Frank Kogan

Dolls In The Days Of The Good Old Times*

Am reprinting here my New York Dolls piece from 1997, which because of its length I've broken into three parts, this being the final part. Printed originally in my fanzine Why Music Sucks #11. Thanks to the University of Georgia Press, who published my book Real Punks Don't Wear Black (and here), where I reprinted this, and are letting me reprint this now.

"Actually, if I were a young person I think I'd be most interested in having old folk like me write about what things were like back in the day: what the Fillmore was like, what the crowd was like at a Dolls show in the early '70s, etc." So Lucy Sante wrote me recently [i.e., October 1997]. Good timing, as I happened to already be at work on "Boys in Makeup." But as for what the crowd was like: Despite my having seen the band six or seven times in the space of about ten months in 1973–1974, I find myself unable to say what the crowd was like, at least not with any accuracy. Partly I don't remember, partly I never noticed in the first place, and partly I rarely can come up with the words to describe anything, even when I do have a picture in my mind. As for what people were wearing, I don't know. My defense against fashion while I was growing up was to put up a complete block in my mind, so I really didn't see what people were wearing. I only got vague impressions and such. Since I wasn't going out searching/shopping for clothes or thinking of clothes items as constituting a potential ensemble for me to wear, I never learned a vocabulary, I never learned to see how shirts, shoes, makeup, etc. went together, I never could describe why (or how) a person looked freaky or hoody or glam. I never had a sister, either, so I was culturally deprived in major ways, no knowledge of makeup, magic beauty secrets, hair styling. Also, I was in general (and still am, of course) too busy in my own mind thinking, calculating, imagining, and so on to see what was in front of my nose. I do remember being eventually disappointed that there wasn't a more interesting sartorial response among Dolls fans, that there wasn't more of a visual echo in the audience of what was happening onstage and in the music. Maybe the crowds were fairly nondescript. The way I remember it, the dressed-up girls in the audience weren't looking nearly as glittery, cheesy, slutty, cheap pasted-on glamorous as they could have been (nor were the boys, of course). The look of those trying to make an impression was more a stylized stylishness: I'd say Early Goth, maybe, with a lot of ornate towers and stained glass and flying buttresses and... oh, I went off there, sorry... the look was, you know, black – black clothes, dark eye shadow, pale makeup. At least it was on one young woman whom I remember, first row center in the basement of the Viking Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, who, at the end of the encore, was helped up onstage, along with a woman friend, by Johnny and Arthur and then accompanied the band backstage as it went off.

New York Dolls "Personality Crisis" live (Don Kirshner's Rock Concert)


As for what the crowd was like in its behavior, let's see, first show: I didn't yet like the New York Dolls; I'd heard the record once or twice and thought it was sludgy and lumbering, not all that different from Grand Funk, it seemed, who were hitting at the time with "We're an American Band." So I saw the Dolls in New York at Max's, and Jay and Maureen and maybe Robin (Jay's mother [a real sweetheart, by the way]; I forget if she went along with us) got a table up in front while I stood farther back with my arms folded, having no real response within me and not yet hearing the beauty that was embodied by the sludge or connecting to any of the starts and stops and syncopation that gave the music movement. My arms weren't folded in disapproval, just in nonconnection. Next to me was another boy with his arms folded too. I don't remember the crowd. The people cheered after songs. Afterwards, Jay and Maureen were radiant and ecstatic, saying it was the best concert they'd ever seen. I was puzzled, not having felt anything in the air, in the music, in the event. Not quite true; there was one moment, in the middle of "Subway Train," where a wail attached itself to the melody, like the guy's voice was a train horn, and I got a sudden sense of tunefulness. This is important, because later that night I couldn't get that one song out of my head; so I said to myself, "There's at least one song I like, even if they play like clodhoppers."

The next show was a different story. I'd absorbed the album, memorized the album, knew as much of the lyrics as I could make out (about 65%); what had been sludge now felt like thickness of emotion. I and my friend Steve (not a Dolls fan, but he went along with us) drove from Tolland, Connecticut, where we shared an apartment, to Providence to pick up Maureen from Brown and then headed down south to the University of Rhode Island, in Kingston, where the Student Activities Committee had, for some reason, booked the Dolls. At Brown that afternoon Steve and I had sat in Maureen's dorm room and listened while she – in a monologue I'll never forget – talked about the day her mother had died, and how no one would tell her that it had happened, and (if I'm remembering this right) she was first told to go sit with one person, then another, or maybe she was sent from one house to the next. Her mother had committed suicide – Maureen was about nine when it happened. I'd known there'd been a suicide in her past, I think Jay had told me, but Maureen had never talked about it, never mentioned it, until that day. Down at Kingston we discovered that the Dolls would be playing in a cafeteria. We were second in line. First in line was a young woman and her boyfriend who'd come all the way from Boston – the boyfriend seemed like a regular guy (not that he necessarily was, but that's how he dressed, like the guy in the bar, the guy in the mail room). The woman was dressed more like – well, in a dress, a light-colored dress that seemed interesting on her because it was like an adult person's dress, not a young woman's dress, like a cheap version of something Jackie Kennedy would wear; it wasn't part of the youth uniform and it wasn't glitter. But it did announce a stab at fashion in some way, and the Dolls may have inspired this in her. Nowadays this would be no big deal, someone dressing up at a rock show, but in 1973 it said something. She talked nonstop, too, full of opinions and dissatisfactions, and kept saying stupid things and being real irritating. I think Maureen and I had a common disappointment, that this would be the first person with whom we'd share the potential rapport of Dolls fandom.

