Olden Sleaze....

This voiceover sounds like it was written by a sexual predator with a rhyming dictionary and delivered from a waterbed:

Whether you're a sweet petite, long and lean or in between, here's another Chic to fulfill your dreams.

Put this one in your Hobo Bag....  

Your new favorite song is somebody's old favorite song...

Have you two met?  Let me introduce you to Ken Laszlo (born Gianni Coraini).   Ken's nom-de-disco was apparently inspired by Victor Laszlo the Czech Resistance leader who's on the run from the nazis in the film Casablanca.  Ken apparently related to it because a disco singer like resistance fighter is hiding in plain sight: an anonymous voice on any number of pop tracks.  

Well, Ken likes phones, sunglasses, the color white,  "menicures," and feeling the groove.  I think you two have a lot in common:

 For extra fun, and to drive home the idea of the anonymous disco star, here's a television performance of Hey Hey Guy by a model who lip-synched as Ken Laszlo for live gigs.  This version includes the completely baffling phone conversation from the beginning of the track. 

Catch that? Here's a transcript:

Ken: "Hallo"
French guy: "Hallo, ??"
Ken: "Oh dear, you have phone"
French guy: "Yeah, hey guy, tell me about your menicure"
Ken: "I love you and feel the groove"
French guy: "Tell me about it, is it the true"
Ken: "It's true, yes, it's true"
French guy: "Don't fool out, it's dangerous"
Ken: "Don't worry, baby gold"
French guy: "Everything is same as all"
Ken: "Everything is the same"
French guy: "Oh, I love you"
Ken: "Me too"
French guy: "I love you"

"Oh dear, you have phone."  Thanks for noticing!

All In Together Now...

Now that European Socialism is our official form of government and the most popular band in teh internets is a "Collective."  I wait in breathless anticipation for a full scale revival of that most euro-socialist form of pop: EBM (Electronic Body Music). 

America is a machine and we are its gears and wires: 

I saw Nitzer Ebb a couple years ago.  They look and sound exactly the same.  It's uncanny. Dancing to this music turns you into an ageless peoplebot.  Also a EBM revival is in the works according to this.  I don't know if I'm convinced.

All Good Things...

Ahhh Vangelis.  How I love thee.  Fairweather favorites come and go but the sensual, melancholic synth brilliance of his Blade Runner score will have a place at the summit of the Top Ten List that shall be chiseled upon my pink marble tombstone.  

Many put Vanglis down as a Yani-esque new age ding-dong, The Greek Rick Wakeman, or cheese purveyor.  Something that's difficult to dispute if anyone's heard the Enya meets Air Supply space-yacht-rock of Vangelis and Jon (which I still like).

Less a pleasure of the guilty variety is Vangelis' old Greek garage-prog group Aphrodite's Child.  Check out Magic Mirror, a terrific Proto-Metal tune in which the vocals play Echo to Vangelis' organ's Narcissus:

Aphrodite's Child had quite the apocalyptic streak.  Their first album is entitled "End of the World" and their swan song, the cult epic "666" is a psychedelic concept album about the book of revelations.  Here's an awesome track off it (which proves that even back in the early seventies Vangelis loved him some echoed-out tinkley bells) accompanied by a video apparently made by someone in a high school computer science class in 1995:

Heavily Armed Military is Necessary 

After a brief talk about the Nick Cannon opus Drumline at the airport the other day (how do you spend your Mondays?), I started thinking about the idea of militarism in music.  Drumlines hark back to the days of "genteel" rank-and-file warfare when the disciplined and clipped precision of group maneuevers  were a strategy of group control and a tactic of battlefield intimidation.  It's a technique that stretches back to the roman phalanx, a mass of individuals moving as one body, seeming to share the same mind.  The drum corps was a part of this psychological warfare (synchronized movements accompanied by the thunder of drums) and also a practical method of keeping people moving in lockstep.  

