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.
Like many, I was not open to David Bowie when he appeared in my circle in 1974 or thereabouts.
In fairness to Bowie, when I first saw a picture of the Stones, I remember at the age of 12 thinking the band was going just a little too far with the hair and clothing, and later, when I first heard of Johnny and the Sex Pistols, again, I thought it was a joke. Needless to say, both bands became all time favorites.
But, going into my senior year at college I had the lucky fortune to live in a house with three women (sigh, those were the days), one of whom, Evie Gandleman (at the time, not sure if she got married and changed her name), and her boyfriend, Rebel (see why it was hard to take seriously?) were nutso for Bowie, calling him the “man of the future.”
It was embarrassing to see them go into the chant of the ever circling skeletal family, seeming more like Moonies than rockers.
However, the album they chanted–Diamond Dogs— contained the fantastic song Rebel Rebel, a tune I could not deny then, and still dig, and eventually Bowie won me over (if Evie and Rebel are still together, are they now One Direction fans?).
As a result, I saw Bowie twice, once in the late 70’s on the Low tour, and again 20 years later when Bowie toured with Trent Reznor and his band Nine Inch Nails.
The Low show was great, it being my favorite period of Bowie’s, and the NIN one so interesting as there was no formal set change. NIN started the show, and seven or eight songs in, one-by-one, a member of Reznor’s band would leave the stage and a member of Bowie’s replaced him.
This went on till Reznor was the only member of his band, at which point Bowie came on and they did a song together.
I saw that NIN/Bowie show with my late pal, Cathy, whom I had been dating for about three months and I will never forget Reznor kicking into the song Closer, snaking my fingers through Cathy’s, and saying, “This is our song” (I got a squeeze back). So, well, I have to drop that video in just because (if you don’t know the song, listen to the words and think that Cathy was, in some ways, a very shy and modest woman).
Back to Bowie, aside from a long and interesting and influential career of great songs, it is because of Bowie that I got to know Mick Ronson who is one of my three all time favorite guitar players (Bill Frisell and Richard Thompson being the others).
Like many other great artists, part of what made Bowie great was his desire to change paths along with his art and try to go somewhere new. And, being more of a rocker than anything, it is why Ziggy Stardust and Tin Machine are among my favorite albums by the artist (with Low and Diamond Dogs) while his more dance-based projects (Dancin’ In the Streets, Young Americans) ranked lower on my love list.
I think the real power of Bowie, though, is in that word, his name. For, he is iconic enough to be regarded by just one, like Dylan and Cher (sorry, but she is huge). Which is kind of a big deal.
I had planned on finding some choice Bowie tune to drop here, but there have been plenty in the previous posts. Plus, while looking for a song, I stumbled onto this fabulous interview with Mick Ronson, who explains (sort of) his band’s guitar sound, and then demonstrates. It’s awesome, and for sure you get both late great artists, Bowie and Ronson.
I saw Christiane F. when it came out, more than 30 years ago, but I so remember the clever and compelling way it wrapped its lurid sad story around a David Bowie concert in Berlin in the late 70s. Here’s a clip:
Blackstar, David Bowie’s latest album, came out last week. I’d read the warm, enthusiastic reviews but only sampled small pieces before word came this morning that he’d passed on. I was waiting until I found the whole album, Google Music didn’t have it, but it turns out YouTube did. We’ve written about many Bowie songs and projects here over the years. This cut is a worthy piece of ambitious and pleasurable music suffused with the mythmaking heart found in everything David Bowie created. A look backward into a dark future without him (but with his art) that starts today.
Today’s SotW guest contributor is Haley Flannery. I was first introduced to Haley when her father, a lifelong friend of mine, asked me to add her to the SotW distribution list. I have since come to know her as the outstanding author of the Emphatic Hands blog where she professes a fondness for girl bands amongst other things.
Carrie Brownstein published a memoir last year. Though she is now arguably better known as an actress (see Portlandia, Transparent), as well as a writer and cultural critic (for NPR and others), Brownstein devoted the majority of the memoir’s pages to Sleater-Kinney, the punk band that she founded with Corin Tucker in 1994, dissolved in 2006, and reformed in 2014 to release one of 2015’s best albums, No Cities to Love.
