Before there was the label of “afrobeat” and well in advance of the market for “world music,” you may as well have filed this stuff under ‘Funk.” Given the number of cover version of “Soul Makossa” recorded by American acts in the year following the song’s arrival on U.S. shores, why the hell not?
In the course of searching for some discog info while doing vinyl rips of some early Manu Dibango LPs, I come across the following from Robert Christgau, re Dibango’s Makossa Man album:
"Hate to say this, but what makes Dibango's African dances so much catchier than those of the competition is that he's from a French part of the continent, which means he relates to the Caribbean -- all of it -- rather than to rock. Let's face it, rock's catchiest beats have always come from the Caribbean. Not that ‘catchiest’ is the only superlative I care about."
Cute, but I’m inclined to wave off the Franco-West Indies assertion. If anything, it could be argued that the former colonial territories of Spain and Portugal exerted a more pervasive influence. But in extending “the Dean” of American rock scribes all due courtesy, I guess one could make the Franco-Caribbean connection by way of a soukous kinship. Maybe. If anything, most Western listeners are more likely to hear obvious influences of James Brown, Junior Walker, et al.. Most Americans were introduced to Dibango’s music with “Soul Makossa,” and again with the Atlantic LP of the same name that quickly followed; the latter of which included a couple of tunes that the artists had recorded four year earlier. If anything, there’s plenty of moments when you might be struck by the canny parallel between what Dibango was up to – in terms of electrified rhythmic Afro-Cuban hybridity, and the expansiveness of a groove – and what Carlos Santana and his crew were doing at the exact same time.
And I suppose there’s a lot could be said about the extent of the Santana influence; about he his band inspired countless musicians – be they black, brown, beige or white – during the years of the late 1960s and early 1960s. If anything, there was a timeliness about it all, as if Carlos & crew had come along at exactly the right cultural moment. Mainly because the appearance of those first several Santana albums coincided with the years that the Chicano (Civil Rights) Movement reached peak activity and achieved its highest public recognition. Perhaps something similar could be said of Dibango’s premier on the international stage, corresponding as it did with a brief period when political hopes an urbanizing, post-colonial northern Africa were brightly optimistic.*
* A personal for-instance: I recall that in the early 1970s, some elementary-school world history textbooks in the U.S. adopted a chapter or two about Africa's emergence on the geo-political stage (particularly focusing on Nigeria, which had – admittedly – at the time only recently emerged from the Biafran War). By the end of the decade, this trend would undergo a reversal – with Africa being once again returned to the margins in most textbooks, if not dropped altogether.
Siouxsie and The Banshees are generally classified as ‘Post Punk’, i.e. they didn’t release a record until 1978 and they were more subtle and cerebral than, say, UK Subs. Their music is distinctly ‘against’, but is cool and ironic and caustic, rather than simply angry and loud. In ‘Suburban Relapse’, a song from their aptly titled first LP ‘The Scream’, Siouxsie (formerly Susan Janet Ballion of Chislehurst, Kent) details her own potential nervous breakdown.
‘I'm sorry that I hit you but my string - snapped I'm sorry I disturbed your cat-nap But whilst finishing a chore I asked myself what for Then - something – snapped’
There’s something horrible about that opening verse, especially its politeness and the banality of the phrase ‘cat-nap’. The violence of the situation is not in the physical attack, but in the twang of the snapping string. The words are perfectly complemented by the backing music, which sounds like sheets of metal being tipped over a cliff, and by Siouxie’s vocal, with its perfect balance of numbness and growing hysteria, full of the fuzzy, unpredictable threat of madness. She goes on to ask:
'Should I throw things at the neighbours? Expose myself to strangers? Kill myself or you?’
Rather a difficult question to answer.
Not afraid
Although it’s hard to imagine the fearless Siouxsie Sioux in an apron, she nevertheless understood the underlying dread of the suburbs. Her father had died of cirrhosis of the liver when she was 14, and one can only imagine the pressure of growing up in a home where one of your parents is a chronic alcoholic. Not surprisingly, the thing that young Susan most wanted was to be like everybody else -
‘My family felt like the Addams Family, and I grew up desperately wanting to be normal. We stuck out - even our house was different from all the others on the street. It was this modern house, with a hedge in front that was so tall you couldn't see the house, and the neighbours complained’.
