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Woo! Another new Disclosure track. These guys can do no wrong.
Fire on the dance floor!
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This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before.
— Vladimir Nabokov in the Foreword to the autobiographical Speak, Memory -
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This was what distinguished us from all rock bands, really…the rock bands were always expressing something.
— Michael Karoli of Can, in this documentary that is available on youtube -
I swear to you this song brings tears to my eyes every time I hear it.
(Source: Spotify)
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Spector, a neurotic control freak with well-document problems regarding impulse control…seemed less than delighted by his acolyte’s affections. In fact, he took perverse pleasure in insulting Brian as often and as publicly as possible. For instance, when Brian submitted “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” to the Ronetes, Spector rewrote the tune from top to bottom, ultimately tossing Brian and Mike’s lyrics in order to use them as a throwaway jingle called “Things Are Changing (for the Better).” Spector invited Brian to play piano on the session, but then he tossed the younger musician out of the studio for what he called his substandard playing.
The abuse did nothing to cool Brian’s ardor. In later years, his awe for Spector would seem detached from the relative merits of their work. ‘I never considered us to be anything but just a messenger of his music,’ Brian said in 1998.
— Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson -
This track.
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Surf’s Up.
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Clip from rockabilly singer Sakamoto Kyu’s 1963 appearance on the Steve Allen Show (“rockabilly” in Japanese culture encompassed everything from Elvis Presley to Paul Anka.) He was most famous in the U.S. for singing “Sukiyaki,” a misnomer propagated abroad for a song whose original title is more closely translated, according to Michael K. Bourdaghs, as “I Will Keep My Head Up As I Walk.”
Here Sakamoto sings a version of “I Could Have Danced All Night” followed by a pretty lame attempt at an interlingual interview (although I’d say late night TV didn’t treat Jean Dujardin much better last year.)
Before this performance, Sakamoto said: “For my appearance on The Steve Allen Show, my costume hasn’t been decided on yet, but if they tell me to wear a chonmage [topknot hairstyle] or something, I plan to turn them down flat. Because I want to show them me just as I am, a completely ordinary visitor. In a foreign country where all they know about Japan is Fujiyama, geisha, and sukiyaki, I’d like to use this chance to get as many people as possible to change their way of thinking, even if it’s just a little bit.”
Sakamoto was later killed in the 1985 crash of JAL Flight 123, which took the lives of 520 people. It’s interesting that in the interview portion of this clip, the joke he tells in Japanese is carried off by his boyish charisma, but we never get to find out what it means.
(Most of this information comes from Michael K. Bourdaghs’ fascinating Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop.)
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Former N.W.A. band mate MC Ren remembered visiting Eazy in October 1993. What he saw wasn’t pleasant. Around his old friend, Ren saw a Roman circus of hangers-on, ass-kissers, gangsters-turned-rappers, and yes-men. Like Caligula, Eazy sat at the center of the debauchery and listened to Dre’s The Chronic. ‘Aw, it ain’t all that!’ he roared. ‘Ain’t all that!’…
…By late 1994, however, Eazy and Dre were on speaking terms again…after spending years attacking Eazy, Cube now said he didn’t hold any grudges…Eazy was ecstatic……At the office, Eazy became secretive. ‘You couldn’t really tell what was going on with him.’ Even when people knew he had to be depressed, Eazy stuck to his happy-go-lucky facade. During stressful marketing meetings at Priority Records, he would blow spitballs. ‘He was like a child,’ said Doug. ‘He had the personality of the little boy he looked like. Always laughing and smiling and giggling.’
—from Have Gun Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records, by Ronin Ro.
In which the portrait of Eazy-E is strange, tragic, and somehow by far the most human in this particular telling of the story.
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Happy birthday to Sly Stone, whatever he may be doing.
“Oh, time! Time needs to be a little longer. Time, they say, is the answer, but I don’t believe ‘em.”
