African Easterly

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.*

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* 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.

Give The Punky Drummer Some

When it comes to (post) punk drumming, one can crudely identify two 'traditions' at play: A harsher variation on Bo Diddley's 4/4, or the elliptical wonkiness of Captain Beefheart. The more versatile (or expensively produced) bands of the era often combined both, retaining an air of 'primitivism' either way. Purists stuck with the 4/4 well into the 80s, and the more adventurous weren't averse to indulging electronics by the next decade. Being the late 70s, the influence of 60s garage, reggae, Krautrock, disco, and to a lesser extent Afrobeat (not really funk that much - although acts like Talking Heads pulled it off by hiring in the creme de la creme of session musicians) was all over the place. The end of the 70s was arguably the high point of pop as melting pot, just before neoliberalism reconfigured that as multiculturalism (for niche marketing) with respective corners of fundamentalism, in which I'd include the unashamed gloss of New Pop. More mainstream 'new wave' acts frequently referred to 70s Stones and funkier Bowie. But in accordance with the ethos of the time, enthusiasm took precedence over virtuosity. The grandstanding of prog and fusion - though never quite erased - was drastically downplayed by a newer generation. When it came to drumming, it was a process of weeding out. Not so much back to basics as establishing further basics. Hiphop would do the same with drum breaks, sometimes to the point where hearing originals after samples could prove frustrating and/or disappointing.

Below are examples of a striking variety of styles and rhythms from the period. All of them are tracks I'd return to again and again. I know the lyrics to all of 'em by heart, even when I don't know what the hell they're talking about. Despite Simon's initial rule of no electronic beats or sampling, some were nevertheless enhanced at the mixing desk; perhaps difficult to reproduce with as much force played live. For purposes of space, I've left out tracks which were more overtly dancefloor - orientated (like the Ze records/August Darnell axis, for example). I'd consider them under the rubric of 'disco' rather than 'punk', and plan to discuss that mini-movement at a later date. But anyway, the beats here are so distinctive, that it's impossible to imagine them played any other way. Glorified tribute acts like Nouvelle Vague really do lose something in translation. As Greil Marcus noted, the point when key tracks of the punk era lose their power is the point we know popular culture has moved onto something more exciting. I'll leave it to the reader to judge whether or not we have yet.

Nice Solo, That Man

Guitar solo
Organ solo
The Stranglers
George Melly
Lew Lewis
Burt Bacharach
The former Miss Australia

Marvellous.

Down In The Sewer

'"Ladies want to weaken us", a lay yogi told me. "They want our semen - they will not say so, but they will rob us of our only power."'

- Agehananda Bharati, "The Light At The Centre"

"It’s only the children of the fucking wealthy who tend to be good looking"

- The Stranglers, "Ugly"

The Stranglers are one of those bands who, if they hadn’t existed, would probably have to have been invented. Spectacularly malignant even by the standards of their day, their viscous, visceral sound provided the backdrop for the most fetid of lyrical concerns. If misogyny was a commonplace amongst 70’s rockers, with The Stranglers it was ontological. Indeed, to accuse The Stranglers of misogyny is much like accusing Liberace of kitsch.

However, it would be wrong to place The Stranglers in a continuum with what had come previously in the decade. With their debut album, 1977’s "Rattus Norvegicus", there was something very new in the way they portrayed men’s relationship to women. Rather than being cocks-of-the-walk in the Mick Jagger/Robert Plant mould, men are relentlessly portrayed as the weaker sex. Instead of having a whole lotta love, The Stranglers gape into the Mersey Tunnel equipped only with a sausage.



