Colour Television (Aftermath inside the Interzone)
As mentioned previously, by 1995 I started to explore more extensively other genres of music besides rap music. There was a series of documentaries which started to get broadcast on TV. I had VHSed most of them.
This is episode 3 of the series in the American version from PBS.
And here is the British version of that same documentary. It's quite interesting to look at the differences between the two, how some elements are highlighted in one and rendered much more softer in the other one. The titles of the British Dancing in the Street version are all mixed up for some reason.
The following episode, I didn't VHSed it. As a teen (and for many more years), soul music wasn't my thing. Gospel music has never been very appealing to me, but more than that, the church aspect of it will always remain alienating and just simply bizarre to me.
That said, obviously with time and all I came to have a better appreciation for soul music. It's a music which does do something to you, and just watching this documentary, I wish it will do something to you, too. There's a lot in there, and it's just as bizarre to dismiss any of it.
The American version is once again a bit meatier, but it's overall less dissimilar than the first episode at the beginning of this seminar.
At the very beginning, you will notice that the sound cuts off. This is due to the very annoying youtube bot censoring the Jimi Hendrix classic for copyright purposes. Sometimes, you will watch a documentary and something interesting is being said but the sound suddenly shuts down and you will never hear the rest of what is being said because some music started to play in the background and someone needed the money for that music really badly. Mr. Robot A.I came to the rescue of that poor person. The only problem is, I don't think that anybody who uploads videos on youtube would have that kind of thick clearance dough to send to any music publisher to restaure videos back onto the "social media platform" in a non-butchered shape. It's not like uploading old and difficult to find documentaries is the same as producing a movie without asking the permission or without paying for any of the music used and commercially releasing that movie and making millions at the box office. So what the fuck is the point?
How about some bonus material with Cholly Atkins....
For the next episode, I couldn't find a proper American one that hasn't been heavily edited to avoid getting flagged on youtube due to that copyright thing.
About the way this documentary concluded, you've all seen about that mythology with the movie Sinners so it's quite interesting to think about it from that angle... interesting to compare how musicologists have talked about that type of stuff pertaining to the supernatural versus how bluesmen and blueswomen actually lived any of it. But in regard to including a Jimi Hendrix died of drug overdose headline or claiming he had moved back to a simpler interpretation of anything by the turn of the decade... how about telling the truth?
How about clarifying that Hendrix died from sleeping pills due to the insomnia and exhaustion and stress he was suffering from and that he was becoming more political. Anyway, I guess people just prefer that flavor of bullshit Robert Plant was serving at the end of the documentary.
Basically, when I was a teenager I would hear rappers make these songs about smoking weed and I knew about LSD and that sort of thing so I got to our local library to find books about psychedelic. I probably found out about Timothy Leary from some encyclopedia or something but obviously going to a smalltown library the only book I ever managed to find was a french translation of his Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era (Mémoires acides) and it's in that book that I first discovered about the Beat Generation. I mean, the internet back in 1992-93? Give me a break. Belinda and I only got a computer for the first time in 2005. Nowadays, it's very easy to download pdf files of all these books for free, but back then? In a smalltown where most people have never even read a book? Our school teachers were not even making us read books or do media literacy analysis. What we were taught was grammar and how to conjugate verbs properly from the first day we started attending school all the way to the end of high school. Of course, we were shown how to structure a text (introduction, development, conclusion) and as for things like poetry, it was only about the rhyming ABAB scheme of a simple quatrain. That was sufficient enough, right? How about history class? It went about like this: Jacques Cartier arrived on the American continent, the foundation of the cities of Québec and Montréal, beaver fur trade, the British invade, the Patriots resistance and defeat, the foundation of Canada. The end.
On to the version I had VHSed. How many times did my friends and I watched that one?
