psycho fashion

I read with delight and anticipation the following author blurb at the end of David Byrne's survival guide to the music industry in the January issue of Wired:

'David Byrne is currently collaborating with Fatboy Slim and Brian Eno. Separately.'

The first collaboration is 'Here Lies Love', Byrne's song cycle about Imelda Marcos, 'with musical contributions from Fatboy Slim (Norman Cook)', as Byrne's blog describes it. (See my entry for February 7, 2007.)

It's the mysterious Eno project that's got me all excited. The last time David Byrne and Brian Eno worked together, the result was four of my all-time favourite albums: Talking Heads' More Songs about Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, and Remain in Light, and Eno & Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Think of the last one as Steve Reich meets Fela Kuti via Grandmaster Flash, and you'll get the idea.

That era, 1977 to 1981, was a special time in music and the arts generally. I like to think of it as the culmination of the 1960's, or, if you prefer, their last hurrah. It was a period of cultural experimentation, political skepticism, and young people being fabulous, but without the assassinations, nightly reports of war dead, and Richard Nixon. I can think of no better evidence than TV Party, Glenn O'Brien's love-in après la lettre on Manhattan public access cable.

Just think about all the fantastically weird/angry/trippy music that came out between 1977 and 1981 on both sides of the Atlantic by Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Chic, The Clash, Parliament-Funkadelic, Blondie, Joe Jackson, et al. Disco reached its peak and became the raw material for rappers and DJ's. And, perhaps for the last time, there was cheap real estate in NYC.

Besides the US and the UK, the other country that belongs in this conversation was Germany, where the excesses of youth, cf. Baader-Meinhof, took on a more extreme quality. It's Berlin, the walled city of the Cold War, that calls our attention back to Brian Eno and his collaborations, for it was there that David Bowie, at his most vampiric and drug-addled, retreated for his great strung-out trilogy with Eno: Low, Heroes, and Lodger. From the electronic melancholia of Low to the persona of the helpless egomaniacal DJ on Lodger, Bowie fed off the body of ideas in circulation at the time and gave them the tinge of the undead.

But here's the thing that I've always wondered, and the simultaenous Eno connection makes it all the more bizarre: why have David Byrne and David Bowie never collaborated? I've never even seen them photographed together. Think of all they have in common:
-They both recorded at least three albums each with Brian Eno between 1977 and 1981.
-They both live in New York and are devoted to contemporary art.
-They're both known for showing up at concerts all over the city to keep up with what the new bands are doing. (See also their live appearances with the Arcade Fire.)

How can two people in the same line of work walk the same streets, frequent the same galleries and concert halls, and collaborate with the same partners (Eno, Philip Glass, Adrian Belew) yet never appear together? Is one the super-powered alter ego of the other? (Hmm. Which would be which?)

So I got to thinking last week: what form could a Bowie-Byrne collaboration take? They could write and record a song together, but one song would not be enough to satisfy anyone. At the other end, an entire album of co-written duets doesn't strike me as a good idea either. Neither one is known for sharing the stage for long.

And then the idea came to me for something in between that would put the two of them in musical and creative conversation with each other but would be more imaginative than an album of duets—a four-song EP according to the following rules:

1. A new song co-written and performed by the two of them.
2. A Bowie song covered by Byrne.
3. A Byrne song covered by Bowie.
4. A joint cover of a song written by someone else that they both love and have never recorded.

I have suggestions for 2 and 3. Aside from Guster, Bowie and Byrne may be the only musicians who have recorded songs that include the lyrics 'Fa fa fa fa fa...' Think about it: David Bowie singing 'Psycho Killer' and David Byrne singing 'Fashion'!

'There's a brand new dance
But I don't know it's name,
That people from bad homes
Do again and again.
It's big and it's bland
Full tension and fear.
They do it over there
But we don't do it here.'