It’s the small details of that private hell that nag at you: the embarrassing overgrown garden, the neighbours ganging up on you, or, in another memory, the dolls pram with a bent wheel from when Daddy fell on it when he was drunk.
When her father died, Susan became dangerously ill with ulcerative colitis. As she recovered she saw David Bowie on the TV and realised that being like everybody else was over-rated. Her ‘race memory’, of the straitjacket of life in the suburbs, however, is a recurring theme in the band’s early work, and brilliantly exemplified here.
I remember Tom Waits saying in an interview many years ago, "A lot of music sounds better when you're hearing it on a shitty speaker from several blocks away."
This is one of those songs. It's a song that's followed me throughout my life. A number of times over the years I've heard it off in the distance while it was pumping at some party from a block (or two, or three...) away. You know it as soon as you hear it, because it can't be mistaken for any other tune. The beat and the voice -- that voice -- always carry strongly. What usually doesn't carry is the dubbed-in party chatter that undergirds the track, which doesn't matter because the song usually generates its own party noise whenever it's played -- the sort that travels clearly with the rhythm in nighttime air. Each time I hear it, it prompts the same immediate compulsion -- to leave my apartment or the low-key party I'm attending, follow the groove to its source, and see if the dancefloor at the gathering in question has the same come-one-come-all policy that the song compels. As you'd expect, this usually happens in the middle of the night or in the earliest hours of the morning.
And I mention it now, because it happened again last night.
At any rate, perhaps the weirdest time this ever happened was about four or five years ago. It was about 11 AM and I was standing on an El platform on the south side of Chicago, catching a northbound train to make the 60-block commute to work downtown. And there it was -- that song, bumping away somewhere nearby. Actually, it was a house remix of the tune -- a remix that managed to build on the quasi-Latin groove that fueled the original (rather than, y'know, squashing it). The song caused a few of us on the platform to turn in its direction, quickly tracing its source to an aged three-story townhouse located about a block away, where it sounded like a party was going on.
Broad fucking daytime. Not even noontime, yet. On a weekday. Who knows how long that party had been going on. An hour? Maybe ten? Whatever the case, the song soon ended and another began, at which point a pair of police cruisers came rolling up in front of the place with their blue lights blazing atop. From our elevated vantage point, we saw the back door to the place fly open and a number of the party's attendees -- all young and able-bodied -- come scrambling out into the rear alleyway, taking flight in every direction. Those of us on the platform who'd watched the whole thing transpire turned to look at each other, exchanging variations on the same slightly bemused, arched-eyebrow expression. Each of us had turned to look, to follow the sound. Maybe we'd each had the same urge upon hearing it. No matter, our existence dictated that we had other places to be. And even if we'd gone with that impulse, it was clear that we'd have arrived too late.
In 1976, there was no getting away from Peter Frampton. Seemed like you couldn't go very far without seeing the cover of Frampton Comes Alive. Wherever you went, there he was -- looking all illuminated and holy like some Byzantine icon. Saint Peter fuckin' Frampton, Bestower of the Communal Good Vibes, with frets held aloft to bless the flock with and whatnot. Staring out at you from record store windows; or from the ads for the Columbia Record Club that appeared in all the magazines; or from posters on the bedroom walls of your friends or their older siblings; or -- most often -- laying at the top of the stack of records propped up next to someone's stereo, where the album itself was in frequent rotation.
Rarely does a live album attain that sort of ubiquity. Because let's face it, nine times out of then live album are dodgy business. No matter how it's marketed, the live album is usually the equiv of low-end product in any given artist's catalog. Not to say that live albums universally suck, but they almost never rise to any level of consequence, let alone -- except for rabid completists -- rank as "essential." But in the U.S. during the 1970s, there were two big exceptions. The first being Frampton Comes Alive, with Cheap Trick's At Budokan following in second place.*
In the latter instance, good timing had a lot to do with it. At Budokan arrived in 1979, right about the time that disco's hegemonic grip on the culture was finally waning and a lot of people were ready to hear something else. The album's lead single "I Want You to Want Me" rapidly climbed the charts. People heard all the girls in the audience shrieking and chanting along and wondered how they'd previously missed out on the band -- how it was that the band could be so wildly popular elsewhere, yet why haven't I ever heard of these guys before? It was a classic example of the "big in Japan" scenario.