You need to understand that when I quit school in 1995, that was the year that the education system in the province of Québec decided to include the study of literary works in high school classes. Prior to that, it was only after graduating high school and going to CEGEP (around the age of 17 to 19, mandatory if you ever want to attend university someday) that you would start to analyze texts... that is of course if you chose a literary study class for your curriculum (basically, if you are planning on studying finance or whatever, why would you need to learn about media literacy, right? Goddamn waste of time!!). As a result, you can easily find people who will tell you they don't like poetry but they can't name you a single fucking poet since we didn't even heard about Baudelaire or about Whitman at school. Do you think that any of the province's tv channels broadcast documentaries about writers? The radio doesn't broadcast classical music concerts anymore. People hate poetry or the arts but have never read or seen any. Pretty smart, right? Popular opinions....
Since 1995, they started teaching media analysis in high school but there's never been any guideline. It's up to the teacher to choose which books they want to introduce to their students (the requirement being that students must explore 5 literary works each year). What's wrong with that, you may ask? There's sometimes the possibility that in your 5th year of high school a teacher would make you read the same book that your teacher during your 4th year had already made you read. How to know? In October this year, the government of Québec's Ministry of Education was scheduled to work on establishing the list of recommended books for teachers. I'm not joking you.
Obviously, as a surrealist I'm by definition countercultural, but this type of situation can just make it pretty difficult to even find people who would give a shit beyond their individual work and personal entertainment, to some degree. If you think that what surrealism explores isn't within the realm of 4th of 5th levels of literacy... It's very easy to scare people away with a movement such as ours, making people feel they don't have what it takes and making them want to go back to their regular program, where things are more familiar, where it feels safer. How the fuck can anyone even evaluate their own comfort regarding anything if they've never heard about anything? I'm coming to them like a species from another universe. What the fuck can I possibly want from them? How many times have you heard someone telling you they are affected by the I'm-too-busy-I-don't-have-time syndrom? Let's not kid ourselves, a lot of it stems from insecurities, or from how many times they were told as a teenager that "What's important in life is a good job, don't annoy anyone with personal stuff and leave thinking to the elites, and for the love of God just shut the fuck up about being creative, what? do you think you are special or something, snotty arrogant idiot" or from anything of that sort. You know what demagogues and cultists feed on and so forth. "What the fuck do you mean, you are a surrealist? You want me to do dreamy bizarre shit or something? Sorry, I'm not really good at this type of things...." According to studies, 53% of the population in the province of Québec are pretty much stuck at level 2 (able to read a simplified newspaper article or read an instruction manual, for instance).
We arrived here at the biggest amount of differences between the British and the American versions. Sure, the BBC one will focus more on Bowie and the Glam Rock scene but to cut out the entire segment on The Doors?
I guess there's going to be a shoutout to my favorite cousin Annie right about now. When we were kids we would have these little friendly confrontations: I was into Michael Jackson, she was into Boy George. Much later, I was into hip-hop, she was into punk. She is the one who gave me that E.T. book-vinyl and introduced me to Bérurier Noir. Everytime we would go to her house, Annie always rented two movies for us to watch. Our parents where upstairs smoking cigarettes and having a few beers while us kids were in the basement watching movies like Alien, Breakfast Club, Die Hard, Platoon, Legal Eagles, Taps and so on... You get it: not what you would consider kids or family movies.
We could take a little break here, make a pause. David Bowie mentioned how he was inspired by the classical and traditional kabuki and nô theater. What about butō dance? This style appeared after WW2 and was quite strongly inspired by aspects of surrealism and more specifically Artaud. I will do more research on that topic at some point but for now... Bowie was also inspired by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs cut-ups and basically ripped off the ludic how to write personal dada poems by cutting words, putting them in a hat and randomly picking them up as proposed by Tristan Tzara.
Kurt Weill was also mentioned. So I have tracked down this film by the Toronto director Larry Weinstein (no relation to... the guy). Co-funded by his own Rhombus Media, by ZDF in Germany, the canadian CBC and RTP in Portugal the film features several interpretations of Weill's songs by musicians and singers like Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Betty Carter, David Johansen of the New York Dolls whom we saw a few moments ago in the above episode, and with another appearance by Burroughs among several others.