The declarative quality of these lyrics from Bowie's 'Fashion' sound like they were written by Byrne in the 70's but with the paranoid undertones brought to the fore.

'Ce que j'ai fait, ce soir-là
Ce qu'elle a dit, ce soir-là
Réalisant mon espoir,
Je me lance vers la gloire ... OK
We are vain and we are blind.
I hate people when they're not polite.'

Can't you just hear Bowie's jaded, disinterested sophisticate persona sing-saying these lines from 'Psycho Killer'?

Stranger things have happened than blog entries making their way to their intended targets and dreams coming true. In the meanwhile, while we wait for my magic wand to arrive from Ebay, what song do readers think they should cover together? The only rule is that it cannot be something that either has already recorded.

What do you think, reader? Now that my blog hiatus is over, show the love by posting a comment with your song title and explanation.


[Note: The first comment in the thread has somehow disappeared and now Dan's comment about late Bowie cannot be understood properly. The missing first comment was a provocation from a reader who said that Bowie was 'shot', whatever that means.]

free Dizzee Rascal

Dizzee Rascal has been the most exciting rapper in the world for the past four years, yet, as reported by Billboard, his third album, Maths and English, is not being released in the States on cd. Here one can only download it or wait for delivery from Amazon UK, as I am currently doing. This is very bad news, particularly while American hip hop continues to suffer the hegemony of crunk. (His first two albums, Boy in da Corner and Showtime, belong in everyone's musical library.)

I was lucky and curious enough to attend Dizzee's U.S. debut at Volume in Williamsburg on February 7, 2004 before I had even heard any of his music. The buzz from Britain was deafening at the time, and being a lifelong rap aficionado I figured what the hell. What I saw and heard that night blew me away. The space itself was bizarre for a concert venue. The club, which had only been open for a month and is now long gone, was a high-ceilinged, featureless, hangar-like space. And slashing across it diagonally was a huge, shiny, stainless steel flatbed truck.

When Young Master Rascal finally emerged, he climbed right on top of that shiny hulk and, charisma in abundance, turned it into a runway-style stage as if there could not be any other conceivable uses for a flatbed truck. On first listen, and live no less, I had no clue what the hell he was saying, but I was in awe of his speed, his skills, and his confidence in performing a style of rap that, musically and vocally, was like nothing I had ever heard before.

Dizzee Rascal's great accomplishment has been to pioneer a style of rap that is true to one of the original missions of American rap while while sounding nothing like it. Musically, his work is distinctly British in drawing on garage and electronica. It's as much about the beeps as the beats. Obviously, he is neither the first nor the only British rapper, but he is the most distinct and has unapologetically ventured the furthest away from the American sound. Vocally, even among British rappers, no one sounds like Dizzee. He has his own unique accent which sounds like that of no other English-speaker on earth, and he raps precisely while keeping to a pace that would exhaust most vocalists, not to mention some listeners as well. For the sharpest example, download his first big hit 'Fix Up, Look Sharp', and note the exaggerated emphasis he consistently puts on his oo's:

'Flushing MC's down the loo,
If you don't believe me bring your posse, bring your crew. '

Thematically, his songs return to the early American tradition of urban testimony—think 'White Lines' or 'The Message'. But there is a second, less noticed tradition that he draws on: that of the angry young men of the postpunk late 70's—Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson et al.—and their frustrations and dim understandings about sex and romance. His lyrics to 'Round We Go' from his first album demonstrate what I mean:

'She used to love him, he used to love her, she used to kiss him, he used to hug her, call it deep love or puppy love, they bunked off school.
Now there's no flame, things ain't the same, look's like she's changed, thinks it's some game, he's left in the rain, trying to point blame, talks for a fool.
She moved on quick, he's still lovesick, she's not having it, thinks he's some prick, he won't believe it, wants it just how it was in school.
He keeps calling, night or morning, break of evening, break of dawning, he keeps ringing up, she keeps hanging up, oh what a fool.
She is the best friend, of a ex-girlfriend, of a old school friend, who is the close friend, of this best friend, best friend likes this boy called Blue.
Best friend loves him, best friend needs him, but the ex-girlfriend, of the old school friend, who is the close friend, of this best friend, likes him too.
So the ex-girlfriend, of the old school friend, who is the close friend, of this best friend, sits with best friend, who by now has slept with Blue.
Now the ex-girlfriend don't want to pretend that she ain't slept with that boy Blue 'cause he was a friend of an ex man too.'