New York Dolls "Human Being"/"Jet Boy" (live)


The performance room – the cafeteria – had been cleared of tables and seats. People were to sit on the floor, or stand. Maureen and I went up front, though Steve stayed back. The place was packed, all these college kids sitting on the floor. Maureen and I and one other person, right by the stage (which was a platform not very high off the floor), stood and danced to the music, made motions to the band, shrieked between songs; in back and to the sides some other people were dancing too, and applauding, maybe twenty-five or so of them. And the rest of the crowd, maybe a couple hundred, sat, immobile, not applauding, not leaving, watching the band and the three of us as if we were space creatures. In my memory, it's all brightly lit, everything's in clear view, the three of us are in clear view. This memory is wrong: It was a show, it was night, it was dark, only the stage was lit. But I felt exposed, which was kind of thrilling. Close to the stage, maybe we were wavering between dark and light as we danced. My shrieking might have been forced – hey, I'd never had the chance to be a teenybopper, had only learned recently to respect teenyboppers, and now at age nineteen I was shrieking. Steve said later that it was obvious that Johansen was playing to the three of us. As the show ended one of the dancers from the side came up and asked me to try out for his band. I explained that I was from out of state. Then Maureen said, "Hi, Mac." It turned out that he was a friend of hers at Brown. He was a tall black guy, halfway between a dressed-up '60s freak and a glitter guy; I think he had Lou Reed shades and Hendrix scarves or at least an air of Hendrix-like flamboyance, but maybe some leather too.

There was tension and excitement in all this: the uncomprehending crowd, the audacity of us standing next to the band. That was a year when a few crucial critics (Christgau, Paul Nelson, Dave Marsh) liked the Dolls, but most others and the music press in general had a general attitude of contempt. "All flash and no music" was what they said. I remember constantly reading putdowns. One jerk I think it was in Rolling Stone joked that the Dolls were really dental students who only dressed that way for the money. This was part of the atmosphere too, part of the event for me, standing up and dancing, withstanding the contempt.

New York Dolls "Chatterbox" (live)


The next Dolls concert was that one in the basement of the Viking Hotel. It was me, Maureen, and Mac. This time those who didn't like the music left right away, leaving forty or so of us who wanted to be there, and it was one of the best concerts of my life. In my memory it looks warm and hazy and dark. As for how the crowd looked and acted, though, I can't remember. Dancing, cheering, being happy. At one point all of a sudden a crazy wild-eyed guy started hitting Mac, and Mac pushed back at him. The band handled this well; the roadies lifted the guy right onto the stage and let him off on the other side, where he was away from Mac. Johnny made a funny comment about practicing his Kung Fu fighting, and the situation was defused. When the tussle had started some people had jumped between Mac and the crazy guy to separate them, and I'd grabbed Mac as if to hold him back; Mac got angry at me, saying that he wasn't trying to fight, he'd just needed his hands free to fend the guy off. I mollified Mac by saying that I wasn't trying to restrain him, I was trying to make the crazy guy feel safe, like the threat was over. This was a quick thing for me to say, but I was probably lying. I didn't know Mac, really, and maybe he was a crazy guy too.

As an intro to "Vietnamese Baby," David said, "This song's about a soldier who falls in love with a whore in Vietnam and then he comes home to his mom."

The band seemed happy. It was a different Johnny Thunders from the one we'd see later with the Heartbreakers; he wasn't sulking, wasn't yelling at the sound man. At the end of the show he gave his arm to the girl in black.

Next show, Orpheum or Orpheus Theatre in Boston. I was in the balcony, and maybe this is why I felt more distant. One guy sitting near me – regular-type guy, again, longhaired hard-rock type – pointed at Arthur Kane, the bass player, and said to me, "I think he's a faggot." This guy was not using the word "faggot" with much precision, since Kane – whatever his sexual tastes – was not at all femme. He had the look of a hulking stevedore, and in drag he was a knock-you-down broad. I don't think the guy was saying "faggot" with any particular hostility, either, but he must have had a sense of the band being foreign to his regular-guyness. I read all this into him, anyway, in a glance; I gave him a shrug rather than an answer.

Before the show we'd stopped off at some friends of Mac's, who were also going. Roxy Music was on the record player. Roxy sounded ridiculous and wooden and put-on – all due to Ferry's voice. This was the first time I'd heard them, obviously, and I hadn't yet connected to the guitar playing. Mac's friends – a couple – were dressed in really stylized stylishness, in deliberately falsified high fashion. Unfortunately, I can't remember more than that. The woman might have had her hair up, and earrings, and maybe an intentionally obvious blonde dye job.

Mac had grown up in Manhattan. There'd never been a rock star from Manhattan, he said. They were all from the Outer Boroughs or out of town. All the Dolls were from the Outer Boroughs. Mac was going to be the first star from Manhattan, he told us.

We got his New York phone number, his parents' number. This was probably when we were in town for Iggy and the Stooges' New Year's Eve show. I never had reason to call him, but I remembered the number for several years after because it spelled out L-U-M-P-Y or W-A-R-P-I-N-K or something. Or maybe we were supposed to dial W-A-R-P-I-N-K and ask for Lumpy, like he had to use Lumpy as his nickname within his family because perhaps his Dad's name was Mac, too.**

( Chaperoned and out of place )

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Groucho, as Freedonia's newly installed president, is handed a report from the Treasury Department. "Why, a four-year-old child could understand this!" he scoffs, then quickly turns to an aide and says, "Run and get me a four-year-old child."

So, I wrote this in my early forties in 1997, and fortunately my inner 19-year-old had me by the throat, insisting that it's his 1973 that needs to get told, the truth of his damaged and agonized perception. And maybe I could now add words fore and aft that would help you understand this boy and his world better, but they'd weaken the piece, make it too soft.

Or maybe you in your own perception can hear what's around the story's edges. "The kids in these songs have never heard of the Cool Generation. They are actively, hopelessly involved," wrote Richard Goldstein in 1966 about the Shangri-Las. And to me, 1973 – even before I'd heard the Shangri-Las – was about my failure and my world's failure to live up to those kids. But maybe my prose was good enough to show something more?

I do need to say, though – the reason for this introduction – that despite what's written here, Reggie and Kerry, for instance, are actually in my mind as happy memories. So part of me at the time must've known more than the official story I was telling myself. (Was I more willing to count their cheer as genuine cheer than my story admits? I feel like a jerk for not thinking that it was genuine when I wrote this, though see "blame" below.) Meanwhile, Fred is damn near the hero of the story. And some of what I wrote about dullards can't be true. ("Some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.) Still, in case you, or me, in our wisdom, want to go back and counsel 19-year-old Frank, "You don't need to blame everyone so much; you don't need to blame yourself so much," 19-year-old Frank has an answer: "Self-blame is beautiful."