The film has been restored in 4K back in 2022 or 23 and should be hitting a few selected movie theaters this coming Spring before becoming available for streaming (hopefully). Meanwhile, here it is in two parts and strangely enough it hasn't any written indications or end credits. Normally, each performers and the title of the songs appear on screen but this copy is fully devoid of anything else but the film and perhaps the music has also been remastered from the movie soundtrack CD version. Besides that soundtrack, I absolutely ignore if a VHS or DVD of this has ever been commercially released. It was a TV-movie and I had only seen it when it was broadcast on CBC back in 1994.
While we're here, people are familiar about Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht but how about Hanns Eisler?
Please, don't ask me why HK Gruber appears in blackface for that scene. I wasn't consulted. That said, the song is obviously a satire of racism in the USA and most probably Larry Weinstein wanted to satirize minstrelsy itself during that scene. The song is from the Weimar jazz cabaret era in Germany of which Eisler was deeply involved in.
I feel like including something from Eisler's old tutor. A melodrama from his expressionistic post-romantic era, already using atonality but not his 12-tone compositions yet (which started with his Serenade, opus 24 completed 11 years later) leading to serialism by Boulez, Stockhausen, Maderna and al. This was 7 years before Schönberg started to teach Eisler.
The text is based on the poem cycle by belgian symbolist poet Albert Giraud.
And so we get to punk rock, and as a supreme matter of course we get this episode in an extended deluxe format because nothing says punk like...
When I VHSed this one so many years ago, I didn't record all the stuff with the Sex Pistols and The Ramones. I only kept the reggae, The Clash, The Slits, Talking Heads and Blondie bits.
(We don't need the American version for this one, it's very much the same, just shorter)
And we get to the funk. I'm aware there's already more than plenty enough documentaries about funk on this blog, but you wouldn't really want to break this series we got going, do you?
Now for the American side...
The last episode.
Congratulation, you've made it through the series. So how about a musical? That's different enough.
Back in Austria in 1990 for the play The Black Rider by Tom Waits and his co-writer William S. Burroughs. The album came out in 1993 and goddamn haven't we listened to that one.
But like I've mentioned this is the stage production of The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets and this is not commercially available. No VHS, no DVD. It was filmed by the Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF) for a future broadcast. The text is pretty much bilingual English and German but the dude who posted it on youtube added English subtitles for each German parts so, thanks Jake.
Before we pivot for the next part of this thing here, I'll include my beloved sassy Friendly Space Ninja. I was delighted listening to him destroy every seasons of the TV show Emily in Paris, so for a short introduction: My guy was born in Paris, lived in the United States for a while but now lives in Montréal.
If you need to know, of the movies he will introduce I have watched They Cloned Tyrone, Rye Lane and L'amour ouf (aka Beating Hearts).
Montréal. I miss it so much. I must find the means to relocate there before it's too late. I lived there for 18 years, but I'm now stuck in Saint-Hyacinthe since July 2015 and my life here is basically buying groceries and cigarettes in order to go back home in my tiny apartment to wallow in social isolation. I have looked everywhere, I have asked around, there's nothing to do around here, no one to fully talk to either. Sometimes, if I feel like I'm going nuts, I'll go out to nearby bars for a few pints and pointless and directionless conversations with whomever I may encounter while there (just for an idea: Besides economical reasons, why does a smalltown always remains a smalltown? Because that's also how the people living there like it to be. But I don't and that's my personal tragedy). Right now it's 3 am on December 24 and I have to torture myself watching this. The title means "Canada's strangest city?" speaking of Montréal. I enjoy strangeness, my fellow Maskoutain(e)s not so much.
Here's an album I had read several reviews for but had never listened to until recently.
Before we start, I found a copy of that Buckshot LeFonque album in Montréal. It was on cassette tape and I probably paid something like 2$ for it. This was a project co-directed by Branford Marsalis (Wynton's brother) and DJ Premier. If you don't know anything about rap music in the 1990s, I will tell you that each producers had their very uniquely identifiable sound. Premier and GURU formed the hip-hop duo Gang Starr and were selected to deliver the hip-hop theme for Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues (he commissioned one for each movie). This one is from Gang Starr's third album.
Premier always had these dark weird distant almost jangly motifs to his productions. And if we are going to discuss rap flows, Nas was definitely an elite level rapper. Rapping wasn't just about rhyming or coming up with killer bars but it also used to be musical.
