Tag: Music
This is the best thing I’ve listened to in a while
This is another one of those musical finds that more or less randomly dropped into my lap. I’ve been listening to a lot of music lately. I listen to music while I’m doing homework, I listen to music while I’m doing contract tracing, I listen to music when I’m trying to settle my brain before bed. I have pretty extensive music collection but looked at from a broad perspective there are really only five or six genres of music represented and recently it’s all been feeling a little stale.
Some time ago, and I can’t even remember where I heard about it, I downloaded the Boomplay app. For those not familiar, Boomplay is kind of Spotify for the African continent. My exposure to afro-pop is limited to the very small collection of artists that have broken in to the U.S. market to some extent so I was expecting to be able to find something new and (hopefully) interesting.
In one of those tiny sparks of serendipity, the first song that was playing when I switched it on was this
Angélique Kpasseloko Hinto Hounsinou Kandjo Manta Zogbin Kidjo is a musician, actor and activist who was born in Benin in West Africa and that is the extent of what I know about her.
In 2018 she released a cover of Remain In Light by the Talking Heads. The whole album.
It. Is. Amazing.
One of the best ways to get me hooked into a song is to take an element that is familiar and transforming it into something very different, DJ Shadow using a sample from El Condor Pasa (If I Could) in You Can’t Go Home Again, for example, or Diane Birch’s Velveteen Age EP. Remain In Light is one of my favorite Talking Heads albums (along with almost all the others if I’m honest) and it works surprisingly well as an afro-pop album. It is also unquestionably something different, even if all the songs are more than 40 years old at this point.
At some point in the near future, once I’m able to stop compulsively listening to this album, I want to dig in to some of her other material. I’m hoping more discoveries await.
Brain Radio
A somewhat different impetus for this episode of brain radio, in that the song running through my head reminded me of an album that I had (almost inexplicably) forgotten about entirely.
For a few days I had a song by Laurie Anderson running through my head. I couldn’t remember the name of the song (it turned out to be Langue D’amour) so I went to my music library, sorted by artist, Laurie Anderson, and totally failed to find what I was looking for.
This was puzzling to me. I’ve been a fan of Laurie Anderson since I was in my early teens and I was reasonably sure I had all her music from the mid-‘80s to late-‘90s in my library. So I went to [$online_music_store] and my jaw dropped. I had totally forgotten about the album Mr. Heartbreak.
Somehow, at some point in the remote past, during a shuffle of data from one hard drive to another, Mr. Heartbreak fell out of my library without me noticing and it’s existence just slipped from my mind. The oddest are thing about the situation is that Mr. Heartbreak is still probably my favorite of Anderson’s studio albums.
The album was released in 1984, which was probably about the time I discovered it. Unfortunately I have absolutely no memory of how I got connected with Anderson’s music. I’m almost positive I didn’t hear it on the radio, although c. 1986 the song O Superman (For Massenet) from her first studio album Big Science did get a little airplay on the new wave station in Seattle (KJET 1590 AM). Anyway, the album has vocals by Peter Gabriel and (of course) William S. Burroughs in addition to Anderson and is about as mainstream as her material gets, in the sense of being considerably more accessible than, say, some of her spoken word/poetry performances with John Giorno. Which is sort of like saying an airport is more accessible than the high security areas of the Pentagon; the former you can get in to, but it takes work, whereas attempts to get in to the latter will, best case scenario, result in nothing but frustration and, worst case scenario, may result in serious head trauma. But I digress.
There is still a share of surreal imagery, experimental sounds, and examples of Anderson’s fascination with Bible stories and literature, but they’re hidden a little better. On some tracks anyway. The whole album is amazing, but this is the track that stuck in my head;
Brain radio
One of my professors when I was in nursing school told us that we should pay attention to the songs that are running through our heads because sometimes they can be an insight into what out subconscious is doing. She taught psychiatric nursing and was herself a few bananas short of a bunch but that one thing has stuck with me over all these years.
For the last few days I’ve had Medicine Show by Big Audio Dynamite running through my head.
Life’s Little Victories
Just so that this isn’t all doom and gloom, and also because I really do think it will be good for my mental health, I intend to sprinkle in a few of what gentleman cartoonist Keith Knight refers to as Life’s Little Victories.
My first entry in this category is something that genuinely made me do the full-on Keith Knight “YES!”.
Mashup artists The Kleptones have a new four part album called OV ER LO AD. It’s 135 tracks, clocks in at just over 8 hours and since I just found out about this a few minutes ago I haven’t had a chance to listen to it. However, The Kleptones double album Uptime/Downtime remains in the top three on my list of best mashup albums of all time (the other two being Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals and The Dirtchamber Sessions by The Prodigy) so I’m expecting great things.
Best part; you can download all four parts FO’ FREE!
Share and Enjoy.
Edited to add – I still haven’t listened to the whole thing but the first few tracks on OV are good. Like really good.