I wrote this for my fanzine Why Music Sucks. It's long, so I've broken it into three parts, the second made up of what had originally been footnotes to part one. In the fanzine original I'd had the footnotes snake around what they were commenting on, so you were seeing words and their reflection looking back at each other. I don't have the formatting ability to do that here.

Parts two and three get posted soon, I hope.

Thanks to the University of Georgia Press, who published my book Real Punks Don't Wear Black (or here), where I reprinted this, and are letting me reprint this now.

In this piece I refer to the one by Liz Armstrong, which came right before it in my fanzine, and contained the following paragraph.

Liz Armstrong: Although absolutely crazy/strange things seem naturally attracted to Sarah [freshman roommate at the University of Missouri] and me, we usually aren't running around all the time. Normally we just sit around and watch television (I'm now an addict, thanks to her), flip through magazines and sigh, sleep, and generally look for excuses not to do homework. At least once a week we play dress-up. Sounds silly, but it's so fun! See, we shop quite often at this really neat vintage shop and buy all sorts of things that we'll never be able to actually wear. My most recent purchase is a vintage linen, lace, and satin prom dress – very Victorian looking. Anyway, we make a mess out of our room with all the clothes. We try stuff on until we find a particularly stunning outfit, and then we spend lots of time on each other's hair and makeup. When satisfied, we decide where we'd fit in in real life. I usually end up in a Calvin Klein ad or a rock video. From there, we adopt a "voice" (sometimes foreignly accented) and make up a line or two. Me (as a CK model) (in a really bad British accent): "Be dangerous. Be careful. Just be." As a rock video chick, I don't say much; I just walk around, dazed, with semi-watery eyes and a slack jaw. Sometimes I'll press a finger near my nose and sniff violently, like I'm all coked-out. After doing little skits for each other, we walk up and down our hall, past the open doors of the hallway gang/slumber party crew, and talk loudly about either stupid stuff that happened or racy stuff that never happened. When back in our room, we make a halfassed attempt to tidy the place, but we always end up leaving ⅞ of our stuff lying around. Finally, we do something overly normal (like homework) while still dressed up. It gives us a sense of excitement while performing a mundane task.

Frank Kogan: I related very well to what Liz wrote about playing dress-up with her roommate. Interesting: When I was a freshman in college my roommates and I would do the exact same thing. We'd go to the clothing stores or thrift shops and buy the tackiest women's clothing we could find, either really sleazy stuff (vinyl was just coming in; so were tank tops) or ridiculously lacy and satiny shirts and dresses. We'd claim they were presents for our sisters or girlfriends. I'm not kidding. We also had contacts in the drama department who got us wigs. And we'd dress in these things and decide what role to play. On one weekend we'd prance around the hallways telling outrageous stories about sexual adventures we'd supposedly had, and we'd address each other as "Bitch" in really loud voices, and argue about Broadway shows that we'd never actually seen. The next weekend we'd be high-school girls from the '50s and carry on loud conversations about "dreamy boys" and about our daddies, and we'd pretend that we were getting high on cough syrup and vanilla extract. I cultivated a really annoying giggle at this time, which I've still got.

All right, I'm lying. We did no such thing. I made it up. But wouldn't it have been interesting if we had done it? —But there's no way I'd have had the courage.

I was really lonely and unhappy freshman year in college. I'd grown up in a university town with a high-powered intellectual dad and mom and older brother, and for college went to an east coast prestige school, so you'd think I'd have been on home ground, but I wasn't. I was very alienated. High school had been very interesting: very traumatic at times but full of life. Since it was a liberal college town with a lot of faculty brats, the freaks were an influential group in the high school, large enough to undermine the status of every other group but not strong enough (or confident enough) to establish their own status, so the social life was very unsettled yet open. And freakdom and hipness there didn't have the same contempt for ideas that one probably found elsewhere. People were very messed-up, but I had the sense that, smart or dumb, everyone was really willing to try things out and not pretend they knew what to do or who they were. I probably romanticized this in my mind and romanticized it even more in my memory, but anyway, romanticized or not, I carried this image into college of what I expected young people to be: people who weren't taking things lightly, people who were really trying, you know? So I got to this prestigious college where everyone was supposed to be the smartest of the smart, and I expected students to be intellectually or emotionally adventurous or something, and they weren't. They were smart but they were dullards. It's as if the top boring two percent were scraped off of every high school in the country and sent to my college. They weren't offensive or snooty, usually; depressed would be a better word, or suppressed or repressed. And no doubt some – but only some – of the problem was me: my not actually being able to see into these different people's different lives. But the atmosphere of the place wasn't inspiring people to express what was interesting in their lives either, it seemed to me.

So after freshman year I dropped out, then a year later I didn't know what else to do so I went back and was actually much happier. My opinion of the place didn't go up, but I'd figured out how to get what I wanted from it. I actually liked a lot of the teachers and a lot of the course work. This was disconcerting compared to my high-school years, to find that I liked the teachers more than the students. But it stopped bothering me that the students seemed so bland, and I made some friends, etc. etc. I still don't really respect that time of my life – it was limbo. But I learned a lot in my classes.