From the chorus:

'Ain't no love ting here, it's just one big cycle here.
Ain't no friendship here, it's just one big cycle here. '

These are unusual observations, not to mention line lengths, for a rapper. On the rare occasion that his vocal persona disses women, it's not misogyny but youth being served. In 'I Luv U' his perspective is de-centered by a female response that calls his claims into question:

[Dizzee Rascal:]
'That girl's some bitch, you know.
She keeps calling my phone,
She don't leave me alone,
She just moan and groan,
She keep ringing me at home.
These days I don't answer my phone. '

[Jeanine Jacques:]
'That boy's some prick, you know,
All up in my hair,
Thinks that I care,
Keeps following me here,
Keeps following me there,
These days I can't go nowhere. '

So is that girl really 'some bitch', or is he a jilted stalker? Ah, youth.

When Dizzee testifies to how he's living, a rap commonplace, he marks his turf as distinctly British and tackles the class question from a fresh perspective, as in 'Imagine' from his second album:

'Imagine if I showed you one day I was leaving the hood,
Would you call me a sellout? Would you say it's all good?
Would you follow if you could?
Or would you just tell me get the hell out?

And imagine if I showed you that I found another way of getting dough without doing dirt—let's blurt.
Would you love me for giving me some hope
Or resent me 'cause your pride got hurt?
Imagine if we never grew up on a council estate
And was country manor-raised with a spoon in our mouth,
Would we still be making fuss about the East and the South?
Would we shiver at the robberies, murder and the crack
And thank god that we didn't have to live like that?
Just the image on the TV as we're comfortably sat
Sipping wine, room lit by the summer sunshine
Not a worry in the world as we casually chat. '

Unlike American rappers boasting of their hustling ways while they're chilling at their mansions (not that there's anything artistically wrong with that), Dizzee is dreaming of a materially better life and simply wanting, without apparent anger, what others have: not the bling but the bucolic. Life on a council estate, or in the projects, is not something to boast of but something to get away from.

Yet another strength of his œuvre is the unexpected sources of his samples. On his first album, the standout was 80's arena rock star Billy Squier's 'The Big Beat', a source later used by Jay-Z on '99 Problems'. Outdoing Jigga one more time, on his second album Dizzee turned to the Broadway canon, once removed. It was both brilliant and daring when Jay-Z sampled Annie on 'Hard-Knock Life', but Dizzee went after bigger game: Rodgers & Hammerstein. On 'Dream', he not only took the chorus to 'Happy Talk' from South Pacific but specifically sampled Captain Sensible's 1982 pop recording. Yeah, he's that cool.

This is the young prodigy whose new album won't even be out on cd in the States because no one here is listening. According to the Billboard article linked above, his first album sold 58,000 units here and his second a mere 16,000. I wrote a blog entry last December called 'the problem with American hip hop today', but I see now that the biggest problem may be something else entirely: an uncurious, risk-averse buying public. Why are American rap listeners not supporting this important and groundbreaking artist? Are their needs really being met by the stale crumbs of the crunk mafia?

Reader, if anything in this blog entry sounds interesting to you, download a song or two and if you like it buy Dizzee's albums. It's time for the United States to work with its hip hop allies around the world. Clearly, we can't go it alone anymore.

don't hate the genre

The New York Times reported this week on the Brazilian government's hip hop arts program led by Gilberto Gil. Yes, that Gilberto Gil, pillar of tropicalismo since the 1960's and minister of culture since 2003. In 2004 I was lucky enough to see both Gil and Caetano Veloso perform live though, alas, not together. That remains one of the things I still need to do before I die.