(Source: Spotify)
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This song is everything you could want out of disco: perfect, shiny, innocent-sounding. Wikipedia is pretty light on information about writer/producer/musician Gregg Diamond, who recorded some excellent tracks as Bionic Boogie. He was one of the backing band members for glam rocker Jobriath, and later went on to write and produce Andrea True Connection’s “More, More, More.” I haven’t learned much more (although selection by Horse Meat Disco says a lot) beyond the fact that he died of gastrointestinal bleeding, which is sort of weirdly specific and uninformative at the same time. Most of his stuff sounds so big and expensive, I’m surprised there’s not more information out there about him, but hey— the Disco backlash was real. I’m imagining him as a fast-living producer whose world ended with the death of disco.
(Source: Spotify)
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We had a hut by the river with my brother Chekaren. We were sleeping. Suddenly we both woke up at the same time. Somebody shoved us. We heard whistling and felt strong wind. Chekaren said, ‘Can you hear all those birds flying overhead?’ We were both in the hut, couldn’t see what was going on outside. Suddenly, I got shoved again, this time so hard I fell into the fire. I got scared. Chekaren got scared too. We started crying out for father, mother, brother, but no one answered. There was noise beyond the hut, we could hear trees falling down. Chekaren and I got out of our sleeping bags and wanted to run out, but then the thunder struck. This was the first thunder. The Earth began to move and rock, wind hit our hut and knocked it over. My body was pushed down by sticks, but my head was in the clear. Then I saw a wonder: trees were falling, the branches were on fire, it became mighty bright, how can I say this, as if there was a second sun, my eyes were hurting, I even closed them. It was like what the Russians call lightning. And immediately there was a loud thunderclap. This was the second thunder. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our Sun was shining brightly as usual, and suddenly there came a second one!
Chekaren and I had some difficulty getting out from under the remains of our hut. Then we saw that above, but in a different place, there was another flash, and loud thunder came. This was the third thunder strike. Wind came again, knocked us off our feet, struck against the fallen trees.
We looked at the fallen trees, watched the tree tops get snapped off, watched the fires. Suddenly Chekaren yelled ‘Look up’ and pointed with his hand. I looked there and saw another flash, and it made another thunder. But the noise was less than before. This was the fourth strike, like normal thunder.
Now I remember well there was also one more thunder strike, but it was small, and somewhere far away, where the Sun goes to sleep.
—Eyewitness account of the Tunguska event of 1908, in which a meteoroid struck Russia in the “largest impact event” ever recorded, felling an estimated 80 million trees.
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In 1932 Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his novel Laughter in the Dark:
“…the beautiful idea came to him. It had to do with colored animated drawings—which had just begun to appear at the time. How fascinating it would be, he thought, if one could use this method for having some well-known picture, preferably of the Dutch School, perfectly reproduced on the screen in vivid colors and then brought to life— movement and gesture graphically developed in complete harmony with their static state in the picture; say, a pot-house with little people drinking lustily at wooden tables and a sunny glimpse of a courtyard with saddled horses— all suddenly coming to life with that little man in red putting down his tankard, this girl with the tray wrenching herself free, and a hen beginning to peck on the threshold…
…after a while he happened to speak of it to a film-producer, but the latter was not in the least excited: he said it would entail a delicacy of work calling for novel improvements in the method of animation, and would cost a whole lot of money; he said such a film, owing to its laborious designing, could not reasonably run longer than several minutes; that even then it would bore most people to death and be a general disappointment.”
(Now we have Girl With a Pearl Earring, The Mill and the Cross, the Van Gogh part of Kurosawa’s Dreams…not to mention Kanye’s “moving painting.”)
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One time I did a party and [Grandmaster] Flash turned up, and I played a beat that he never heard. So what I did, on one record I wrote, ‘For the name of this record, go to turntable two,’ and you see this on the label and it’s spinning. So Flash went over to the other turntable to look and the other record said, ‘Get off my dick!’
— Charlie Chase, DJ for the Cold Crush Brothers, in Last Night a DJ Saved My Life