In these days of insurgent warfare, field maneuvers are relic of "civilized" battle, which are used more as way of indoctrinating recruits into the group mind.  Recall the first half of Full Metal Jacket where the young soldiers who will soon be running through the jungle are being drilled though obsolete about-faces.  However, on the domestic front, this style of battle is alive and well during protests and riots. Before an all-out melee happens to break out, police use the same intimidation tactics used by the warriors of yore: the massed phalanx moving as one.

Getting back to drums.  The aura surrounding them is naturally suited to the riot and the battlefield.  You beat the living shit out of them, the rhythm they create boils the blood, imitates the quickening pulse,  creates nerve jangling tension and release.  They were useful in battle for the same reasons they are useful on the dancefloor, and countless artists have used them to evoke the atmosphere of the warzone.  

For the purposes of this post however I'm interested in those who have used drums and rhythm produce military force for the purposes (intentional or not) of satire.  

Watch this performance by James Brown (with no less that two full-kit drummers) and remember that it was recorded a year after Dr. King's assassination. 

 

This was a time when anyone with a social conscience had the images of the southern civil rights protests and the Democratic Convention seared into their brains.  It was a time when "clean" crew-cut conservative reactionaries were pitted against the "unkempt" forces of progressive social change.  

James Brown and his band appear onstage like an army, even donning a weird sort of uniform somewhere between Judo master and Jedi knight.  The locked groove they beat out is more clean and  tight than a marine corps marching band.  On top of this unbelievably precise human-rhythm machine (many-as-one) The Godfather of Soul opens fire.  It all closes with the staccato bob-and-weave interplay between bandleader and saxophone in an breathless climax.  The martial sounds and images have been swallowed up into James Brown's spiritual-sexual ecstasy.  He has transformed the coup-de-grace into the petit mort. 

For an even more overt example of this same idea, listen to Zombie by Fela Kuti and the Africa 70.  Each instrument and voice interlocks in a head-spinning polyrhythm.  The percussion becomes fluid then shocks the listener when it abruptly halts with a thunderclap snare hit.   Fela steps up to the mic not as singer but as drill sergeant, leading his band through a cadence of military orders worthy of R. Lee Ermey.  The band follows with frightening discipline.  Fela Kuti continually  spoke and sung against the corrupt military government of his native Nigeria that raided his home, imprisoned him, and killed his mother.  Perhaps nowhere is his criticism of militarism more devastating than in Zombie.  The lyrics sardonically describe a soldier who has surrendered his will to his superiors, whose training has rendered him one of the "walking dead".  However, it is the percussive music itself that contains the most incendiary attack.  By reimagining his band as a paramilitary organization Kuti reveals their musical precision as a threatening artistic parody of military might.

Band as army.  Drums of war.

In ancient times there was ....

which begat....

Then came...

Behold!

I'm not really trying to compare these two cultural jack moves in terms of quality. What interests me more is the Euro -to - America flow of influence, since the sonic palate of Eurodance has been owning Rap for the past year or so now. Flash from the Aughties to the Eighties: Afrika Bambaataa was playing with Kraftwerk's teutonic synth squelches as a way creating a "music without boarders" fitting his envisioned global community of the Zulu Nation. Ethos aside, you can dance to it, Numbers was a breaking tune before Bambaataa got ahold of it. Today Kanye dosen't seek to unite a world community by joining seemingly disparate cultural threads (Berlin and the Bronx).  He's counting on a global market and going for mass appeal. "Stronger" begs the question: when does a song based on a sample of a tune simply become a glorified cover of that tune. (Especially since Daft Punk's song is built around a sample of American Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby." )  Kanye obviously loves his source material, but he's also counting on you loving it. Gone are the days when DJs sought to mask or bury their samples. Now, producers like Kanye build songs onto a pre-existing hit, banking on the audience's thrill of recognition. (Right, Girl Talk?) All the same, these homage-tunes are part of a continuum of dialogue between Europe and America. Two genres are quickly merging into one coked-up keytar-weilding neon Chimera. In shutter shades. The Auto Tune craze flows out of this, as does such bonkers EuroRap hybrids as TI's use of Numa Numa. Alls I can say is, I'll be first in line to shake the hand of whoever cover/samples Alice Deejay first! Smart money's on Birdman.