RICHARD BECK

Harvard nips fun in the bud

RICHARD BECK — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:19:07 GMT

Girl Talk at Harvard Yard, November 20, 2008
Harvard is not a fun place. Girl Talk was going to change all that.

Ghost story

RICHARD BECK — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:07:47 GMT

Toni Morrison's colonial America
Toni Morrison's colonial America

SLAVE SONG: Morrison’s characters — and history itself — sometimes disappear in the æther of her poetic prose.

A Mercy | By Toni Morrison | Alfred A. Knopf | 176 pages | $23.95

In Toni Morrison's America, slavery and its racist legacies are malevolent ghosts: dead, at least legally, but not at rest. In her 1987 novel Beloved — a now-canonical vision of a nation haunted by its wrongs — the angry spirit of a murdered baby takes up residence in the house of her family of freed slaves, smashing mirrors and scattering food. So it's not surprising that spirits would also be wreaking havoc in Morrison's new novel, A Mercy, a baggy, half-allegorical account of the nation's poisoned origins. The bigger question is whether these new ghosts can speak to us.

Morrison's focal point is Florens, who in the late 17th century, at age eight, is given by her mother to a Dutch trader named Jacob Vaark. (This is the mercy of the book's title.) Florens's mother believes that Vaark will treat her daughter well — "There was no animal in his heart," she thinks — and she turns out to be right, in some respects. Florens grows up on Vaark's estate in upstate New York with Lina, a Native American sold to Vaark by Presbyterians, and Sorrow, a vague young white woman who is probably the daughter of a drowned sea captain.

The novel speaks in a chorus of voices. Florens, illegally literate, writes her story in a kind of improvised patois: "I know you cannot steal me nor wedding me"; "With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging." These chapters alternate with Morrison's lyricism-on-steroids third-person narration, and the narrative back-and-forth helps you to feel the eerie, shifting mysteries of the unorganized colonies. "I am happy the world is breaking open for us," writes Florens, "yet its newness trembles me."

Vaark, a benevolent eccentric, is planning the construction of a mansion — "a profane monument to himself." But he chops down the trees "without asking their permission," and in Morrison this is a big mistake. (One feels that if Vaark had read Beloved, he'd have known better.) He falls ill and dies (he'll come back to haunt the unfinished house), leaving his English wife, Rebekka, alone with the estate.

Rebekka also gets sick. She sends Florens into the Virginia wilderness in search of a free black man — a blacksmith — who she believes can heal her. Florens falls in love. The blacksmith refuses her, and Florens goes mad with desire and anguish.

Peaceful Easy Feeling

RICHARD BECK — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:01:18 GMT

Calexico at the Somerville Theatre, November 16, 2008
The members of Calexico look like dads. They play a little like dads too.

A meme deferred

RICHARD BECK — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:53:48 GMT

Michael Eric Dyson changes the subject at Harvard
Nobody knows exactly what Obama means yet, but Dyson is having a great time figuring it out.

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell

RICHARD BECK — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:05:48 GMT

A somewhat revelatory documentary
There’s no explaining Arthur Russell. It’s best just to listen to his music. I hope Wolf’s documentary will encourage people to do precisely that.

Get around to it

RICHARD BECK — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 13:51:17 GMT

Belated props to Arthur Russell
You would not guess, listening to his music, that Arthur Russell grew up in Oskaloosa, Iowa. In fact you might not guess that he came from anywhere.

Film review: Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell

You would not guess, listening to his music, that Arthur Russell grew up in Oskaloosa, Iowa. In fact you might not guess that he came from anywhere. He spent almost his entire creative life in New York City as a dance-music producer, singer-songwriter, and avant-garde cellist before dying of AIDS in 1992. Russell’s exquisite, strange, watery records are not quite anxious or agitated, but they never settle down either. His was a kind of principled, half-voluntary homelessness.