It's all a bit dodgey, isn't it, this matter of breaking things down by decade. As if historical or cultural developments so tidily fit into calendrical boxes and whatnot. Yet here we are.
But yeah, it's a common enough way of thinking about things. For instance, the whole matter of Americans during the 1970s looking back and getting nostalgic for the 1950s. And how the 1970s were — for a time, at least — considered a decade not worth talking about, too dismal and inconsequential to bother with. And then there's the matter of the eruptive 1960s, which has its own mixed legacy. That decade that the 1970s backed away from in many respects, the same decade that became the touchstone for the backlashing "cultural wars" that have raged on these shores ever since.
The Sixties had been — by some reckonings — a cultural apex. Which is why, if you take the mythology at face value, the dudes who would eventually become known as The Residents uprooted themselves from Shreveport, Louisiana to move to Haight-Ashbury — to where things were really "happening" — in the latter half of the decade in question. They reputedly moved there looking to be their own network of filmmakers and artists, but eventually wound up being a band, or some "multi-media collective" for whom music was the central component. But initially they arrived in the Bay Area just in time to witness the very thing they were seeking fade into a dismal travesty of its former potential.
This being the Residents, you never know what to take at face value. Maybe the whole backstory part is a load of horseshite, who knows for sure? At any rate, the cover of their 1974 debut album seemed to send a fairly clear signal about how they felt about the matter...
True, this sort of thing wasn't wholly without precedent, since Third Reich 'n Roll chiefly it owed its "pop satire" premise to the "freak-out" excursions of Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Captain Beefheart had pioneered some years previously. But with Zappa and Beefheart, you always had the impression that no matter how loosely they played with established pop genres or formulae — be it Zappa's doo-wop parodies or the Captain's fractured blues — the artists harbored some love for their inspirational sources. With Third Reich 'n Roll, it's a far murkier matter, and the listener has a difficult time gauging how the Residents felt about the songs they chose, let alone the era those songs represented. One detects, at the very least, a deep and darkly-tinged sense of ambivalence. The "atrocities on parade" violence the band does to its source material, the acts of musical dismemberment committed, all seem a little too wanton. Sentiment and nostalgia, the listener might conclude, had absolutely nothing to do with it.
The Residents would have a long, perplexing, cultish career in the decades that followed. But in retrospect, the timing of Third Reich 'n Roll couldn't have been more appropriate. Sure, rock'n'roll had been the soundtrack of the youth culture of the 1960s, the product and the embodiment of a massive cultural and demographic shift. Still, many had figured (or hoped, perhaps) it was passing fad. By the time the '70s had rolled around, the major labels were mobilizing huge amounts of resources into the trend that had proven itself Commercially Viable for the long haul. The music gained a central presence on the FM airwaves — especially as college stations sprouted up in less metropolitan locales, devoting much of their programming to a proto-AOR format. And in 1972, Elektra Records released the original Nuggets compilation, a collection of '60s garage-rock classics sported a number of tunes that would later helped inspire punk's "back-to-basics" musical ethos.
Despite the fact that he hadn't been able to convincingly pass for Mexican, Charlton Heston had become something of a top-tier American screen icon by the early 1970s. Yeah sure, there were his wonderfully overwrought deliveries in those revelatory moments of Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green; but personally, I was always more fond his performance in The Omega Man. As the second of three attempted screen adaptations of Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, it is one of the decade's most deliciously WTF films.*
Perhaps my favorite moment in the film is the part where -- between taking time out from grilling steaks in his townhouse fortress to casually mow down encroaching vampire-zombies with a machine gun, never shedding his smoking jacket the entire time -- Heston's character decides to take in a matinee. With the vampires dormant during the daytime, he breaks into a movie theater, spools a film in the projection booth, and then sits back in the best seat in the house to take in a viewing of the documentary Woodstock. And as the film slogs on, he sits there gnashing his teeth and weeping. O, what might've been, is the anguished sentiment we're meant to take from this. We were on the brink of paradise. If only things hadn't gone so horribly, unexpectedly wrong.