Let's now hear that famous I'll Stay.
Vocals: Garry Shider, Eddie Hazel, George Clinton & Calvin Simon
Guitars: Ron Bykowski, Eddie Hazel & Garry Shider
Bass: Cordell Mosson
Clavinet, Piano: Bernie Worrell
Drums: Gary Bronson
The very early days of P-Funk in Detroit.
This next ship was recorded sometimes in 1995 at SereNgeti Gallery and Cultural Center in Detroit.
That was interpreted by Harold McKinney. In the 1960s, Mr. McKinney was a member of the Detroit Artists Workshop, an organization founded by John Sinclair (I told you we would get back to him).
So, the Black Panther Party had their own funk band.
Speaking of Boots Riley. I remember when The Coup released their first album Kill My Landlord.
Understand that when The Beastie Boys released their album Check Your Head, that woke up a lot of kids. That album is a genuine landmark for musical consciousness. These skaters were previously into bands like Pennywise and The Pixies or Red Hot Chili Peppers and Primus...
Jimmy James, that's how he was known before becoming Jimi.
This was our high school for 3rd to 5th year, Polyvalente Hyacinthe-Delorme. There are four entrances.
At the front we see Entrance 1 where the preppy kids would hang out. The music there was pop boom-tchi-boom-tchi-boom dance music to go along with marveling at hockey and owning a Honda Civic.
Entrance 2 on the left of this picture was where "random" kids would hang out.
In the back is Entrance 3 where the metal heads, punk and grunge enthusiasts would hang out and smoke cigarettes.
The last entrance was where the skaters and the sort of hippy-ish peace & love (mostly girls) would hang out. Where all the guys who would eventually become artists were, like Guillaume Labrie for instance, also where Eliane Bonin and Belinda would be. You know, where the weed-mushroom-LSD crowd was.
As for my hip-hop friends, they were hanging out inside the building at the agora central space. If I would get bored being there I went to entrance 4. Michel would navigate between 3 and 4 but mostly at entrance 3.
I'm very sorry for featuring underage people here, we shouldn't have to look at them on a blog such as this, but it's to give an idea of the place. This middle-level where the kids are could be accessed by 4 sets of staircase located at each corner. We were sitting at the upper level, usually chatting or even listening to music on our respective cassette tape Walkman (who the fuck could afford CDs?).
What type of event was that? Worshipping an inflated chicken? I said let's not look at the kids, so moving on...
It's not like kids at these entrances were at war against each other. We had the odd friendly snowball fights between entrance 3 and 4. But Entrance 1 really thought themselves superior, so what would have been the point to talk to blockheads of that kind? Most of the kids at Entrance 3 and 4 would socialize outside of school, sharing the few cigarettes we had at the park or passing a joint around, while Entrance 1 could be seen loitering at the mall or at the hockey arena, or who knows. As for the rest of the students, for this one, your guess is as good as mine. Home perhaps, watching TV and playing video games? It's so stupid to trivialize people in such a way but we are trying to cover a very broad scope with detailing almost nothing, that's all.
In previous high schools, when we were younger, there were a few skinheads but they never made it to the polyvalente. They would harass you on the streets sometimes but how easy it was to shut them down and resume walking. Lots of bravado but that was it, besides that one time one of them put out his cigarette on my friend James' hand. His smug face was immediately removed out of sight. Sometimes preppies wanted to fight us but that was also very easily dealt with... "I'm going to draw a line on the ground, pass it and it's on." They never did. You see, they only tried that type of shit if girls were with them, so it didn't take a genius to figure out what would be the outcome of such an attempt. Who has ever been impressed by that crap? Significantly impressed, enough so that they would lose their virginity over it? Get the fuck out.
But allow me to indulge for a bit. I'm saving you from watching the whole thing but these pictures were taken from a video uploaded to youtube about 6 months ago only.
The school has an American football team now. I only remember the sports installations to be that running track, the ice skating rink and a soccer-football field. We see tennis courts, a second football-soccer field and the American football at the center of that stupid running track. Of course there's a basketball court and a gym inside and no swimming pool.