Most of us will nod in earnest agreement at the suggestion that the artist and the art are different — though not entirely separate — things, but we don’t really mean it. We want the artist’s life to explain the artist’s output. Matt Wolf’s fine new documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, is, among other things, an effort to line up Russell with his music. It doesn’t quite make it. Russell’s friends and collaborators remember him as a gentle guy who was also very, very weird. He spent hours on the Staten Island Ferry listening to mixes of his own work. He was difficult to work with. He had trouble finishing things. One of the film’s interviewees suggests that the process of making was more important to Russell than the final product (I don’t buy it). None of this comes anywhere close to accounting for Russell’s music. The clips of Russell in performance or in the studio put all of Wolf’s evocative mood-making to shame.

Russell arrived in New York in 1973 and soon became musical director of the Kitchen, an avant-garde art space frequented by the likes of Philip Glass and Brian Eno. He didn’t really hit his stride until he started making dance records. He had a knack for pioneering. “Kiss Me Again” was the first disco single to be released on Sire Records, and “Is It All Over My Face” — yes, it is what you think it is — can claim both house and garage as not-too-distant descendants. He used all kinds of pseudonyms, releasing records as Indian Ocean, Dinosaur L, Killer Whale, and Loose Joints, to name a few. The last of those is attached to a more conventional dance track, “Tell You Today,” which is also one of his best. For four minutes, “Tell You Today” clatters along with cowbells, whistles, and a few brass players who have all kinds of trouble hitting the right notes. But with two crashing piano glissandos, everything congeals into a persuasive, funky four, and when Russell starts singing, his voice harmonizing with itself, you can feel a light go on somewhere. The track floats off three minutes later, basking in its own ravishing light.

Tricky | Knowle West Boy

RICHARD BECK — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:42:24 GMT

Domino (2008)
Who is not glad to have Tricky around?

Positively Phil

RICHARD BECK — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:32:10 GMT

Roth goes back to college
We all know Philip Roth’s preoccupations.

FED UP: One of Portnoy’s favorite words takes on new resonance in Roth’s latest novel.

Indignation | By Philip Roth | Houghton Mifflin | 256 pages | $26

We all know Philip Roth’s preoccupations. They have, after all, been preoccupying the man for 28 books now, and there is nothing in his 29th, Indignation, that will leap out as a new concern. The great thrashings of male adolescence and the intersections of individual will and American history are the subjects of this strange and powerful little novel. The name on the cover is almost gratuitous. Like we wouldn’t know that this is Philip Roth?

The hero of Roth’s knotty parable is Marcus Messner: Jewish, anxious, smart, born and raised in Newark. His mother is motherly, in a fairly bland way. (Here, as is frequently the case with Roth, it’s the men who are awarded complex personalities while the women move along the familiar paths.) His father is a kosher butcher, and Marcus grows up helping out. Marcus loves his father, loves learning how to do the unpleasant things that have to be done, and so it is acutely painful when his father suddenly becomes fearful that Marcus might die. “What is this all about, Dad?”, Marcus asks after one of his father’s irrational, overprotective outbursts. His father cries, “It’s about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences.” Angry, fed up — heartbroken, really — Marcus heads to the well-kept Ohio campus of conservative Winesburg College. It is 1951.

At Winesburg, Marcus encounters the things one tends to encounter at college: inexplicably malicious roommates, pompous administrators, sex. It happens that, in an unexpected way that I shouldn’t spell out completely, Marcus’s father is right, that the tiniest little missteps can bloom into tragedy. Although it never fully enters into the scene until the novel’s epilogue, the Korean War hangs like a specter over Marcus, who realizes that it’s either straight A’s or the draft.

This gnawing fear gives intensity to Marcus’s fervid introspection. Roth’s long sentences take deliberate steps, homing in, ruthlessly, on their subjects. Here is Marcus seeing his mother, who is planning to divorce her anxiety-ridden husband: “Now suddenly she was herself, ready and able to do battle, and I was the one at the edge of tears, knowing that none of this would be happening had I remained at home.” There is considerable force in the little moral that closes off that sentence, and even more pathos in the sentence that follows. “It takes muscle to be a butcher, and my mother had muscles, and I felt them when she took me in her arms while I cried.”

