The Test Tube and the Scale

When Donald Trump announced, “There are only two genders,” on the occasion of his second inauguration into the Office of the US Presidency, he was only validating a long held bias in this country against nonconformists, championing a form of bigotry that, when joined to levers of official power, typifies rejection of personal freedoms by ceding essential human rights to the state. When Jackie Shane sang, “I’m coming down with a heartache,” she was ceding nothing, merely acknowledging what many of us already know to be true; with freedoms come the cost of loss and failure, often paid for with inordinately intense periods of stress and frustration, or, as Shane puts it, “I ain’t sick but I got a fever/blood pressure’s runnin’ high/pulse ain’t right/I can’t sleep at night….” Comin’ Down’s tone is impenitent, a defiance so deeply ingrained within the rhythm and blues/gospel experience that we sometimes forget how closely enjoined it is to marginalization, that chillingly segregationist dyn...

Writing about Walter Benjamin in 1978, Susan Sontag describes the great German essayist as “a collector, weighed down by things; that is, passions.” Expanding upon his interests, she notes his fondness for the miniature; “To miniaturize is to make portable—the ideal form for the wanderer, or a refugee.” In this same way, we come to understand the obsessions of the 21st century’s vinyl fetishists, those happy collectors whose unstated aim is to collect the world by owning its immense and varied songbook. Taking possession of the world in this way—from the seat of the imagination, powerlessly, without danger of causing anyone any harm—is to understand the broad contours of human behavior by arranging our verisimilitudes within intelligible formats; playlists. Whether by the LP deep cut, the 45 single, or the densely compressed MP3 file, putting world history into your pocket and carrying it with you to the beach to celebrate it, or making a Kabbalah of it with your friends, procuring evi...

  The details about rural life that John Prine lyricizes in his best work don’t have the gale force impact of experience distilled through language that makes the reading of poetry such an imaginative tour de force; instead, they’re filtered through the stylized singing voice of American pop, with its concentration on the commercial potential of our full bodied sensuality. The boldness of Prine’s songwriting vision required him to follow with temerity his songs’ characters to the no man’s land between genres, far from the stifling immobility at the center of genre conventionality. Like Hank Williams and Gram Parsons, Prine’s abiding interest was the duress of tension on the working class imagination as it struggled to cope with 20th century capitalism’s enforced integration of rural American societies into the larger, national fabric, threatening—among so much else—flourishing regional musical expression in the process. Taken from Prine’s fourth studio record, Common Sense, Come Ba...

  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 ...

  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...

  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...