Back to freshman year, a year when I wasn't dressing in interesting clothes. My roommates Kerry and Reggie hated each other, so each was very cheery towards me – because by being cheery towards me each was proving that he was basically a friendly person not a hateful person and that obviously, therefore, the other guy was at fault, the obnoxious other guy, and deserved to be hated. We could never completely avoid each other, since we shared a three-room suite that was set up so that both Kerry and Reggie had to tramp through my room to get to their respective rooms, and the phone was in my room so they had to come out to take their calls. Kerry was handsome and blond and dressed very well but otherwise was a complete slob and would never pick up the place, and his dirty clothes were everywhere, all over my room as well as his. I didn't really mind this, but it infuriated Reggie. Reggie was persnickety and complained a lot, and he'd go into rages at Kerry, whereas Kerry would just glide in and out like he couldn't care less. He had a few records that he'd play in his room over and over, an Elton John that made me learn to hate Elton for his hamfisted piano playing and oafish vocals. I think there was a Carly Simon record that bored me and a Linda Ronstadt record that bored me and a Bonnie Raitt record that had "Love Has No Pride" and was really quite beautiful. I thought his taste was impossibly square compared to mine. I had Velvet Underground records that I thought of as great hard rock but that completely baffled everyone else. They thought it was awful noise. I'd put on "Sister Ray" whenever I needed to drive people out of my room so that I could work or sleep. My room became a sort of meeting place, actually, mainly devoted to our listening to records. I kept buying old Kinks albums from back when the band was good, and Reggie and I would joke about not being able to leave for class until the side ended (and he'd go and I'd end up cutting the class). The people from next door were often visiting us. One of them, Fred Smith, had gone to my high school. We'd been friends in grammar school but not really in high school; he was politically conservative (actually moderate) and I was liberal, and that had made me uncomfortable, and there were other differences that I don't know how to identify, differences in outlook, and I was often really afraid of differences back then. In college by some awful coincidence (I thought) we were assigned to suites right next to each other, and to my surprise he turned out to be the most interesting person nearby, and we became friends. So he and one or another of his roommates would often be visiting my room. Fred played up his eccentricities – he would go from comically cute to comically gruff, and he'd always answer his phone "Smith speaking!" and then when he was in my room he'd pick up our phone too, when it rang, and say "Smith speaking!" And he got to the point where when our phone rang he'd dive for it, knocking people aside, and say "Smith speaking!" into the receiver. And then his roommate Timothy got into the habit, when he was visiting us, of answering our phone too and saying "Smith speaking!" This must have confused callers. They must have thought we had a butler. Once a friend of mine from my home town called, and Timothy answered and said "Smith speaking!" and so my friend went "Oh, hi Fred," and chatted with him for a while thinking he was talking to Fred, until Timothy identified himself for real. Well, this must tell you how uninteresting my freshman social life really was, that the most vivid thing I remember is how people answered our phone. Once Fred was visiting, and Reggie was visibly depressed about something, and would clomp through my room to his, and slam his door shut, and then come out and go through my room to the outside and then return through my room back to his without saying anything, and slam his door shut after himself. Fred thought this was pretty funny, so whenever Reggie made one of his trips-with-slam, Fred would follow up by opening Reggie's door a crack and then slamming it. After Fred had done this for the third time Reggie came charging out and dived on top of Fred and started pounding him. We pulled him off; the freshman advisers found out and, I think, forbade the two of them to be in the same room with each other. But later, after the ban was lifted, Fred and Reggie became friends and even became roommates the next year, though Fred could get irritated by Reggie's depressions and stuff. Reggie seemed too tired for me, but, as you've gathered, I wasn't likely to look into what was really going on with people.

As for Kerry, he ignored us except when he had to counter Reggie's criticisms. As I said, the place didn't inspire people to display their interestingness. I remember once Kerry was doing acid with his girlfriend and I could hear them having sex in his room and after he'd come he said, "That was fantastic," and the whole thing – acid, sex, and Kerry – seemed totally vacuous. At least from my side of the door.

So I did nothing creative with dress-up. Freshman year my creativity was all in letters, sent to the outside world. Real life was elsewhere, real life was a fantasy, real intensity was a hope or a memory.

( boys in makeup changed my life )

*"It'll be pretty hard to explain why this image meant so much to me." (Marking this here for anyone reading the next installment who wants to see the context of the note.)

**"As if I just didn't care how I looked." (Marking this here, etc.)
But anyway, here's Poison.

Poison "I Want Action"


***"David was asking if you – if *I* – could make it with the monster of life." (Marking this here, etc.)

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Like her colleague MC Pipokinha, Ari Falcão sounds insistent, grabbing, enticing, potentially lacerating.

Ari Falcão (prod. Christopher Luz) - Toma Xota Na Cara [flashing lights]


In addition, though, she's got a rich singing voice that's capable of great gobs of sadness.

MC Pipokinha & Ari Falcão (prod. DJ Glenner) - Sensação


MC Pipokinha & Ari Falcão (prod. DJ Glenner) - Ampulheta [flashing lights]


Have only found lyrics for "Sensação," so far. Its words don't know how to talk about anything but sex, far as I can tell; anyway, they won't acknowledge the melancholy. ("Just put it all in your wet body while I suck you," and on like that, not particularly inspiring in themselves,* at least as rendered by Google Translate.) The song's videos - there are two of them - are equally free of sorrow: a romp in the clothing store, then someone's awful idea of a sensuous photo shoot. Maybe sentiment, what I discern of it, can only exist when it's being passed over.**

In addition, Ari Falcão gets drawn into favela funk's craving for sonic experiment. This, w/ producer DJ Traka, is the barest buzzy riff and chatter clatter, and mouth rhythm, and it's still a dance party.

Ari Falcão, MC ZL (prod. DJ Traka) - E Esse Pacotão Aí [flashing lights]


But now she throws a party that resolutely won't get started. Fodder for a future koganbot blogpost (scroll down to (6)) to celebrate tracks that don't get on-track.

Ari Falcão, Pucca Tsunami (prod. Digdin) - Você Prefere Whisky Ou Cerveja [flashing lights]


So what's this delicately high melody doing here? - like a ray of sunrise intruding on the nightlife:

Jheny Jheny, MC Bragança & Ari Falcão (prod. DJ Alvim Mpc) - Deixa Sua Marca [flashing lights]


*A writer at the letras.mus.br site has a more hopeful view (again, it's being translated by a bot, so may lose something): "The language used is purposefully vulgar and explicit, which can be seen as a form of empowerment, where the artist [MC Pipokinha] claims the right to speak openly about her body and her desires. The collaboration with Ari Falcão adds a layer of dialogue and interaction, reinforcing the idea of ​​reciprocity and consent in the sexual context." Btw, I assume that Pipokinha and Falcão are smart, that there's intelligence, their minds at work, in their acting out; but this doesn't necessarily mean I'm ever going to understand it. Or that I can't be disappointed by lyrics. That the site writer's terms - "empowerment," "consent" - are teacher's pets' buzzwords make them false even when they're true. I tend to associate intelligence with a sense of complicity and compromise, myself. But anyway, good luck to all. Regarding complicity, does telling your producer, in song, "I just want a piece of you inside me (the dick)," make this more emotionally complicated than what I thought when I called the lyrics "uninspiring" an hour ago, when I wrote the above? Inspiring or uninspiring for whom? Empowering for whom? At whose expense? Complicated for whom? How do we know? Who decides? Was the writer whom I've just called a teacher's pet empowered by what s/he/they wrote? Conforming? Both? Neither?



