Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week

[ONE] GATHER’ ROUND PEOPLE WHEREVER YOU ROAM
There are two beautiful tracks from Mavis Staples’ new album available on Apple Music. From Anti’s website: “To capture Mavis’ resonant phrasing and textured vocals, producer Brad Cook tried to build every song around that voice. He began with spare skeleton recordings, just drum and piano, and focused on recording her vocals. Then he expanded the song from there, trying never to overshadow or undermine the framework she’d established. He imagined a record in the tradition of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a group of artists coming together to celebrate community — in this case, one centered on Mavis.” From the two tracks released so far, one by Frank Ocean [“Godspeed”], I’d say that’s been achieved… And Kevin Morby, writer of the other, had this to say: “hearing Mavis sing ‘Beautiful Strangers’ is hands down the greatest moment and highest honor of my career. Mavis also wields that extremely rare power to take a song somebody else wrote and make it entirely her own. As the person who penned “Beautiful Strangers” I feel I have every right to say, her version is better.” 

[TWO] FROM LIAM NOBLE’S EXCELLENT BLOG, BROTHER FACE
“My feeling is that humans have been hurtling forwards forever, changing and improving, streamlining and enriching their existence ever since the first one grew a surplus of something and sold it on. Progress is like a train, with us at the front looking ahead as history adds carriages in tow one by one, decade by decade, year by year. And now it feels like we are slamming on the brakes. What does the future hold other than a faster compilation of the past, quantum speed rehashes, consensus songs and a literature based on graduate CVs and job applications. All of these things AI does very well. And as the train stops, so the carriages come hurtling over us and through us and past us, shards and fragments of the old pummelling us into submission.”

[THREE] THE COOLEST WEBSITE I’VE SEEN RECENTLY
Serge Gainsbourg’s house has been converted into a museum, and I’m hoping to visit in November, at which point I’ll report back on whether it’s as as it seems. I remember that after his passing they auctioned off an ashtray with Gainsbourg-smoked butts, but I’m hoping they had plenty more ashtrays to choose from.

[FOUR] BOOK CORNER
Jonathan Taplin was The Band’s Road Manager (he found and rented Sammy Davis Jnr’s house for the recording of The Band, for instance) and then produced Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. He’s also very smart. I’ve just finished his excellent book, The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Stole the Future, which I recommend. It’s terrifying, of course. At the beginning of the book, he quotes American historian Timothy Snyder, from his book, On Tyranny: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” Taplin then starts his introduction, “This book seeks to understand the role of four very powerful billionaires — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreessen — in creating a world where ‘nothing is true and all is spectacle’… The four men I am writing about want this outcome — where ‘all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands.’ And as Orwell presciently noted, this society would not be democratic in any accepted sense of the word. Andreessen, Musk, Thiel, and Zuckerberg’s disruptions of our notions of both capitalism and democracy are only going to increase in the coming years.”

”I think I lost it / Let me know if you come across it / Let me know if I let it fall / Along a back road somewhere” — “I Lost It”, by Lucinda Williams
[FIVE] THE SONGS THAT MADE ME FALL BACK IN LOVE WITH MUSIC
One | Shirley Ellis, “The Clapping Song” | Music wasn’t doing what it used to do for me — I wasn’t, in Nile Rodgers’ words, getting lost in music. I think it was also due to having the entirety (almost) of recorded history, everything, everywhere, all at once. And it felt like everyone, everywhere, would have access to everything — so what was the point in writing about it? I decided to try to listen only when that was all I was doing, in an attempt to remember when I loved music unconditionally.

If you’ve heard “Apt.”, a song by New Zealand and South Korean singer Rosé and US superstar Bruno Mars, you’ll know that nonsense songs never go out of fashion. Every few years, one rolls around; this time, it came with a mixed heritage. Using elements from the none-more-American “Mickey” by Toni Basil, the song’s chorus is built around a South Korean drinking game chant, “apateu” (apartment). Starting out sounding close to the Ting Tings, it’s slightly let down by the smooth popiness of the chorus, which sounds like it was flown in from an entirely different tune. Anyhow, it’s popular among the younger set, even a year after its release, but for me, it dialled up something from 1965, “The Clapping Song (Clap Pat Clap Slap)” by Shirley Ellis. Co-written with her manager and husband Lincoln Chase, it still sounds fantastic today. From simple cymbal strokes, it suddenly bursts into a Bo Diddley-like beat, with maybe a side order of New Orleans strut. It’s just drums and vocals as Shirley and her chums sing…
“Three, six, nine, the goose drank wine / The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line / The line broke, the monkey got choked / And they all went to heaven in a little row-boat…”The bass joins in, playing a single, rumbling note to kick the beat up a notch. Horns stab, a baritone plays deep notes, and Clap and Pat Instructions follow. By the time the next chorus kicks in,
“My mother told me / If I was good-ee / That she would buy me / A rubber dolly. / My aunty told her / I kissed a soldier / Now she won’t buy me / A rubber dolly…”
It’s with what sounds like a bagpipe drone. The drums pound. The horns stab more. The chunky rhythm guitar gets louder. At the end of that, the drums catch fire behind the vocals. Each part of the musical patchwork is working towards one seamless tapestry, driving the song forward. Shirley intones over the cymbal break, “Take the flats of your palms and slap your thighs and watch the fun materialize, as you sing this little song…” and then we’re on the home straight, with everything piling in… I love it. You may recall it from The Belle Stars’ cover in the ’80s. It was tightened up with a programmed beat to the point that the song’s freedom went missing.

Back next week, hopefully fresh from seeing last year’s favourite Work From Home soundtrack, CMAT… and wishing a speedy recovery to a good friend of Five Things, Richard Williams.