Knowing what we do about Heston's own politics, it makes for -- among Omega Man's many surreal and nonsensical moments -- the film's most ironically enjoyable and deeply bizarre scene.**
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The Kinks didn't have the most stellar commercial run in the 1970s. Among their many efforts that floundered in the marketplace was the band's Preservation Acts 1 & 2; a pair of albums released in 1973 and the following year in which Ray Davies attempted to revisit and expand the group's 1968 masterpiece The Village Green Preservation Society.
Village Green may arguably be among the top five most perfect pop albums ever recorded, the result of Davies hitting his stride and fully finding his voice as a songwriter. All of that aside, the album didn't meet with the hugest success in its day, at least not when stacked aside the mind-blown accolades that were heaped on, say, Sgt Peppers or Beggars Banquet. It especially didn't fare greatly in the U.S.. One reason being that The Kinks couldn't tour stateside to support the album, on account of being banned over alleged business disputes. The other reason being that the album's lyrical content was just way "too English" to register with many American listeners.
But there also were issues of form that probably counted as strikes against the album. Part of Davies' maturation as a songwriter meant branching out into a number of different styles, a good many of which harkened back to the popular music of years gone by. As Davies would later admit, he never saw anything wrong with writing a song his parents might like -- in fact, it's something he ften aimed to do. In the context of the youth culture of the 1960s, this was probably one of the most egregious act an artist could commit. How "counter-revolutionary" could you get? Pure anathema to the temper of the era, and to many of its criterial imperatives (or whatever).
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The Who played Woodstock, and they reportedly loathed every minute of it. Apparently there was one moment they did enjoyed -- that being when Pete Townshend planted a boot in Abbie Hoffman's ass and sent him sailing headlong into the photographers' pit.
By some accounts, Woodstock was hardly all it was cracked up to be; a far cry from the "Paradise Now" that its later enshrinement would have many believe. Among other things, there were a fair number of crap acts shoved onto the bill, padding out the roster and marking time between the scattered greatest-hits highlights. One such aspiring act was a group that would actually go on to have a modest career in the 1970s was the doo-wop revivalist group Sha Na Na -- a novelty act and admittedly odd choice as last-minute bill-filler, especially seeing how they'd yet to record an album and wound up playing directly before Jimi Hendrix. To hear some tell it, the group's act didn't go over so well with a number of people in the audience, who booed throughout the band's set.
Nostalgia was, to a certain degree, an uncommon sentiment at the time. The 1950s and 1960s had little use for it. If you were born before WWII, what did you have to look back to -- the Great Depression? If you were that generation's offspring, why look back to the previous decade, to a time of bomb shelters and not being allowed to view Elvis from the waist down? Modern life, as typified by the 1950s and 1960s, meant just that -- it was all about the present, and about the future that was being made in the present, a future that could only be better, brighter, faster. All the promises and potential of today coming to full realization...so why bother looking back?
Sha Na Na would a fairly popular act, having --- for a time -- a "wholesome" and moderately successful syndicated TV show, a handful of albums to their credit, and the group's frontman Bowzer making the rounds as a guest celebrity on Hollywood Squares and a number of other afternoon game shows. All of which makes sense perfect sense in a certain context. As the country's postwar industrial boom waned and the economy went to shit, nostalgia became a central figure on the cultural landscape -- American Graffiti, Happy Days, Grease, etc.
An ironic fantasy scenario: If only the members of Sha Na Na had returned a little of the atavism they'd received from those disapproving members of the Woodstock audience, perhaps slipping into the attitude of the New York blue-collar street tough costumes they'd later adopt, and heckled back: "Oh yeah? Well how 'bout you all go fuck yourselves? You people think you know where it's at? You don't. The future ain't now, the future was yesterday...you buncha fuckin' morons."
If only. But hey, I guess we'll always have Altamont, right?
* Admittedly, competition is a bit heavy in this category. ** But Heston got to carry an ace gun around through most of the movie; so I reckon as far as he was concerned, it all balanced out in the end.