13 shots to the dome

RICHARD BECK — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:50:28 GMT

The 10 hours and 29 minutes of LL Cool J’s career
What to do with LL Cool J?

What to do with LL Cool J? Is it possible to remember a time when he was not there, licking his lips and flashing that disarming smile in the strobe-lit background? Is it possible to imagine a future in which his hulking cheer will not be vaguely present? Tupac, OutKast, Wu-Tang — one points to these weird, brooding geniuses and says, “Yes. That’s hip-hop right there.” But hip-hop is not just neon personality and virtuosic beat science; it is also crassly opportunistic, blandly entertaining, boring. It is middle-aged — and nobody better represents that more complex, alternately triumphant and underachieving version of hip-hop than LL Cool J. Here’s to L(adies) L(ove) Cool J(ames), more fully hip-hop than the rest of us.

And here’s to LL Cool J, as he approaches a professional milestone with his new Exit 13 (Def Jam). More than 20 years ago, Rick Rubin signed the 17-year-old Queens MC to his burgeoning label Def Jam with a — get this — 10-album contract that would later balloon to 13! With LL having expressed annoyance over Def Jam’s less-than-enthusiastic promotion of his 12th record, Todd Smith, this would seem to be the end of the road for him and his label. So is this baker’s dozen any good? Will the Collected Works of LL Cool J make for a handsome box set? What do these albums sound like?

Okkervil River

RICHARD BECK — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:22:15 GMT

The Stand Ins | Jagjaguwar
The real problem with taste here is that Sheff doesn’t have any.

Death Vessel

RICHARD BECK — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:06:07 GMT

Nothing Is Precious Enough For Us | Sub Pop
My only criticism of Death Vessel’s second LP is their trouble with slow songs. Otherwise, it's an astonishing forward leap for this Brooklyn-based folk group.

The play’s the thing

RICHARD BECK — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:45:55 GMT

The audial oddities of Blevin Blectum
“I like rhythmic structure,” Bevin Kelley says on the phone from Providence, where she lives.

SOUND MIND: Kelley works with unnerving fluency, as though every sound in the known world were at her disposal.

“I like rhythmic structure,” Bevin Kelley says on the phone from Providence, where she lives. “I lose interest if there’s not anything going on rhythmically in music. I want other people to enjoy it too.” An appeal to audience enjoyment is not the kind of thing you usually hear from obscure electronic musicians.

I’ve just asked her about steady beats. As Blevin Blectum, Kelley has been making experimental music since 1998, when she teamed up with her once and future musical partner Kristin Erickson (who performs as Kevin Blechdom) to form the mighty duo Blectum from Blechdom at Oakland’s Mills College. Whether she’s worked in a duo or on her own, Kelley has generated strange, playful sonic worlds of endless complexity. All of her work, however, is grounded by a steady beat, some looped rhythmic pattern that keeps her crazy train from flying completely off the tracks.

On her new Gular Flutter (AAGOO), Kelly operates, as always, with unnerving fluency, as though every sound in the known world were at her disposal. On “Mine,” synthesized gurgles, processed vocal loops, and bird chirps all weave in and out of one another while shimmering, Terry Riley–inspired arpeggio bleeps fade in and out of nowhere and everywhere. These sounds are not at all like one another, and yet together they make up a complete sound world — albeit one on the verge of collapse. It’s this fluency that allows Kelley’s sophisticated sonic landscapes to avoid academic hair splitting or neurotic knob twiddling. Her music does not sound as if it had taken great pains to find the most accurate or specific word; it simply speaks in full sentences that bewilder and delight at every turn.

Kelley works primarily with a sampler and a drum machine — a kind of glee creeps into her voice when she discusses her equipment, all those acronyms and model numbers. And when it comes to sampling, she’s omnivorous. She cites Jim Copp & Ed Brown’s 1960s records for children — East of Flumdiddle, Gumdrop Follies, that kind of thing — as major influences. “Kind of dark stories for kids. I see a lot of them in what Blectum from Blechdom was and is.” Jack Flanders radio plays, the works of electronic-musician William Orbit, a Zelda video game (sampled on Gular Flutter’s long sigh of a closing track, “Avian Enamel”) — these are all, according to Kelley, “fair game.”