Brazil has a lot going on these days that merits the world's attention—sugar ethanol, gang culture, fighting Northern agricultural subsidies at the WTO—but in some things Brazilians are just like everyone else. Case in point—after noting that Brazilian funk is all about sex, bling, and violence, the article quotes Guiné Silva, rapper and community center director, on the attitudes of Brazil's hip hop community:
'When U.S. rap groups come here and try to be ostentatious or do the gangster thing, they get booed off the stage. We feel a kinship with Chuck D and Public Enemy but we don't have any respect for people like Snoop Dogg and Puff Daddy.' (NYT, March 14, 2007)

(I should say, for the benefit of readers who are not rap afficionados, that Chuck D represents the politically-minded strain of rap whereas Snoop mostly raps about smoking and pimping.)

Now, before I am misunderstood, let me state for the record that I consider Chuck D and Rakim the two greatest MC's of all time and Diddy among the worst, although I do give him props for broadening the model of the hip hop entrepreneur. And yes, many of my favorite raps belong to the politically militant canon. Even so, I have to express my fundamental disagreement with the quotation, which typifies the problem with hip hop criticism today: it is little more than didacticism and prescriptivism masquerading as serious criticism. (For the problem with hip hop today, see my entry of December 1, 2006.)

Too much commentary about rap these days is nothing more than a wish list for what people want rap to be. They want it to be virtuous, morally righteous, and politically conscious. They want it to get up, stand up, and fight the powers that be. And when it doesn't live up to their moral and political program, all they can do is dis it or ignore it. In short, they want rap to teach us how to live and how to think.

But we must ask, is this a valid test for art? Or is this the most intellectually outdated and critically retrograde æsthetic agenda imaginable in the twenty-first century? Do we ask the same of painting or theatre? Have we forgotten the lessons of the æsthetic movement, to wit, that 'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.' (Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray) Or are hip hop critics a special class of people who don't believe in æsthetics but only look to rap for political messages?

The most common complaint, typified by Silva's reference to Snoop and Puffy, is that rap has become too materialistic, but when was it ever not about the Benjamins and partying? Let's go back to day one, 1979, 'Rapper's Delight' by the Sugar Hill Gang:
'You see I'm six foot one and I'm tons of fun
And I dress to a T.
You see I got more clothes than Muhammad Ali
And I dress so viciously.
I got bodyguards, I got two big cars,
I definitely ain't the wac.
I got a Lincoln Continental
And a sharp new Cadillac.
So after school, I take a dip in the pool, which really is on the wall.
I got a color TV, so I can see, the Knicks play basketball.
Hear me talkin' 'bout checkbooks, credit cards, more money
Than a sucker could ever spend.
But I wouldn't give a sucker or a bum from the Rucker not a dime till I made it again.'
And let's not forget that bit about the Holiday Inn.

Rap started out as music by have-nots who wanted to have, and what did they want to have most of all? Equal protection under the law? The right to a fair trial? No, Reader, what they said they wanted was color television and cash money. That's not a criticism but a clear-sighted observation. I'm not telling you what rap should be but, rather, what it is.

The obvious comeback is, well what about raps like 'The Message' and 'White Lines' by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five? I'm not denying that there was also political rap back in the day, but selective memory should not erase Flash's parade of party songs like 'Flash to the Beat' and 'Scorpio' from history. Most rap always was and possibly always will be about satisfying appetite and lust. And I'm here to tell you that if we are ever to have meaningful hip hop criticism, we need to engage rap on an æsthetic level and we must honestly take stock of all that it is and not just what some people wish it would be.