**[UPDATE: Found a couple more lyrics: (1) Ari does a duet with Grazi Arlequina on "Te Amo de Graça," a boring sing-song, but not about sex; quasi-interesting lyrics about not always telling the truth but not breaking up. (2) Ari features on MC Erik's "Sacada," mostly sex again, but smart words that have a strong sense of obsession, addiction, the lovers pulling each other in, while danger lurks outside, "It's midnight and the forecast is for a fight," then "The sun was rising and there was only botada, breakfast in a different way," which is witty. The music is duller, though. (Might botada be one of the derivatives of botar, "to put it in"?)]

[EDIT: Something that didn't come across to all readers, so to be clear: I mean this post as fundamentally VERY favorable commentary on Ari Falcão's music, the sort of thing that if I were to read it I'd say to myself, "I've got to pay attention to this Ari Falcão person, right now!" I especially LOVE the six tracks I embedded. Of course, my loving contains ambivalence and lots of ignorance, and maybe in the writeup the ignorance and ambivalence overwhelm the rest. That often happens with the way I write, and I don't necessarily think that's a flaw in my writing. But maybe I need to do a second post.]

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This post is just so's I can link to these links in the Substack comment thread where I voted in Brad Luen's 1974 music poll; I posted my ballot today, but the deadline is in a week (August 23, 2024), if you'd still like to participate - instructions here.

Fwiw, I took my singles list a lot more seriously than my albums list, so spent way longer searching and listening for candidates for the former. I link the albs here that I voted for, whereas the Singles playlist goes far longer than what I had room on my ballot for.

1974 SINGLES PLAYLIST (longlist):
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLshHxICULapmhtzzY0WGoRc9IzZgjo1FC

1974 ALBUM LINKS:
U-Roy - U-Roy
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLshHxICULapnaMIeO0BDHWQqMs721ithw
Lieve Hugo - King Of Kaseko
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLshHxICULapkH1kw1Q32cfNKQbANF9M6I
New York Dolls - Too Much Too Soon
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kJIcM27EZ_Y-yc9jG6lxS-IAHxSi9qIqQ
Miles Davis - Dark Magus
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_l8E-8h7bU6K9i8_kIrUQ2gZvkDuBxNt5o
Vladimir Horowitz - New Recordings Of Chopin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wO-aWXRkEU
Mahmoud Ahmed - Mahmoud Ahmed
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLshHxICULapn5ij3SGqp4n4SxovYvW26q
Tadaaki Misago & His Tokyo Cuban Boys - This Is Cuban Rock Sounds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myt1i1deASo
Miles Davis - Get Up With It
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nRIm07ncuuUX-IQRMiteK1F1YdEHDUR1M
Lou Reed - Sally Can't Dance
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lMUrLJjwEoGy-qWLwGdzWR_DxVOd6S-R8
Ema Sugimoto - Emma Is Love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl1iDW2y7LA
Chie Sawa - 23 (Twenty-Three Years Old)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kNUZP6blPS1xBz7tSqZkyYX7q9GGDO1OQ
Barry White - Can't Get Enough
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lemoLpuonbDKN-zZF85-10WXq9mbzKj10

[EDIT: Oh, and here's one from the Singles longlist that's no longer on YouTube, Super Boiro Band's "N'Tan Gara" [b-side of "So Ississa"]. "N'Tan Gara" runs from 9:20 to 15:27 on Part1 of the broadcast stream.]

Shirley (and Company) "Shame, Shame, Shame"


U-Roy "Honey Come Back"


[Not crossposting this post, 'cause is just links.]

Am expecting to link my original June 2011 LJ writeup on Miss A's "Breathe" in a couple of days; in the meantime I'm reposting here its original comment thread. This particular thread became very important to me because in it askbask gave me the beginning of a primer on dancers and choreography in K-pop, and he embedded some terrific dance performances – in the case of BoA's dance rehearsal for "Look Who's Talking," I'd say simply my favorite dance performance ever, by anyone: It's not as stunning as the best of, say, Astaire and James Brown, but for basic joy in motion I've never seen anything I'd rather look at.

The reason I'm now giving these comments their own post is that most of the video embeds were eventually either deleted from YouTube or, because they used shockwave flash, they're no longer functional. The original comment thread is just a mess to look at, full of blank space and links that don't work. And because we can't update any comments that have received a reply, there's no good way to put the correct video embeds anywhere near where we'd originally posted them. And Dreamwidth, where people nowadays are most likely to discover this thread, doesn't have the capability of embedding videos in comments anyway.

And I love reliving askbask's awestruck response to "Into The New World," and I want you to experience it too.*

Anyway, I recommend that you start with the original post, linked here:

Athletic R&B: Miss A BREATHE

So here's the reconstituted comment thread, though you'll see that I haven't been able to restore everything yet:

askbask
2011-06-26 04:26 am (local)

Athleticism.

Min (miss A) – Strong Heart

Watch on YouTube

2010.10.05 strong heart_ Miss A Min Dance

Watch on YouTube

Might've been mentioned before, but Min spent some years in the US, preparing for a launch and recording un-released single 'Boyfriend', before the debut was cancelled and she joined Miss A. Sounds like something Cassie also could've recorded, never released and then had leaked.

MIN (JYP Trainee) – Dancing to "Boyfriend"

Watch on YouTube

Miss A released their (quite listenable) 'Love Again' single and video as a three member group.

koganbot
2011-06-28 12:08 pm (local)

Wow, there are a whole string of these (the rest being [her dancing to] other people's tracks, it seems):

MIN (JYP Trainee) – Dancing to "Radar"

Watch on YouTube

Who are considered the really good dancers in K-pop? I'd think Min'd be near the top. There are some names mentioned in this YouTube thread.

askbask
2011-06-28 12:39 pm (local)

Yeah Min is one of them. The Chinese Miss A members as well, Jia and Fei.

BoA is #1.

090605 ExtraTV BoA's Raw Rehearsal

Watch on YouTube

She just finished shooting a US dance flick (Cobu 3D) in the Step Up tradition, lead role vs Derek Hough.

