly be sung in karaoke bars for the next few decades and not as a joke.

Stream “Stars Are Blind” and other Hilton tunes.

Christina Aguilera - “Ain’t No Other Man”

This is exactly the kind of music Christina Aguilera should be making. It finally feels like she’s found herself as an artist by focusing on her powerful voice and her love of big band jazz and rhythm & blues, instead of trying to compete with the dance pop of Britney Spears. After spending most of her career trying to be nastier than her contemporaries, Ms. Aguilera seems to have adopted a more subtle and conservative style of music, which suits her much better and is a hell of a lot more sexy. “Ain’t No Other Man” is a true-blue love song that includes lyrics that are as sincere as they come. The song still oozes sex appeal, but in the way Aretha Franklin or Etta James are able to do with only their voices, without resorting to taking off their clothes. The production boasts a contemporary dance beat along with vintage horn samples that prove that she’s not simply trying to create old-timey music. By combining American roots music with a modern twist, Ms. Aguilera has managed to show artistic promise and depth as she has figured out how to be herself. “Ain’t No Other Man” is her best song yet.

Stream “Ain’t No Other Man” and other Aguilera tunes

Justin Timberlake - “Sexyback” (featuring Timbaland)

You gotta respect an artist that tries new things on their sophomore album. Justin Timberlake was able to surprise all the boyband haters a few years ago with Justified as he seemed like the perfect candidate to be the Michael Jackson of the new millenium. This time around, judging from his single “Sexyback,” he has adopted a new style that is much more influenced by the robo-funk of Prince than the disco-pop of Michael Jackson. In fact, the FutureSex/LoveSounds album cover consists of Mr. Timberlake smashing a disco ball! Instead of relying on The Neptunes again, he choose to have Timbaland and will.i.am produce his new album, giving it a much more futuristic sound. On “Sexyback,” his vocals are distorted and subdued, which is totally unexpected from a former boyband singer. For someone who is always able to rely on his signature soulful voice, it is admirable that he doesn’t depend on old tricks to get his point across. Timbaland’s production is in his regular hit-making style, but Mr. Timberlake appears to be the one giving the track it’s originality as he reinvents himself again.

Stream “Sexyback” and other Timberlake tunes.

(Continued)

Recently I had the pleasure of seeing Jolie Holland live in her native San Francisco, along with a band made up of her favorite local backing musicians. The show took place in the posh Bimbo’s 365 Club with its elegant seating and two drink minimum. However, it was clear from the very start of the show that this was no fancy recital. I felt like I was in the prescence of royalty, although Ms. Holland has to be the most foul-mouthed queen that ever lived. On the opening track of her fantastic new album, Springtime Can Kill You, she sings, “I feel like a queen on this dirty city bus, look what you’ve done to me.” This line seems to sum up the mystery of Jolie Holland. She’s constantly characterized as an elegant songbird with a voice so beautiful and heartbreaking that she frequently gets compared to Billie Holiday, even though they sound nothing alike. The reason they are so often compared must lie in the degree of beautiful sadness with which they sing. The two of them sound so haunted that the only thing left for them to do is sing. That “lady sings the blues” cliché works for Ms. Holland as well since she looks and sings like an angel, but one that can be found passed out drunk in an alley.

Early into her set, Ms. Holland found herself distracted by a young woman in the front row who was doing her best to get attention and disrupt the show. She handled the heckler in her hometown like a cabdriver would. “Baby girl, if you’re going to be loud you’re gonna have to move and get as far away from me as possible,” she sneered with vehemence. After the crowd cheered to show their support, the heckler promptly shut the hell up, probably out of fear that Ms. Holland wouldn’t hesitate to drop kick her with high heels. Ms. Holland handled the situation with such unwavering confidence that I thought she might be the boldest woman I have ever seen. However, I was proven wrong shortly thereafter when she had a difficult time going into the next song, apparently shaken up from the incident. She may be a street-smart queen, but that doesn’t make her a goddess.