It is not surprising that Sleater-Kinney is so vital to Brownstein’s life story. They’re a vital band that has made some of the most singular, electrifying music released in the last two decades. No Cities to Love picks up right where their last album, 2005’s The Woods, left off, exploring the anxieties of living in the modern world, making music, and relationships.
The songs on No Cities to Love are powerful and catchy, none more so than mid-album track “A New Wave,” which is Sleater-Kinney at its most upbeat. Even the music video, a collaboration with the animators of Bob’s Burgers, is pure fun.
No one here is taking notice
No outline will ever hold us
It’s not a new wave
It’s just you and me
When Brownstein sings these lines, and when she sings later of “inventing our own kind of obscurity”, it brings to mind the band’s career-long refusal to be defined. Sleater-Kinney are shapeshifters. They are punks, feminists, mothers (literally and figuratively). They are world-class musicians and intellectuals. They are entertainers. They are uniquely themselves. They were, and still are – as Greil Marcus once called them – America’s best rock band.
Canadian noise rockers. What could go wrong? Maybe nothing.
The interesting thing for me, listening to their second album today, called II, is that they sound great, awesome, excellent, and yet it was hard not to think that I might like Nirvana or the Pixies more. Or more than 20 years ago.
I listened to their whole II album while making dinner tonight, and there isn’t anything about their sound I don’t like. Will I ever go back? Probably not. Musicianship is cool, a retro sound, too, but there should be something new. That’s not here.
I originally wrote this post in May 2008. I decided to repost it because it refers to a concert I saw 40 years ago today. It brings back great memories.
I was a DJ at Boston College’s radio station, WZBC, when Patti Smith’s album Horses was released on November 8th, 1975. I remember seeing the record in the “new releases” bin and being immediately drawn to it. Who was the androgynous woman in the black & white photo on the cover, wearing suspenders, with her coat hanging defiantly over her shoulder? (Of course at the time I wouldn’t have recognized the name of her photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, even if it had been pointed out to me.)
I listened to that album, and listened again. I’m still listening to it and get a rush every time I hear it, though I acknowledge it is one of those love it or hate it records.
A few weeks later I was back home for Christmas break in Newburgh, NY and learned that Patti would be playing the Red Rail, a small club in Nanuet, NY. A few buddies and I made a white knuckled drive the 40 miles to Nanuet in a massive blizzard. My parents were pissed that I insisted on risking the drive through that terrible storm.
The concert was unbelievable. Patti was in rare form, improvising her beat poetry to the three chord garage punk of her backing band. She was high as a kite and kept complaining that “some dude poured orange juice in my hair backstage.” This YouTube video from 1976 will give you an idea of what it was like to see her that night:
This week’s song is “Break It Up” from that debut record.
It was co written by Tom Verlaine of Television and was supposedly inspired by a dream about visiting Jim Morrison’s grave. It starts with a gentle piano intro. When Verlaine’s guitar comes in at the chorus, it sounds like a ghost haunting a cemetery. I’ve always loved the effect on Patti’s voice when she literally beats her chest during the lyric:
Ice, it was shining.
I could feel my heart, it was melting.
This is emotional stuff. Patti sings as if possessed, her words finding their own rhythm within the steady beat of the music. By the end her wailing sounds like she’s speaking in tongues at a Pentecostal revival. The piano pounds away with the guitars and keeps building all the way through the fade.
I hope you enjoy getting reacquainted with this song as much as I have.
I was a DJ at Boston College’s radio station, WZBC, when Patti Smith’s album Horses was released on November 8th, 1975. I remember seeing the record in the “new releases” bin and being immediately drawn to it. Who was the androgynous woman in the black & white photo on the cover, wearing suspenders, with her coat hanging defiantly over her shoulder? (Of course at the time I wouldn’t have recognized the name of her photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, even if it had been pointed out to me.)
A few weeks later I was back home for Christmas break in Newburgh, NY and learned that Patti would be playing the Red Rail, a small club in Nanuet, NY. A few buddies and I made a white knuckled drive the 40 miles to Nanuet in a massive blizzard. My parents were pissed that I insisted on risking the drive through that terrible storm.