Let's not beat around the bush. Most objections to rap come from the misogyny, homophobia, materialism, and violence typically found in the lyrics. I deny none of these claims. Indeed, rap lyrics are a veritable cornucopia of ugly content. Consider one of the starkest examples possible, 'Gangsta Gangsta' (1988) by NWA:
'Do I look like a mother-fucking role model?
To a kid looking up to me,
Life ain't nothing but bitches and money.'
Ugly? Sure. But can we frame a more enlightening critical question than, Yes or no, is rap music sometimes ugly and unpleasant?

At this point, most defenders of rap will choose the classical defense, i.e. the argument that Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, etc. are full of uncomfortable content and violence. Although fairly obvious, that can still be a powerful defense of art in general, despite how overused it is. Yes, a lot of great art takes us out of our comfort zones and asks us to face difficult questions about who we, the human species, are and what we are capable of. There is drama in confronting the darkness. We ought not be too delicate to hear and see things about ourselves that we find unpleasant.

Sure, I buy all that, but that argument only works for rap's singularly great achievements as art. No, I want to defend rap more broadly, not just the handful of cases that any of us would readily accept as art. A better question to ask about rap, high or low, is this: what does it draw on and what does it do with that? What critical and æsthetic operations does it perform on the cultural traditions from which it proceeds? Or, more simply, a question we can ask about any art form: how does it transform the stuff it steals?

For me, the most important traditions underlying rap's lyrical content are bawdiness and the outlaw. Rap's discourse of pimping and ho's has a lot in common with the work of Rochester and Swift's dressing room poems. The first rappers to make a specialty of bawdy talk were 2 Live Crew, not the greatest MC's but clearly working in a similar vein as the aforementioned English poets, if not exactly in a direct line of descent. More directly, American traditions of the outlaw, common in popular song, came to the fore in rap in the late 1980's, not coincidentally in the west. One thinks readily of Jimi Hendrix's 'Hey Joe' or Johnny Cash's 'Cocaine Blues', two first-person narratives about men who shot their women dead.

Artists don't speak literally for themselves when they perform in character (and yes, some rappers remain in character far too much of the time). To portray violence in song is not to perform or advocate violence. Gangsta rap is by now an established genre drawing on a fairly stable body of source material: outlaws and bandits, bawdy talk, pimps and prostitutes, gang culture, Brian De Palma's Scarface, drug dealing, street life, and boasting. The originality of the art lies in the operations it performs on this genre material.

When gangsta rap started, people typically defended it on the grounds that it represented the authentic voice of witness: it was testimony from the streets by people otherwise silenced. I happen to think people were also listening because they were excited by the moral ambiguity of listening to shameless tales of crime and wrongdoing, but perhaps that was just me. Whether we want to imagine a lost, pure heyday of politically militant gangsta rap or whether we want to acknowledge that it was always already self-consciously constructing itself as a genre, æsthetic revolutions ultimately do tend to evolve into sets of genre conventions, and there's nothing wrong with that.

That rap's tales of hustling now seem more mannered than militant is a typical outcome in art. Is there still originality and creativity in American rap these days? Recent albums by Ghostface Killah and Clipse suggest there is, although first-rate new work is becoming rare. But that is a question worth asking about art: is it still original and creative—not, do I agree with what the artist says? Reader, if we only accepted art whose content we agreed with, we'd burn down much of the Met tomorrow.

I'm on the left and all, but there is no place for the dogmatism of easy liberalism when it comes to the arts, let alone rap, the most intellectually demanding form of music today. Appreciating Eminem's assonance and 'Stan', his great epistolary rap, or marvelling at the way the Wu-Tang Clan mixes martial arts, super-heroes, and post-Scarface cocaine entrepreneurs does not mean we are not committed to fighting misogyny, homophobia, war, and all the other evils in the real world. It means that we recognize that art is something else: strange, perplexing, and outside our normal morality. If we limit ourselves to only admitting artists whose literal content we agree with, we will be all the poorer for it.