Ms. Holland’s humanity is in fact the best part of her music. The way she attempts to create the most gut-wrenching, emotional performance possible, no matter how many mistakes there are, proves that she is interested in making real human music with a beating heart. Several of the tracks on her recent album were recorded live in front of an audience, in an attempt to get the most honest performances possible, instead of being inhibited by a lifeless studio atmosphere. Judging from the Jolie Holland live experience, she seems to crave the human interaction that occurs between audience member and performer. Throughout all of her songs she seemed to be singing from the bottom of her gut, creating a loud and forceful sound, but one filled with heartbreak, sort of like how Hank Williams used to sing. Live and on record, the phrasing with which she sings has an elastic quality that twists each sound until it fits the exact feeling she’s trying to convey. This technique gives her music its loose, improvisational feel, while she attempts to get to the deepest, darkest place that she can with her voice and her melody.

(Continued)

If I’ve said it before I’ll say it again: modern music could use a whole lot more mariachi horns.  Who would have thought an indie rock garage band from New York City would completely relearn the art of songwriting and spend a year studying such oddball albums as Bob Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes and The Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies for inspiration.  By immersing themselves in music that was innovative when it came out by sounding so ancient and fresh at the same time, The Walkmen have managed to replicate the same feeling on their new album, A Hundred Miles Off.

The album opens with the track “Louisiana,” which starts off sounding like a Basement Tapes outtake, with its Caribbean beat and boozy drawl, but as it gets going it manages to reinvent itself as something entirely new.  Singer Hamilton Leithauser casually offers some overly optimistic, intoxicated lyrics that recall the excitement of starting a new relationship.  Just before the chorus kicks in he recognizes his blind idealism and belts the line “I’ve got my hands full.”  Just as he finishes, an instrumental chorus begins with mariachi trumpets and barroom piano taking over sounding like an alcohol-soaked fiesta.  The song is surprisingly moving in its progression.  Part of the time it feels like a dreamy love song, while drifting into a loneliness and doubt just before giving up to go get drunk at a party.  It is a bold opening statement, in its adventurous scope and embrace of music of the past, especially within the realm of indie rock.

Of course none of this would ever work if The Walkmen were simply performing an exercise in roots music.  They manage to maintain their garage rock drumming and shrill, hazy guitars, while the keyboards of their past have been replaced with horror movie organs and honky tonk piano.  The overall effect, like all good music, has elements of the past, present, and future combined.

Many of the songs are more like mood pieces with an emphasis on texture rather than songs with a regular verse-chorus-verse format.  This makes the album feel more like a journey than a collection of songs.  The final song, “Another One Goes By,” sums up the entire album by its declaration of wanting to pay attention, but still missing out along the way.  It is a hopeful, hopeless, and brutally real sentiment in a world full of beauty and sadness.  The narrator of the song seems to accept his fate, while letting the foggy ’60s soul instrumentation of the song surround him in his isolated contentment. Leithauser typically sings from the back of his throat in his highest octave, which creates a Dylanesque drunken, gut-wrenching squeal.  He could easily sing in a more conventional lower range, as he does on the tropical lounge song “Brandy Alexander,” but usually he recognizes the depth of emotion he can reach by howling at the top of his lungs.  The overall effect is like the end of a long night of drinking when everything becomes painfully sad, but totally worth it.

It is clear from A Hundred Miles Off that The Walkmen have been trying to listen and learn what they can from those who came before, while still existing in today’s world.  The album has a rebellious feel to it, much like the late sixties/early seventies periods of Bob Dylan, The Band, and The Kinks.  It’s a reaction against the conventions of modern music, but it’s not in complete defiance of it.  The genre of indie rock was originally a broad term meant to imply that it included music that was made on the artist’s terms, instead of those of the music business machine.  However, indie rock, like all invented genres, has often managed to become a cliché with a particular sound.  Just as Johnny Cash challenged country music with his use of mariachi horns on “Ring Of Fire,” The Walkmen have taken a risk of being totally misunderstood by their audience.  It is an admirable move in the world of indie rock where new ideas can potentially be labeled as gimmicky.  With A Hundred Miles Off, The Walkmen seem to have created something out of left field, while challenging conventions and embracing the unknown, while maintaining their indie rock roots.  By doing so they have breathed fresh life into the genre, just when it needs to be reminded of its roots. 

VIDEO: The Walkmen - “Louisiana”

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