Silver Jews

RICHARD BECK — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:03:49 GMT

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea | Drag City
Wry, witty, and weird, this not-quite-coherent set of songs is a more freewheeling tour of lead singer David Berman’s increasingly playful lyrical sensibilities.

Diminishing returns

RICHARD BECK — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:41:07 GMT

The Hold Steady make it hard to Stay Positive
For a while, Hold Steady lead singer Craig Finn wrote terrific stories.

WHERE’S THE IDIOSYNCRASY? Finn’s characters have always been sick, tired, and fried; on Stay Positive, for the first time, they’re boring.

There is a song on the Hold Steady’s debut album, Almost Killed Me (French Kiss, 2004), where the narrator fights a losing battle against his nicknames: “I been tryin’ to get people to call me Freddy Knuckles. But people keep calling me Right Said Fred.” He tries again and again: “Freddy Mercury?” Nope. “Drop Dead Fred?” It’s no use. A nickname is a little story about its owner, and Freddy is trying to fend off the stories that other people tell about him. For a while, Hold Steady lead singer Craig Finn wrote terrific stories. Matched to his band’s charismatic synthesis of classic ’70s rock and hardcore, these stories crackled, writhing, contentious little narratives ready to burst at the seams with energy and detail.

But on Stay Positive (Vagrant), Finn has decided he’d rather speak directly to all those grinning kids who’ve been crowding his shows for the past four years. Cut out the middleman narrator, I guess the theory goes. Get your message right to the people. Get this, straight from Finn himself, in a press release concerning the new album: “These are our lives. These are your lives. This is our fourth record.”

Confident in his band’s access to the universal truths of adolescence, Finn laces Stay Positive with lines like “Let this be my annual reminder/That we could all be something bigger.” Just don’t ask him what that “bigger” might be. The characters on the band’s first two albums are brought to life by the alchemical intersection of Finn’s declamatory voice and guitarist Tad Kubler’s agile, caroming slabs of distortion and feedback. It’s not just that their second CD, Separation Sunday (French Kiss, 2005), is a concept album that maintains a three-person cast — Holly, Charlemagne, and Gideon — over the course of its 11 tracks. By their words, actions, and quirky obscurities, these characters light the fires of their own individuality. Here is Gideon’s reading of Genesis: “Yeah, I guess I heard about original sin/I heard the dude blamed the chick/I heard the chick blamed the snake/And I heard they were naked when they got busted.” A character from Almost Killed Me introduces himself in “Hostile, Mass.”: “Hey, my name is Corey/And I’m really into hardcore/People call me Hard Corey!”

Iri-decent

RICHARD BECK — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:29:46 GMT

Kanye West and Rihanna at Tweeter Center, May 15, 2008
Kanye’s music more than lived up to his visual and conceptual audacity.

Bangers + Mush

RICHARD BECK — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:38:09 GMT

Dizzee Rascal and El P at the Middle East Downstairs, May 11, 2008
About five years ago, when grime came crashing through the gates, many thought that England had finally found a homegrown answer to American hip-hop.

The Roots | Rising Down

RICHARD BECK — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:47:14 GMT

Def Jam

Here's the beef

RICHARD BECK — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:13:14 GMT

MIT's Steer Roast at Senior Haus at MIT, May 2-3, 2008
Standing underneath a leaky tarp, I looked across the courtyard and saw a guy pushing mud around with a stick. That was kind of a low point.

Pimp and circumstance

RICHARD BECK — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:04:13 GMT

Wu-Tang Clan at Harvard University "Yardfest," April 18, 2008
Some 45 minutes into the Wu-Tang Clan’s afternoon performance in Harvard Yard, Raekwon took a moment to describe his audience.

Rings

RICHARD BECK — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:57:47 GMT

Black Habit | Paw Tracks
The members of the Brooklyn-based trio Rings — Nina Mehta, Abby Portner, and Kate Rosko — are hippies with focus.