Yeah OK, but Chuck Brown, with or without The Soul Searchers, is considered the “Godfather of Go-Go,” did everybody change their kit later? And do all mostly black musical sub-genres have to have someone named “Brown” be the godfather of them? And “it was because they couldn’t afford bigger congas” has urban legend written all over it. Anyway, yeah, a whole bunch of congas and bells and whatnot. The only time a white DC audience ever heard that many drum solos was when Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” concert was in town. (Before Randy Rhoads died in that tragic plane accident at Ozzy’s ranch. Who knows what magic might be flying off the fretboard of his distinctive “Flying V” right now. I’ll tell you all about my deep, deep love of “Tribute” and how I cry when I listen to “Goodbye to Romance” another time.)

Yeah, anyway, why two Rare Essence songs? OK, they’re my fave go-go band. But also I think this shows the evolution of the genre from something like funk to an intriguing version of hip-hop backed with live percussion and horns. It has continued to evolve, and is still popular in the DC metro area despite never making it anywhere else. Well, that’s not quite true, in that the music has been heavily sampled for other hip-hop songs which are then, perforce, go-go.

This is ye olde skuel, “Body Moves.” It’s special because it includes the DC slang word “sice” in the call and response at the end. “Sice” is more or less entirely equivalent to “psych,” (I’m siced for this party!) but can’t be negative (you can’t “sice someone out.”):

Back in the crack epidemic years go-go clubs were the site of lots of crime and shootings, and since the DC City Council is a bunch of morons, they decided to solve this problem by banning certain clubs from playing go-go. Ha ha pretend. NO RLY! One wonders whether, if such a club were to play, say, Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” (not that it would be a good idea, mind you) whether the club would be in violation, since the main loop is a sample from Chuck Brown’s “Busting Loose.” (Notice Chuck saying “give me the bridge now,” in 1978, that’s the oldest song I know that does that.) “It’s go-go!” “But it’s just a sample. It’s as if there are invisible quotes around the go-go that make it safe!” I could imagine the liquor license board debates getting pretty metaphysical. Next up is Rare Essence’s most popular ever song. It even made it to Yo! MTV Raps, as you can see (video way worth watching).

It is a testament to how not gentrified parts of DC are that I still don’t know where the hell Montana or Minnesota Avenues is. They’re getting the shout-outs, I assume they’re in S.E., but damn, that’s a lot of not knowing shit about your hometown. Go-go’s just weird in that none of its practitioners have ever hit the big time, even though it’s more or less next to New York. Even little old Savannah, GA has had more success in this regard (Outkast). I was originally going to defend disco from its detractors in the Don Cornelius thread who complained there was only one beat and the bass could never stray, and that was bad, by showing a) the bass can walk all over the damn place, and b) no harm in having generic constraints. Do you hate Loleatta Holloway and the SalSoul Orchestra, I intended to ask? Do you hate dancing (N.B. there is a go-go break in that song, “212 North 12th St.”)? Do you hate life itself? Then I got distracted. Squirrel! What? John insisted on the title. Brought to you by Stuff White People Like.

DISTURBING UPDATE: People born on the day Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” was at #1 are old enough to comment on youtube now. I mean, I know stray dogs comment on youtube, but still. Possibly more disturbing: I have a sweet-tooth weakness for this song.

NOT PARTICULARLY DISTURBING AT ALL UPDATE: If you find the openly proffered go-go unpalatable, then listen to the more funk-like Chuck Brown track linked above. You will probably like it more. If you like funk, which you probably do, because it’s funk, and all.

The Soul Train Youtube channel is generally amazing, and I am so buying a boxset now. The sound quality on this one isn’t as good, but a)it’s Marvin Gaye singing Distant Lover b) the look on the woman’s face at 2.02 when he comes down to sing into the crowd is truly beautiful. I know what you’re saying. “Belle Waring, I am a busy person and even though I am skiving off work I do not have 5 minutes to spare listening to one of the greatest singers of all time singing a beautiful sad song.” Well OK, Ms./Mr. Thing, you can listen to it open in another tab while you read a blog post write your journal article. Or you could watch Marvin Gaye in a knitted hat, charming the pants off of every person so inclined as to have their pants charmed off by a dude, and frankly, probably no small number who didn’t think they were in the “a dude can charm my pants off” crowd. Wishing you peace, love, and soul.

You have seen Denmark, you see England, and you will soon see Sweden. Profit by these examples to learn once and for all that, however many precautions you may amass, heredity in the throne and liberty in the nation will forever be incompatible things.

What would they have seen in Denmark?