Flaccid and post-coital rather than priapic and anticipatory, the misogyny of The Stranglers was not that of the braggart who treats women like dirt, but of the sexual failure who is reduced to voyeurism and violence. Whereas The Rolling Stones could casually jettison ex-lovers as "Yesterday’s Papers", in "London Lady" it is Jean-Jacques Burnel who is raging about being used and discarded. Underlying all of "Rattus Norvegicus" is the tremendous melancholy born of impotence. "Goodbye Toulouse", "Princess Of The Streets" and "Hanging Around" take us through rain-washed streets and piss-stained alleys with their throngs of love-addicts. Hugh Cornwell is forever pushing his nose up against the window of the brothel and contemplating his next dose of humiliation, while Burnel’s bass rumbles around the back of your skull like a resentful memory.

"Peaches" takes us to the seaside for more heavy-duty ogling, but again there’s no contact, just deluded fantasising. "Ugly" is an extraordinary eruption of inchoate rage, Burnel seething that he can be sexually out-competed by an ugly old fart who happens to have money. The Stranglers understood too well the cord that connects sexual failure with violence.



Finally, The Stranglers take us to where all bodily fluids eventually end up. "Down In The Sewer" demonstrates why they identify so strongly with the rat, enough to make it their mascot. For The Stranglers, sexual desire turns men into rodents - inquisitive, instinctive vermin. Depicting the male sexual experience as one of envy, frustration and humiliation, "Rattus Norvegicus" is the most thorough demolition of masculine conceit ever recorded.

The follow-up "No More Heroes" album, released the same year, was even more combative, though focused more on settling scores with those, real or imagined, who had crossed them. It featured two remarkably offensive tracks that were both inspired by pornography. "School Mam" follows the example of the kind of imported magazines such as "Color Climax" in which the same group of models would perform the same implausible sexual scenario in a variety of mundane social settings. "Bring On The Nubiles", perhaps still a little bit too strong for daytime Radio 2, depicts an equally implausible pre-pubescent orgy, this time given extra brio by the juddering bass-line and Dave Greenfield’s whooping organ, which almost blows a gasket, like an orgasmatron going into meltdown. However, the pay-off line ("I’m high beneath my zip") once more undercuts the song with its revelation of voyeuristic fantasy.



The Stranglers could probably have flogged this attitude forever, but something very strange was happening to them. The first inkling of this was the b-side to the single of "No More Heroes". With "In The Shadows", The Stranglers bypassed 1978, and made the sonic leap straight into 1979. Featuring dub-spacey production, bass as lead instrument, guitars as scratchy ambient accompaniment, and keyboards as synth-alienation effect, they had effectively abstracted their sound, and leapt far in front of their peers.



This new space was explored further on 1978’s radical "Black And White" album, in which their sound was strung out even further. Lyrically too, their vision had expanded. Awash with dread, the songs on the album primarily addressed the Cold War, but also the alienation induced by technology, the relentlessness of time and the atomisation of the individual. Even the remaining misogyny became abstracted, mythical, in the bizarre quests of "Nice’n’Sleazy" and "Toiler On The Sea". As well as being spacious, it is also a remarkably physical record - only Gang Of Four’s later "Solid Gold" can match it for metallic muscularity. Burnel’s bass playing still invokes awe in it’s mechanical suppleness - like pipelines creaking at the bottom of the ocean, or heavy machinery changing gear. Dave Greenfield is a one-man Radiophonic Workshop, equally capable of beaming in sounds from Alpha Centauri or the massage parlour next door.



By the time contemporaries such as Joy Division and PiL had sonically caught up with them, The Stranglers had already moved on. Their last album of the Seventies, 1979’s "The Raven", although considered to be their last "heavy" album, in fact laid the template for the rest of their career (notwithstanding the occasional concept album about alien abduction). Tight, professional, thematically diverse and pop-orientated, it prepared the way for the gradual softening of their sound. The Stranglers would continue to produce great records well into the Eighties, but the days when the Earth would tremble beneath their feet would be long gone.

Tell them all to go and stew

One of the byways of Seventies politics was the Freddie Laker saga, one of proto-Thatcherism, established cartels, the emergence of the European aerospace industry to challenge the American giants, and of course, oil.

The saga is pithily summed up here by Mr. Burnel, giving me the excuse to shamelessly indulge my Stranglers-love.