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Colwater High. Ian Hunter. 1975. CBS.

  American voters who cast ballots electing Donald Trump 47th President of the United States fell, with some overlap, into one of three groups: those who trusted in his supposed business acumen, hoping they, or the national economy, would somehow benefit from it; those who were enthralled by the mien of his celebrity, mistakenly assuming it was an imprimatur of top tiered success; and those who identified with his bigotry, anticipating that the office of the Presidency would once again sanction their indecency. Americans are enamored of confidence, and we’re a sucker for the con. Conditioned by postwar mass media to accept an idealized, archetypal image of the American consumer as the omniconfident gender normative freak of normality whose transubstantiated bones we still gnaw at today, we offered ourselves as committed adherents to a consumer cult as wildly uncontrollable as any organized religion we have imagined. Rock and roll quickly became a viable opposition to this cleverly ...
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Collard Greens and Black Eyed Peas. Bud Powell. 1954. Blue Note.

  In 1953, only two years following the completion of the studio sessions for The Amazing Bud Powell, the pianist returned to WOR Studios in New York to resume the series. The two years were a period of intense personal crises for Powell. Hospitalizations, arrests, prolonged stays in mental institutions where he was administered electro convulsive therapy, on and off drug use, even a court ordered declaration of mental incompetency resulting in a loss of legal and financial autonomy; the harrowing drama of these circumstances impacted Powell’s playing style considerably. Though still in possession of extraordinary technical dexterity, Powell’s approach to his instrument is distinctly less playful than on The Amazing Bud Powell, having tasked himself instead with reconfiguring the failed mental processes that on The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 2, are fixed to cohere brilliantly as mid-century jazz artistry. Playing with a smaller band, Powell takes a carefully considered full measure...
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Cococun Gba Gounke. Colomach. Soundway. 1974.

  Our physical responses to polyrhythms function at a level so deeply ingrained within the prefrontal cortex that they’re beyond the reach of streamlined western capitalism. The polyrhythmic drumming of Nigerian rock is a cerebral event; it awakens and holds the attention of our brain with all the sensual insistency of an alarm. In western pop music, we’re accustomed to hearing guitar, piano, or voice mixed up front so that the melody will cushion the abrasion of rhythmic aggression. Nigerian pop by contrast transfixes us with the mollifying stimulant of percussive energy. Melody invites the comfort of consumer driven fantasy, while rhythm beats back against the demonic advancement of our worst impulses. From 1974, Colomach’s Cococun Gba Gounke finds the altitude at which human excitement is pitched, and transmits from those heights of ecstasy what is essentially a passionately modulated vision of a balance of both worlds. Polyrhythmic drums overlaid with an electric, psychedelic g...
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Clones (We’re All). Alice Cooper. 1980. Warner Bros.

  There’s so much more going on than is necessary in the lyric for Clones (We’re All)—themes of conformity and paranoia culminating in loneliness and alienation, a science-directed social revolution conspiracy, the terror of living in a homogeneous culture—that it’s beside the point to claim the song’s about anything other than a generic vision of dystopia of the sort that was a fraction of David Bowie’s influence bequeathed by him to the rock and roll new wave. Released six months after the surprise success of Gary Numan’s Cars, Clones was Alice Cooper’s attempt at effectively mining that record’s commercial potential. The producer, Roy Thomas Baker, effortlessly integrates Cooper’s gratuitous embrace of cultural weirdness and rock’s most durable song structures into the synthesized marketplace of eighties pop idiosyncrasy. Baker performs the same studio hygienics that gave his work with the Cars such an inspired sophistication that an entire listenership could imagine a place for...
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The Clapping Song. Shirley Ellis. 1965. Congress.

  We walked back from Ocean Beach on a late afternoon, Friday. The sky was overcast, as if the teeming void held by the Pacific had emptied itself into the space behind our atmosphere. Walking through Golden Gate Park, I couldn’t shake the sense of isolation imposed upon us by our recent visit to the sublime; we were silent on our return to Haight-Ashbury, largely an echo of the immense density of silence that is a hallmark of the natural world, and, which, at a certain geographical point inside those oceanic waters, can literally crush you. The core of silence I was carrying with me—the same one everyone carries, at all times—began to expand within the confines of my skull. Its expansion is potentially toxic, if only because it’s fueled by heat from what the mind tells it to believe. Brain chemistry, though more powerful than cognizance, can sometimes be redirected by the mere whims of consciousness.   The mood of alienation began shrinking once we caught a taxi outside the H...
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City Too Hot. Lee Scratch Perry. 1977. Trojan Records.

  Every election cycle, Americans—registered voters or not—are reminded of the atmosphere in which we live, choked on the party exploitation of our tendency to fall into habitual bicameral thinking. It’s difficult living in extreme polarities; so difficult that, in this country, only the homeless, prison populations, and the mentally infirm are subjected to it. Abandonment in these extremes is a condemnation to reality as remote from conventional living as are the high rise apartments of heaven.     Listening to Lee Scratch Perry’s City Too Hot, released in 1978, when CIA involvement aimed at disrupting Prime Minister Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government, People’s National Party, was at critical mass, you hear clearly evidence of how we live in the grey areas between extreme polarities. City Too Hot is about the chase for equilibrium, our flight into the fancy of “self care,” that empty terminology of a privileged American generation having congratulated itsel...
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City Slang. Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. 1978. Orchidé.

  Near the start of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band—The One That Got Away, Ken Shimamoto’s authoritative online account from 2002     of that band’s searing yet short lived history, which can be found with a Google search, you come across an anecdote told by SRB bassist Gary Rasmussen about a backstage encounter between Fred Sonic Smith and Eric Clapton, following a Cream show at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, which the MC5 opened. What is remarkable about the recollection of this exchange isn’t so much what it’s about—the absence of a Cream rhythm guitarist—as its setting. Shimamoto, a practicing guitarist with stage and studio experience, whose influences span Hendrix to Pete Cosey, arranges his interviews with band members Rasmussen and Scott Morgan—along with Radio Birdman founder Deniz Tek, MC-5’s Wayne Kramer, Michael Davis, and Dennis Thompson, Stooges’ guitarist Ron Asheton, and Detroit bassist Ron Cooke—along traditional narrative/oral history structures, and features a recu...
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