What they would have seen was the rise to power of Johann Friedrich Struensee, appointed as a travelling physician to the crazy Danish King Christian VII in 1768 and then as his personal doctor the following year. By 1770 he’d managed both to become the lover of the Danish queen and to persuade the king to get rid of his other advisers and grant him almost unlimited power which he used to promote various Enlightenment goals such as the abolition of capital punishment and torture, and the end of censorship. However it wasn’t to last. He’d upset too many people and the King’s mother denounced his relationship with the Queen in early 1772 and he was tried and then executed (after having his right hand cut off). The Queen, Caroline Matilda (British in a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha kind of way) who had borne Struensee a child, Princess Louise Auguste. The child was recognized as the King’s but the mother was swiftly divorced and exiled to Germany.

What a great plot the rise and fall of Struensee would make! What a great movie? What a great opera!

Well IMDB is you friend (as is Youtube) and so we have forthcoming “A Royal Affair” (Denmark, 2012) starring Mads Mikkelsen as Struensee and co-written by Lars von Trier, no less. Historically there’s Die Liebe einer Königin (Germany 1923), The Dictator (USA 1935) and Herrscher ohne Krone (Germany 1957). And there’s an opera too by Bo Holten, based on a novel by Per Olov Enqvist (and the novel is translated into English!)

Here’s the trailer for the opera (more excerpts available from the Youtube sidebar)

Apologies to Danes and other Scandinavians (who presumably know all this already) and to anyone else familiar with the history, but I was fascinated, and wanted to share.

fn1: This will be in a new translation of the Social Contract and other writings out with Penguin next year. The translation is by Quintin Hoare and I’ve done the introduction and some of the editorial work.

Ong’s book is a classic. Out of date in some ways (published in 1982), but still worth a read for the way it stakes out a para-McLuhanite position on the orality-literacy debate. Wald’s book came out a couple years ago and is a real eye/ear-opener (I’ll let my kids decide whether it’s a classic, when they’re old enough). What makes them go together is that Wald, in effect, rehearses Ong’s argument – unawares, so far as I can tell. This helps me see what’s right and wrong in Ong, who tells the story of how we ended up with this oxymoron, ‘oral literature’. Wald tells the parallel story of how we ended up with ‘live music’ – not an oxymoron, but it would have considerably puzzled our ancestors. Let me just give a thumbnail version of both stories.

Ong writes: “Human beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any form, learn a great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not ‘study’. They learn by apprenticeship—hunting with experienced hunters, for example—by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship …”

He talks about how writing is, initially, not a substitute for speech but an aid to it. “Thus writing from the beginning did not reduce orality but enhanced it.” The ancient study of rhetoric, for example, rests on writings – texts you can memorize and study – but aims at speech. But eventually we reach a tipping point. Writing declares independence, becomes the dominant, culturally privileged mode, to the point where, as aforementioned, its predecessor is reduced to an oxymoronic afterthought, ‘oral literature’. “By the start of the twentieth century, the Scottish scholar Andrew Lang (1844–1912) and others had pretty well discredited the view that oral folklore was simply the left-over debris of a ‘higher’ literary mythology—a view generated quite naturally by the chirographic and typographic bias discussed in the preceding chapter.” But even knowing this, we poor reading apes couldn’t quite wrap our literate brains around it. Ong relishes the story of Milman Parry’s rediscovery of how Homer works: “virtually every distinctive feature of Homeric poetry is due to the economy enforced on it by oral methods of composition.” It really is a great irony: because they themselves could not have functioned without reading and writing, scholars before Parry couldn’t ‘get’ something that is, properly, the human natural default. Primary oral culture. Writing got in the way. Writing is, as Plato said, very destructive of human memory; of species memory.

Ong has interesting thoughts about how writing colonizes inner space. “A literate person, asked to think of the word ‘nevertheless’, will normally (and I strongly suspect always) have some image, at least vague, of the spelled-out word and be quite unable ever to think of the word ‘nevertheless’ for, let us say, 60 seconds without adverting to any lettering but only to the sound.” I don’t think Ong mentions this, but it’s a fun fact that the word ‘word’ is, itself, a literary artifact. Primary oral cultures pretty much never have a word for ‘word’. (Or so I have read.) Also, while I agree about ‘nevertheless’, I wonder whether this would be true of a medieval monk reading scriptura continua, and whether it would be true of an English speaker-reader before there were dictionaries, standardized spelling, all that apparatus.