Former BoA back-up dancer Kahi

As mentioned in those comments, Hyoyeon, Minzy

Unfortunately Sori's own underperforming singles haven't given her opportunities for Ciara-like moves.



Guys: Jay Park, Taeyang, Rain, TVXQ

koganbot
2011-06-29 12:03 am (local)

I like all four of the Miss A's, but Min is the standout, has an extra suppleness, as if every single one of her muscles can hear and speak. Just amazing the way she has of letting the music ripple through her.

Fei is effective in a different way: she's tall and this gives a false sense of gawkiness, with an almost comic faux frightenedness in her eyes; it's very funny and hard to keep one's own eyes off of.

Watching that BoA rehearsal increased my respect for BoA 100%. I've never gotten her as a singer, though haven't heard much of her voluminous repertoire. I borrowed her American album from the Denver Public Library last month. A lot of the material is excellent, especially the stuff from Jonback/Bloodshy & Avant, a track called "Touched" in particular. There was this dance gorgeousness, a desire ready to saturate the atmosphere. But I got the feeling I sometimes get from Keri Hilson of an absence in the middle. The tracks seemed to be waiting for their Cassie, or Britney, or someone, a missing ache or neediness that needed to seep into the music. She was singing well, but not injecting enough character.

But looking at the rehearsal for "Look Who's Talking," I see immediately that BoA's got something: her whole demeanor, a completely flexible confidence, a casual command of space and an elastic joy that's capable of owning every cubic centimeter in the room, should she find her way to it. Maybe the trouble with the album is that the music doesn't reflect this ease, this motion. Maybe she needed more hip-hop, more disco, I'm not sure.

askbask
2011-06-29 12:29 am (local)

Yes.. I think she shines with this stuff

BoA / 永遠

Watch on YouTube

askbask
2011-06-29 02:08 am (local)

"completely flexible confidence, a casual command of space"

Exactly! Will be quoting this when talking about her strengths to others. I haven't always been happy with her singles, but am still mostly transfixed by her live performances because of this.

askbask
2011-07-21 01:21 pm (local)

This is the most impressive dance performance I've ever seen from a girl group. It almost beggars belief. The stuff around the 3 minute mark is just scary.

[Pre-Debut] ★Girls' Generation (SNSD)★ ▶『Into The New World』Jul 19, 2007

Watch on YouTube

Helps that it's all lipsynced – it's noticably less sharp on regular performances – and that the camera is fixed so we get the amazing sync work and units moving around the stage. I don't expect them to ever match this level again because it was their debut track and they exclusively practiced this choreography for such a long time.

koganbot
2011-07-21 03:32 pm (local)

I quite like the popping/locking at 2:00 as well. Who was the dancer there? (I've made little effort yet to distinguish the members of SNSD; that's a subject for further research.)

askbask
2011-07-22 12:05 am (local)

Hyoyeon

( TVXQ! Miss A dance tutorial )

*I doubt I'll ever really get to a wholesale updating of the embeds and links on my old comment threads. Fixing the posts themselves was hard enough, and I'm still not done. These old K-pop threads in particular, though, are crucial because I discovered through them a bunch of people (anhh, tarigwaemir, petronia, askbask) who knew far more about Korean music than I did and who were eager to teach me (and then we were joined by a slew of others: Christophe, belecrivain, skyecaptain, davidfrazer, arbitrary_greay, sub_divided, Maddie, and whoever else dropped in).

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We're doing Black Pop History Month '78-'81 at the People's Pop Polls, and here are three discoveries from '79, the latter two firmly in the category What Was THAT?

Paulette & Tanya Winley – Rhymin' & Rappin'



Tanya's the great discovery here, less grab-you-in-the-face than Roxanne Shanté, but she raps with the same insistent glue, our attention immediately glomming onto her. Her counting up the years at the end just presses and presses and presses, then the tape runs out.

Little Scotty – Going To A Disco To-Night



Sounds like a saloon in an old western movie right before the fight breaks out. Not sure what they gain from the last three minutes, though (they're sweeping up broken glass and the piano player keeps going).

Ayisha – Space Man



Lyrics have her observing from outer space, but it's more like she's down in the Mariana Trench gurgling her way upward.

[EDIT: Oops. Looks like I misattributed the year for "Space Man." It's 1978.]

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The last album I really listened to as an album was Taylor Swift's Fearless. Which isn't to say that there've been no albums since then that have had an identity for me, such as a common sound to the whole thing or interesting ways the tracks play off and sometimes against each other. In Babes Wodumo's Crown, for instance, from my 2021 albums list, every single song on it has a density of sound and interplay unlike anything else I've heard in gqom or amapiano. So the album itself has a signature sound, just as Blackout or Exile On Main Street have. Maybe even more interesting along those lines is the Sounds Of Pamoja compilation, also on the 2021 list, a bunch of different artists from Dar es Salaam scratching the same itch and clawing the same walls.*

Except the way I use those two albums isn't as albums (in the way as a teenager I'd decide to listen to Side Two of Crown Of Creation). Rather, the songs on them became fodder for playlists, basically. Essentially that's what I do with albums these days; pull tracks from them. Or listen to them several times for "context." Or, near the end of a year, listen to a number of them (not that big a number) for the sake of finding titles for end-of-year poll ballots.

As for end-of-year polls, I use them for schmoozing, partying, and proselytizing; less for taking stock of a year much less deciding what's good or not. But it's always interesting to see if anyone likes what I listen to, and it's instructive and kind of funny to see sheets and sheets of stuff I've never heard of. Of course singles are way better than albums for sampling morsels off the passing food trucks. But albums are still what these polls center on, and if I want in on the party then I'll make a list of albums. And hope someone listens to one of those albums.