When I quit school, I was interested in learning music production to make hip-hop/electronic music. You could only study electronic music composition, like the musique acousmatique pioneered at GRM-IRCAM and stuff like that but you have to be a composer for that. There are pretty solid Electronic Studios in the province here, at McGill and Université de Montréal and of course the electroacoustique class at Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, or at Concordia University (remember Sarah Feldman about Pauline Oliveros earlier on this blog?) and so on, but these are all superior level classes during your music studies, younger students also have music theory and sound technologies at Cégep de Drummondville for instance... if you ever want to go nuts there's so much to dive into from all the research done in these type of studios worldwide, encountering stuff like psycho-acoustique to name just one, but briefly listing what can be found locally you have the magazine Circuit and the record label empreintes DIGITALes.
In 1994, just to enter the music program at Cégep in order to go into music production, you had to know how to read a music score because they would basically teach you mainstream music production exclusively (in other words, how to produce the recording of a pop or rock band). As for what I was looking for? First of all, who the fuck listened to rap music in those days? That wasn't professional material for academic consideration. That's underground, DIY territories.
They now have an electronic music sound editing station at that polyvalente.
And a radio broadcasting station since last year.
I don't remember us having a school band. Shit we spent almost all elementary school on recorders and moved to clarinets during high school. I believe we could choose another class instead at the start of our third year. Who was given the passion of learning an instrument from recorders and clarinets? I remember we went in that auditorium only once in the two years I've spent there. The principal wanted to talk to us. It didn't even occur to me that music could be performed in there.
We could only choose between attending the religion or the morals class, and the other choice was between music and woodshop/home economics (have I even completed a single assignment in there and do I remember how to load a bobbin on a sewing machine?). We weren't given options to build a curriculum by adding german and music editing or whatever. Fuck, I'm genuinely mad looking at this. It was all so fucking dumb. Since you have to be in school, might as well learn something engaging while you're there. No?
Regarding sports, I don't know how to ice skate. Enough said. I fucking loved playing basketball and always looking for crazier dunks to make, but that was with my friends, not at school or for competition and tournaments. This is not the United States, where we could get scholarships and bet everything on trying to go pro. I've never met a single dude who was so deep into hockey that he was aiming to make it into the NHL and dreamt of playing for the Canadiens in Montréal. Sure, before being drafted by the New Jersey Devils Martin Brodeur played his Junior Major League years for the Laser hockey club in Saint-Hyacinthe (a team which no longer exists), but a guy like him is just exceptional to begin with, not your run-of-the-mill athlete. Just think about how much it costs to become a pro... and I was flabbergasted the first time I heard about someone receiving a weekly allowance from their parents when they were a kid and a teen. Our parents gave us sweet fuck-all. How many times did I shoplift as a teen? We all did it, otherwise there wouldn't have been a whole lot of music listening for us. That was our sport: not getting caught. So, good for Martin Brodeur. I'm glad for him. You see, that his dad was the official photographer for the Montréal Canadiens surely didn't hurt...
Whenever I felt anyone starting to feel weird due to my inquisitiveness, I used to think to myself "What do you want me to talk to you about then, Ricardo's recipes?" I will include a video of his about that poutine thing just a further down below, but now I'm uploading a lifetime sport achievements highlight thingy...
Boots Riley nowadays navigates in movie-making and he came out with a bang. His second one, I'm a Virgo, is less interesting but fully worth the watch as well. His third one is due out in May, about the fashion industry and a bunch of shoplifters.
Something else from the P-Funk early days. If you know, you can recognize George Clinton's voice in there.
Tamala and George had a son, Tracy "Treylewd" Lewis.
And Treylewd's daughter is Patavian Lewis. She has her dad's eyes.
Patavian herself has a child with Danny Bedrosian.
Patavian's cousin Tonysha Nelson was born and grew up in Toronto.
Tonysha's mother, Barbarella Bishop (Parliament-Funkadelic's tour manager) is another child of George Clinton. I don't know who is her mother, Clinton had a few kids with different women. Why Toronto, that's because that was P-Funk's real base of operation. Not Detroit, not Plainfield, NJ.