Ong has a McLuhanite ambivalence towards literary culture. On the one hand, it’s great! It makes possible analysis, critical thought and individualism. On the other hand, there is a spiritual cost in narrowness, isolation and forgetting. Ong, like McLuhan, is pining for preliterary, prelapsarian holism, re-integrated community, the whole ball of wax, before the shapes of letters were impressed upon it. I’ll just scan in a self-reflexive page from The Medium is the Massage (not because the text is adequate, but to show that McCluhan appreciated that brief statements of his view inevitably come off a bit goofy):

This seems a good point to switch over to discussing Wald’s Beatles book. Wald makes the same argument about recorded music that Ong makes about literature. Recorded music (a.k.a. ‘music’, i.e. the stuff on your iPod) starts as a support and adjunct to something else – ‘live music’, as we now call the other thing. Recording comes to be the dominant mode. Live music becomes the exception. Like Ong and McCluhan, Wald sees benefits, of course, but a high cost. We are, each of us, enclosed in our private iPod minds, thus not connecting with others in ways we might be.

It turns out that John Philip Sousa rewrote Plato’s Phaedrus, warning of the dangers of the shift to a new medium. (Here’s a bit by Wald, discussing Sousa.)

But Wald’s point also cross-cuts Ong’s. We can start with the New Yorker cartoon. Wald identifies the cultural moment satirized in the cartoon as the moment before the fall: right after Dylan went electric, after which (be it noted!) ‘acoustic guitar’ becomes an obligatory redundancy; right before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. McLuhan, by contrast, sees this as the moment when, so he hopes, we begin to turn it all around, recovering what went before the fall. So what fell, or was going to?

A bit more about Wald’s argument. For Wald, Sgt. Pepper’s is the tipping point after which we get white art rock. “Rather than being a high point of rock, the Beatles destroyed rock ’n’ roll, turning it from a vibrant black (or integrated) dance music into a vehicle for white pap and pretension.” This is Wald being hyperbolic to get the gist of his point across. He isn’t so dogmatic. It’s a hook to hang his history on. He wants to “explore the effects of evolving technologies, as bandstands and parlor pianos gave way to Victrolas, transistor radios, and iPods and what was once a social lubricant became a way of creating a personal soundtrack.”

Sgt. Pepper’s is important because it’s a studio rock album. It’s music that couldn’t really be properly performed in concert. It’s not music intended to be live dance music. It marks the emergence of a new sort of listening culture. Rock for headphones. It facilitates a new sort of individualistic, Crawdaddy-ish critical attitude: “[those who fixated in this new stuff] tended to be the sort of men who collected and discussed music rather than dancing to it. Again, that is not necessarily a bad thing (some of my best friends …), but it is relevant when one is trying to understand why they loved the music they loved and hated the music they hated.” Thus: “music criticism demands studious, analytic listening, and the people who listen that way tend to value music that rewards careful attention and analysis over styles that are just fun, relaxing, or danceable.” And: “The later Beatles LPs … were treated as musical novels, designed for individual contemplation in their entirety.”

Ward has a great epigraph from Harry Belafonte: “Everyone sing the chorus—including intellectuals!” That’s from 1957, so it’s obvious this whole thing didn’t start with Sgt. Pepper, strictly. Obviously Wald has read Sousa and is aware these worries go back to the beginning of the 20th Century. He focuses on the Beatles by way of drawing a parallel with Paul Whiteman in the history of jazz. He thinks the Beatles ought to be regarded as like Whiteman, i.e. hugely popular but an evolutionary dead-end in certain respects. Wald thinks that black and white music styles were growing together in a healthy way but that an effect of the shift the Beatles brought about was to reverse that tide: we had black music again, and white music. (It’s complicated. I just want to emphasize that Wald isn’t oversimplifying, per se, in picking on the Beatles, and Sgt. Pepper in particular. Read this interview, for example.)

This post is getting a bit long, hmmm yes? Maybe it’s clear where I’m headed. Pretty much all the broadly cultural points that Ong makes about what people are like before and after the shift from primary orality to literary culture have analogs in Wald’s picture of the shift from primary performance culture to recorded music culture. St. Ambrose, reading silently, is like the solitary rock critic, sitting in his apartment, with the headphones on. But obviously there is no shift from ear-to-eye orientation in the Wald case. We still listen to recorded music. So the thing that Wald’s argument shows about Ong’s argument is that it’s two arguments about ‘the medium’ that need to be kept distinct.