So for the sake of doing it I made a last-second list of albs for the November 30 Uproxx poll (results here), leaning heavily for my listening on recommendations from my friends Don, John, Chuck, and Dave. And then the idea was that for a bunch of weeks in December I was going to listen to at least one new-to-me EP or album a day, and of course relisten to others, and so on, in time for the Pazz & Jop Rip-Off poll. And, of course, this rarely happened, between my submitting a song for TSJ's Amnesty Week and my watching football highlights on YouTube. Then in January, um… Anyhow, with my P&J Rip-Off ballot done on Jan. 1, ballots for the Expert Witness Poll are due in one-and-a-half days [EDIT: make that one day] and I'm sort of panicking. In the meantime, this was my Albums ballot (half of which are actually EPs) for the Jan. 1 Pazz & Jop Rip-Off Poll (poll results here):

DJ Jeffdepl - Forrozinho CD De Carnaval 2023 - 14
MTS No Beat - Outubro 2023 - 13
D'Athiz x Ke-nny x Locomeister - What's The Sound? - 11
DJ Ws da Igrejinha - Caça Fantasma, Vol. 1 - 10
MC Madan - Controle Mental - 10
99 no Beat - Tremzinho do 99 - 10
Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra - America: The Rough Cut - 9
NewJeans - Get Up - 8
V/Z - Suono Assente - 8
Actress – LXXXVIII - 7

DJ Jeffdepl - Forrozinho CD De Carnaval 2023


The Jeffdepl CD is part of a trend whereby someone presumably from the Brazilian northeast takes a rural or rural-like rhythm and throws a whole bunch of urban baile funk songs or samples on top, possibly including a whole bunch of non-baile funk material as well. Or that's what seems to be going on, though Jeffdepl's collaborations with MC Danny seem to be originals. And seemingly every month Jeffdepl puts out a mix CD and usually his fans upload it as a YouTube mix (I'm including in the category "fans" people who want to attract Jeffdepl listeners to their own YouTube channels). The Carnaval CD was February. And I'm giving you two links for it, the first to one of these uploads (same as the embed above), and the second to a playlist I made separating it out into discrete standalone tracks rather than forcing you to swallow the whole thing in one breathless continuum. Also, you can find the title as Forrozinho - CD Carnaval 2023 or Forrozinho Carnaval 2023 or 2023 Forrozinho CD Carnaval or CD de Carnaval 2023 (Forrozinho). And some of those have an extra eighth track, a different one on each, which seems to be uploader's choice and sounds nothing like the rest or like Jeffdepl.

The following EPs and albs are still in play for Expert Witness, not just because I'm always changing my mind and have several new discoveries but because it has five more slots, owing to Brad's including a separate five-entry EP** category.

MC Rogerinho - "085"


DJ Alef Rodrigo - Evolução do Mandelão
DJ Arana - EP A.Mago (Playlist do Mago)
MC Rogerinho - DVD Pode Crê (Ao Vivo)
DJ Jeffdepl - Casca de Bala
d.silvestre - Espanta Gringo
Felo Le Tee x Mellow & Sleazy - The III Wise Men
DJ Black Low - Impumelelo
JPEGMafia and Danny Brown - Scaring the Hoes Vol. 1
Lakecia Benjamin - Phoenix
Jason Moran - From The Dancehall To The Battlefield

...plus whatever else I scrounge up or stumble across in the next day and a half.

The What's The Sound? EP edges out the other two South African long-players by being the most arty and abrasive of the three, also therefore getting along better on this list with my Brazilian entries (abrasion contains five-sixths of brasil).

D'Athiz x Ke-nny x Locomeister – "Gumba Fire"


I will interrupt this disquisition to say:

EOY, EOY Oh!

JJ Fad "Anotha Ho"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldrcZNTYfmA&t=91s

( MC Madan, Sparks, Rolling Stones, the life of rock )

( Old ballots )

( Footnotes )

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Funny beats! Tied to riffs that resolutely don't go anywhere, but don't go away, either. There've been several of these recently, all Brazilian funk, all fluttering around the number 10 spot on my 2023 singles list. Each is a combination of funny peculiar and funny ha-ha, at least to my various and peculiar funny bones.

Not the same funny beat on each, though – these all seem like one-offs, not particularly sounding like each other and probably not even in conversation with one another.

And it's not always the beat itself that's the "funny beat." Sometimes it's the riff, or several riffs that intertwine with the rhythm so as to wave the funny flag on the rhythm's behalf.

Jiraya Uai, MC Tarapi – Hoje Tem Rodeio, Baile De Favela



I've slotted this in my mind as a Dave Moore tip, though it doesn't seem to be on his 2023 playlist. I don't have a name for this track's musical style – Google Translate says "Today there's a rodeo, a favela dance," and perhaps the cowboy hats are meant to signal sertanejo, a rural-identified genre I have no sense of. The music on this seems pretty radical and experimental. What puts this in the funny category is its folkish-countryish tendency, the snaking gtr line and the two (!) harmonica parts (one sucking in and the other blowing out). And to call the guitar "folk" or "country" fails to communicate the psychological sense it has for me: it's the sort of line I'd have sold my kidney to write in 1979 when I was listening hard to Miles Davis's On The Corner and even more to "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose"–era James Brown and trying to twist those into something stranger and more destabilizing, aspiring to create a kind of no wave that wouldn't necessarily be abrasion so much as the feeling when you suddenly go into a roller-coaster drop.

Mary Apelona, MC Boyugo – O Apelão Me Convocou



It's a classic "accordion" part except it's perching like a dazed bird atop a tuba. The two vocalists do a low-affect version of the same thing.

"Classic"? Well, I'm being silly. In suspense movies it's not an accordion but a flute or recorder or piccolo that plays the pretty melody, which is made stereotypically eerie by being thrown off-key against its musical surroundings. In this song, half-a-minute in, the instrument (whatever it is) lands emphatically on a sour note, which recurs often enough that when turned off it's still present, poised to inflict itself again – which it finally does, two minutes in.

(Actually, it's probably a keyboard setting.)

Yuri Redicopa & DJ Bnão – Bebê Tá Solta



Is one of those piano lines that you get in movies that are trying to evoke the 1910s or the 1890s but, as Dave says, used in a compulsively nondevelopmental manner, so, as he also says, it keeps promising to fall into a trot or a basic goofy post-disco no-speak-americano Austral-Romanian Empire* dance, but stops on the brink.

MC 2K, Almir Delas, DJ Samuk – Tropa Do Arranca Pix



Our unexpected beat here is the rockabilly bass. This also has its compulsively nondevelopmental aspects – all the instrumental parts except the drums – but they're not functioning as dance bohemia experimentation but just as regular Brazilian backdrop that allows the vocalists to declaim and grunt and giggle.

