Lots and lots of music sounds derivative of some other music. Sometimes that’s a bad thing, evoking the thought, Why bother? But other times the song is so right it feels absolutely fresh and absolutely classic at the same, which is the case with this new country song.
What’s extra-funny about this tune is that it is paean to listening to FM radio in the car, which is not the religious experience it once was (unless one finds one of those rare stations practicing the free form format).
Form meets function in My Church. I can’t stop playing this.
I was streaming KTKE on my way to the links the other morning and Bruce Springsteen’s fantastic Brilliant Disguise came streaming through the car radio, allowing me to sing my ass off along with the Boss, finishing just as I pulled into the Buchanan Fields parking lot.
No question, Bruce sticks largely to his working class roots and experience when composing lyrics, and he is indeed a strong songwriter with respect to words, meter, and rhyme.
Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town LP made our initial Top 60, and still is my favorite album by Bruce, but Brilliant Disguise, and Out in the Streets (from The River) are my two favorite songs by the artist.
Brilliant Disguise, which riffs of the early days of Rock’n’Roll in two nice little homages, is really a great tune about relationships, honesty, how we present ourselves to others, and most important, how we see others and how they see us.
The Boss implores a lover’s confusion about barriers for two choruses asking “tell me what I see, when I look in your eyes?” but concludes his last chorus turning the tables asking “tell me who you see when you look in my eyes?”
Brilliant Disguise riffs in its nod to the beat of The Drifters’ Save the Last Dance for Me, and then as the words complete, makes reference to Lou Christie’s The Gypsy Cried, both tunes from 1962.
Anyway, just before latest Republican debate and the Donald Trump travelling sideshow, days before the Iowa Caucus, well, let the words of the Boss ring in the back of our minds.
Mali was the home of the great blues guitarist, Ali Farka Toure, who channelled John Lee Hooker from across the water and brought him back home to the deserts near Timbuktu.
Songhoy Blues were formed by north-Mali musicians exiled to Bamako in the south by jihadists who banned western music in their appropriated shariahland up north. There’s a movie out about the exile of the musicians of Mali, called They Will Have To Kill Us First, which features Songhoy Blues.
I started watching this tune because of the colorful and appealing video, but I’m a sucker for Africans from all over the continent playing electric guitars, so I share this guitar music here.
Their first single was produced by one of the guys from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the video seems to have been recorded in a Soho loft in New York City. This is a rockier tune.
I went with some friends to see Pierre Kwenders at a small room off Broadway called the David Rubenstein Atrium last night. They regularly program free shows in the atrium, and this was the first I’ve gone to.
Kwenders is from Kinshasa, Congo, and now lives in Montreal. His band, three young Quebecois, play guitar and keyboards, various drums, and dj. It’s this last that was a little problematic. Being able to fire samples of strings and horns and chants distorts the small band vibe. Not that this world music wasn’t lush and gorgeous, it was, but when all that recording came to fore things started to sound more like a Peter Gabriel record than a four-piece band on a small stage playing for a couple hundred people. Live became qualified.
The best songs were popping and angular, with a little space between beats. Kwenders is a crooked and crafty dancer, a strong vocal presence in three languages (French, English and, maybe, Lingala–the predominant Kinshasa language), and a charming host. This was his first show ever in the US, and he got the decidedly mixed crowd (all ages, all colors, many nationalities) on their feet and singing and clapping along. The song that got us to the show was Mardi Gras, on record a Francophone hip hop hipster melange, but lacking the rap parts live seemed more a cajun lament.
Another good one was a raucous reggea-ish tribute to the Rumble in the Jungle called Ali Bomaye! This is a much sparer version than what the band played last night, but in a way the spareness is a tonic, an open window into Kwender’s lovely voice and lyrical songwriting.
More than 13M views have accrued to this clip, so it is hardly rare. But it’s new to me. And it’s fantastic. (What is also new to me is that bands other than the Beatles made videos (or whatever) this way in the 60s. Very cool. h/t to Angela.