As announced, Tonysha loves poutine. You must be careful, though. It's such a fucking fat dish.
In front of Toronto City Hall.
This is from CBC Radio. It's impossible to find it on the CBC website but thankfully its producer, David Dacks, has a soundcloud.
There's this little movie about the life of Neil Bogart and his record label Casablanca, where Kiss, Parliament and Donna Summer were signed.
The movie is directed by Neil's son Timothy Scott Bogart. Mostly filmed in Montréal until they had problems with the union, it was supposed to be directed by Spike Lee... Just read the wikipedia page. George Clinton is interpreted by the rapper Wiz Khalifa. It's not that bad, but only if you are curious.
Patavian, Tonysha and Garry Shider's son Garrett had small cameos in that movie.
Who else was a former Black Panther Party member?
A quick return to the Our World song by Daniel Bedrosian, Tonysha and Benzel. That song is part of a compilation titled Detroit Rising: A Cosmic Jazz Funk Adventure, partly recorded at the legendary Detroit studio United Sound. These next guys also recorded their first album there back in 1975 (it was only released in 2009). Without any further ado, I give you Death.
Just read the description under the video.
One of the collaborator on that track was a hip-hop pioneer in the Los Angeles early 1980s scene.
I have only seen this documentary once, as a teen. It was during a weekend visit at my father's house, in the basement, around 1 am so the lights had to be closed since I was supposed to be in bed, on a tiny shitty TV that just had one audio channel on the right, and due to the hour this broadcast was sheduled I had to sit very close to plug in with a pair of those aweful yellow Sony walkman earphones with the volume at maximum if I wanted to hear at least decently enough. So...
I guess we are about ready to finally watch this next one.
You know, before it became that genre, that thing, the word punk meant an inexperienced person, a novice, someone lacking knowledge, a nobody. That's how punks saw themselves: they were purposefully outsiders. A life based on trying to wing it. As a creative praxis, it's interesting, but at some point... why would it ever mean that to be a punk you have to be ignorant of everything?
There's just that little pesky difference between going onstage and singing how you are "pretty vacant " and just being "pretty vacant".
As I'm including this next video, it is now the day of birth of the P'tit Criss. So let's have a slice of Yule log.
So, we have heard about what was going on in Detroit in that later half of the 1960s, but what about Ann Arbor in the first half? Let's visit the ONCE Festival with a music composition for vocals based on letters from the anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
This performance took place on February 16, 1963 and was recorded by WUOM Radio. The electroacoustic elements were realised by Gottfried Michael Koenig in the Studio for Electronic Music of the WDR (West German Radio) in Cologne.
This is part of a very beautiful 5-CD box set released by New World Records, containing a thick informative booklet with all the photographs seen above and more. About that picture of Eric Dolphy with the Bob James Trio. His performance is unfortunately not included in the box set but I was able to find some of it on this website right here.
As stated, when Blue Note released the Other Aspects compilation in 1987 (never reissued since), they had no idea about who were the musicians accompanying Dolphy for A Personal Statement (aka Jim Crow).
Jim Crow is still the title attached to that recording.
But we indeed have it pretty much confirmed that it was the Bob James Trio and that the recording was made at the 1964 edition of the ONCE Festival.
Bob James ought to be familiar to many fans of rap music since his composition Nautilus was sampled more than twice. It's a full-fledged classic at this point.
For those who might have never heard about the Sacco & Vanzetti case.
And here's the soundtrack to the 1971 movie directed by Giuliano Montaldo. Music by Ennio Morricone, lyrics written and sung by Joan Baez.
The ONCE Festival of New Music was created by the ONCE Group which included several former students at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater & Dance to feature their very experimental compositions and films to an hungry public looking for a little something else. Among these new composers was Robert Ashley.
I have been meaning to watch this TV opera for several years. The time is now 10 pm on December 25, so I guess I'm giving myself this most secular of Christmas present and end this Aftermath inside the Interzone seminar right now.
Commentaires
Publier un commentaire