First, there’s the question about what it means to shift from ear to eye-orientation, per se. Ong himself emphasizes that there is no such thing as primary visual literary culture, analogous to primary oral culture. When we read, visually, we don’t stop hearing. Visual reading is a sight-sound hybrid. (St. Ambrose was pronouncing silently, even though he wasn’t moving his lips.) But this is a confusing thing for Ong to admit, because it makes visual culture inherently multi-modal and hybrid, and Ong wants to emphasize that literary culture is a matter of narrowing the channel down, thereby producing certain sorts of isolation.

Second, there’s the question of what difference it makes when you get these sorts of stable, reproducible intermediary artifacts: books and recordings. Scholarship goes up, because scholarship now has a steady, representable-in-its-own-right, studiable object in this thing. But amateur performance gets crowded out. Before books, every village has its home-grown Homer. Before recorded music takes off, every town has its local dance band – indeed, many families have the means of making their own music.

Slogans like ‘the medium is the message’ (or the massage) run these two questions together. Ong runs the questions together and, it seems to me, a lot of subsequent scholarly writing on the subject of orality and literacy is still laboring under that conflation.

Pulling it all together: Wald and Ong (and McCluhan) alike have this kind of Apollonian vs. Dionysian thing going on. I’ll just quote the first section from Nietzsche’s book:

With those two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we establish our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast, in origin and purposes, between the visual arts, the Apollonian, and the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian. These two very different drives go hand in hand, for the most part in open conflict with each other and simultaneously provoking each other all the time to new and more powerful offspring, in order to perpetuate in them the contest of that opposition, which the common word “Art” only seems to bridge …

In order to bring those two drives closer to us, let us think of them first as the separate artistic worlds of dream and of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

I think it would have have been useful for Ong to step back and say: I’m letting my remarks about visual literary vs. primary oral culture get infused with a bit too much of that old timey Apollo vs. Dionysus religion. Likewise, Wald on live vs. recorded music culture. All the same, these are two great books.

I got the new Bon Iver album and it, too, has got some solid tracks but also some that make me fear that, in 5 years, Bon Iver is going to sound like Bruce Hornsby and the Range. I hope I’m wrong about that.

I’ve never really been into anything post Desire, but went through a period of intense Dylan fandom in my late teens. That’s faded, but he’s still special and I’ll never understand the haters. Personal favourites: Visions of Johanna and Absolutely Sweet Marie.

Somehow there’s this review meme that Fleet Foxes is coolly uncool. Pitchfork: “Their bright folk-rock sound wasn’t exactly “cool,” but that was sort of the point—it’s familiar in the most pleasing way, lacking conceit or affectation. Their expression of their love for music (and making music) was refreshing three years ago, and that sort of thing never gets old.” Stereogum: “Helplessness Blues is a deeply uncool album. If you played it for your dad he’d either say, “Finally,” or he’d laugh and put on some Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, maybe even America if you stuck around. Robin Pecknold, Fleet Foxes’ singer and songwriter knows how unhip this music is.”

That doesn’t seem right to me at all. Fleet Foxes sounds to me like growing up on Radiohead transmogrified into a kind of flat, plainsong-y folk choral style. Radiohead is vocally flat/affectless and instrumentally droney and tick-tock yet also emotionally soaring; so is a lot of folk music. So you can map Radiohead-y forms and stylings onto folk-y or country-ish patterns and get something that sounds quite contemporary. If you don’t play it for laughs (seriously, click that link) you can play it for sheer beauty, which gets you Fleet Foxes, sounding quite contemporary. If you held a gun to Vampire Weekend’s head and told them to play folk music, they might sound like some of the brighter, warmer Fleet Foxes tracks. Like “Sim Sala Bim”. Which, come to think of it, sort of reminds me of the Beatles, “Two of Us”. And could be construed as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young-ish.

If you wanted to compare Fleet Foxes to something 70’s, I guess the smooth and flat but strong and soaring vocal style of Roberta Flack would seem less inapt, comparison-wise, than Simon and Garfunkel or America. But I don’t think Fleet Foxes sounds much like Roberta Flack. The Pitchfork review also compares them to the Zombies, which I could buy. I love the Zombies.

UPDATE: OK, I take it back. All that “Apples in the summer” stuff in “The Shrine/An Argument” sounds like Crosby, Still, Nash and Young.

Tell me of your SXSW-related musical discoveries, for better or worse. But especially for better.

Something new and nothing to do
I’m just the idea
I must be real cause somehow I feel
That I’m just the idea

The original Broadcast version is here.

Is that clear?

They have a series of New York in 1948 photos up just now. Ooh, this one’s nice.

Hey, let’s listen to Harry the Hipster while we’re at it.