( A couple of relevant tracks from 2022 )

As I said above, what I'm gathering here aren't trends or any common beats; rather, they're just part of the variety that the ocean of funk tosses up onto the shore.

( Footnote )

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2015 is coming up in a couple of months in the Poll, so I scrolled back to eight years ago on KondZilla and GR6 Explode, the two Brazilian funk channels whose archives go back that far.* A couple years ago I'd listened to some bare-bones Bum Bum tracks from 2017, so was already expecting, heading backwards, that I'd find settings that were more spare than those of current funk carioca. And of course the thesis – or at least the hook – of this series of posts is how, for a while, the bass – the bottom – lost its status as the core of the Brazilian funk rhythm. But still, I had a huge shock – jawdroppingly huge – at just how spare 2015 was. And I was also surprised at how young a lot of these performers were. That is, not shocked that, e.g., MC Hariel was once younger than he is now – duh – and not shocked (though somewhat surprised) that so many current performers were making music back then (when some were as young as 17, 16, 12); but was very surprised that those kids were such a big focus of the channels. Of course, this might just be the peculiarities of these two channels in 2015, the spare music and the youth of the performers, the channels happening to pick up on a bunch of kids and the bet paying off prosperously to the present. Nonetheless, here is a treasure trove, early work, voices without much accompanying sounds to cushion them.

That the accompaniments are so unadorned has the positive effect of making the singing feel really openhearted – a contrast to the raspers and bellowers I've been into in 2023. My friend Dave Moore writes via email, "Some of the spareness you identify I don't associate with the bracing spareness in 2020s funk, but with a kind of improvisatory or informal spareness of making music with your friends and a couple of cups or spoons. There's a warmth to the spareness." Exactly.

MC Hariel - Passa Devagar (2015)


I will say, though – to reveal my prejudices and maybe try to sidestep them – that if you'd teleported 12-year-old me from my 1966 world of male early adolescence to this 2015 world of kids singing songs with sexual lyrics, that I REALLY doubt that "warm" and "openhearted" would be words I'd use for either world's social life, Connecticut 1966 or São Paulo 2015. But I'll also say – trying not to derail us too drastically from the subject at hand – that what felt to me in 1966 like a constricted world of teasing and bullying might well have been more of an opening-up and adventure for some of my peers. To me dirty words felt like hate words, and for me that spilled over to any sexual content, and honestly that still colors how I hear lots of stuff.** But I don't know this São Paulo world, and 12-year-old me isn't writing this post anyway, and good for the music for sounding like it could be an opening-up and adventure. Even if it isn't.

Anyhow, in 2014, six months to a year before the songs I'm embedding, MC Pedrinho, at age 12, hit with the song "Dom Dom Dom" including the lyrics, "Kneel down, get ready, and give a good blowjob," getting the attention (says Wikip) of the local state prosecutor because of Pedrinho's age and the sex content – of course these lyrics (especially the imperative to kneel down) jump out at me as more mean than sexy (and strike me as very 12-year-old); but again the meanness (or whatever) is not the only thing going on.*** The adolescent posturing is a container or accompaniment for audacity and energy and experiment. The very earliest video on GR6 Explode is a live clip from several months later ("Se Louco Cachorrera") of Pedrinho and another four of these kids sitting behind him on a step or a stoop, no instruments except mouths and cheeks and hand claps, and the five of them are creating full rhythm and melody, the first sounds being the kid on the far right using his voice as a beatbox. Then Pedrinho grabs another boy's hand in solidarity, runs behind the other four, makes funny motions with his arms and legs as if he's diving forward, goes front again, dances a bit while MC Kevin tickles him and MC Don Juan raps; Pedrinho pulls Kevin's hand back, fooling around, then he sings in a penetrating voice, the guys clapping the clave rhythm behind him.

So anyway, this is where we are. Acks and mouthfarts and dat-dat. Vocalists in place of some of the percussion instruments and rhythm instruments, and voices that sing without the protection and accompaniment of such instruments. (Btw, I think the settings work similarly well for the singers in their twenties.)

MC Neném, MC Magrão, DJ R7 – Parafuso (2015)


On this one a drum is in there with a couple of useful thuds, and a foghorn is blowing smoke, but mostly there's a riot of mouthbeats – it starts with an "ah" repeating on the offbeat, then various clustered staccato yelps and "doo-bitta-doo doo-doo" running with and counter to each other. Of course the words too have their rhythms, even when they're struggling to be heard amidst voicebeats high and low. It's as if you took doo-wop's bouncing balls and pirouettes and changed them to cries and grunts. [Couldn't find lyrics online.]

MC Pedrinho, MC Juninho JR, DJ R7 – Manda Pras Novinhas (2015)


The rhythm is set by a voice that cries "ah" on every offbeat. Percussion and occasional instruments circle around it; but long sections of this are just the singing voice and a few bumps of percussion. [Couldn't find the lyrics, but the kids are saying "putaria" a lot.]

(A couple more tracks with a constant voice on the offbeat are "Assunto Profissional" and "Vai Ficar Ardendo." Like "Manda Pras Novinhas," they're produced by DJ R7. Btw, I assume that on a lot of these, the vocal cry is recorded and then put on the offbeat by the producer, rather than being constantly voiced by someone. But I don't know this.)

( MC Robs, MC Hariel, MC Menor da VG, MC Lais )

( Footnotes )

( EDIT: Meta para pasted in from my Substack )

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I squibbed a couple of these for the People's Pop Polls.

Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians "Love For Sale" (poll link):

You read about the primordial depths; well, Waring's "Love For Sale" is the primordial surface, as the woodwinds skip along like every Saturday morning cartoon from my childhood. Song has the lilt and cheerful sadness that Cole Porter liked to insert into everything.

MC Loma e as Gêmeas Lacração "Quero Em Dobro" (poll link):

"Quero Em Dobro" is my nom, blissful and horny and funny, the guys in the video wiggling almost as much as the women. MC Loma is one of the great popularizers of Brega Funk – "brega" translates as cheap or cheesy or tacky, glorying in its inexpensive electronics from the countryside. Rural beats and urban content.

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