Kinda Gaudy
Jun. 18th, 2013 04:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotOK, the first entry in my MySpace reclamation project is the Corina review I wrote for the Voice back in '91 and then reissued on my MySpace blog in '06. It was the best of my reviews not to make it into Real Punks (in writing this review I'd cannibalized a letter to Mike Freedberg and a Radio On review, and since both of those were in the book already, I decided this would be superfluous). Note that I was using the genre name "Latin hip-hop," the term "freestyle" not having yet superseded it in the press.
Kinda Gaudy
by Frank Kogan
Disco managed to be audacious without being upscale in the usual sense, so it could incorporate cabaret, opera, kung fu, anything, and still not be "culture." It could be ambitious without leaving anything behind, without shedding its down-home mannerisms. "Down-home" is probably the wrong phrase here. It's like Elvis: Elvis never stopped being a truck driver with dreams; the point is, he dressed himself in the dreams, not in overalls. I'm not sure what I'm driving at here, of course. A disco is basically a Saturday night bar 'n' dance floor that doesn't know its place. But that doesn't make it a would-be supper club, dinner theater.... It's got its own style. It's like Tony Camonte in the original Scarface, asking the sophisticate Poppy what she thinks of his jacket. "Kinda gaudy, isn't it?" she says, and he says, happily, "Yeah," oblivious to her sarcasm, and winning her over. In my dream, disco doesn't ignore the sophistication and the sarcasm; it incorporates it, discofies it. Again, what does this mean? How do we take sarcasm, knowingness, a sense of tragedy, politics, and make it gaudy, turn it into a circling disco globe? I'm working on it. A flash of glitter, dime-store glamour. The vision is made of scraps and probably won't amount to much in the daylight. But fuck the daylight, that's not what music's about. The point of having a vision is to use it, not to check it for accuracy.
The most consistent postdisco for me has been "Latin hip hop" (misnamed, because it's singing, not rap), which, while not too heavy on the sarcasm, has got audacity and glitter and gaudiness and pink wigs and electrobeats and passionate wails and fancy clothes and tacky clothes and exposed midriffs and divas and ass wigglers and orchestral flourishes and intertwisting rhythm lines and dancers and breathtaking melodies--until about two years ago, when the melodies dried up across the board, from Miami to New York, and the genre just about died.
And now suddenly it's undead. Well, the latest miracle in my life is "Temptation," the Corina single. It's sexy and it's right there and it's also somehow tough and striking and nonapologetic. The first thing I notice is the chord shifts--no, I'm lying, the first thing I notice is the sexiness, right out of my radio. The second thing I notice is how audacious--I use that word a lot--how audacious and severe the chord changes are and also how effortlessly the song rides up and down those cliffs like they're nothing. So the chord shifts make it sound real dramatic, like a movie soundtrack, but it's still just as casual as a song. The 12-inch has this photo in front with her handcuffed and bare shouldered and presumably in bed and unclothed under a satin sheet. There's a long explanation on the back that claims the cuffs are not about bondage, at least not in the way that you think, but about the terror of going to parties and having your life ruled by a Temptation (capitalized in the original) or an addiction. (Her bare top and satin sheets must represent something equally metaphoric.) The record itself is full-steam about sex, she likes the way he touches her, temptation is a part of life, it makes you do what you like. The liner notes say you should control your life, the lyrics say you don't and maybe you don't want to; a previous song was called "Out of Control," her voice has this dark-brown power to it, and the best words on the rest of her album, Corina (Cutting Records), the ones by her, have her praying to an inattentive universe while life walks her on into pain.
And the video's a riot. There are these funny bits of nonchalant overstatement that go by fast as a shrug. She's in tight garish purple. She's got two-inch nails to match. She wears a plastic ruby ring that's somewhat smaller than a pickup truck. She gets passionately involved with her reclining chair. (If I were a transvestite, this is what I would want to look like.)
Before this single her voice was an ordinary, not-very-flexible thing. The voice hasn't changed, but now it's a personality. On the rest of the album she can't really maintain this personality; they go through various song types, slow song, fast song, Prince song, countryish song, haunting violins, a towering pain-guilt-anger song called "No Excuses" that ought to be the next single, all done rather well, with a lot of subtle smart things down in the arrangement, a wah-wah here, a honky-tonk there, for dancers to do counter-wiggles to, but it ends up diffusing the persona rather than expanding it. I wish that rather than showing off her range she'd stuck with the tough temptress voice and let the other emotions, the vulnerability that suffuses her lyrics, sneak in around the edges.
On the album notes she thanks the Almighty Father for giving her the strength to continue and also thanks her mom and dad (though I can't say any of them created her fingernails), but on "Now That You're Gone" she calls to Mom and God to give her solace, and it's unclear that they're not the ones who are gone. And you know she's really got a theme: she's a believer whose God has left her to drift into impulse and tragedy. (Hey, that God of Love's a motherfucker, but that's my opinion.)
Funny thing about those handcuffs. She really means them. I'm touched. I think there's more to come.
--The Village Voice, September 10, 1991
Kinda Gaudy
by Frank Kogan
Disco managed to be audacious without being upscale in the usual sense, so it could incorporate cabaret, opera, kung fu, anything, and still not be "culture." It could be ambitious without leaving anything behind, without shedding its down-home mannerisms. "Down-home" is probably the wrong phrase here. It's like Elvis: Elvis never stopped being a truck driver with dreams; the point is, he dressed himself in the dreams, not in overalls. I'm not sure what I'm driving at here, of course. A disco is basically a Saturday night bar 'n' dance floor that doesn't know its place. But that doesn't make it a would-be supper club, dinner theater.... It's got its own style. It's like Tony Camonte in the original Scarface, asking the sophisticate Poppy what she thinks of his jacket. "Kinda gaudy, isn't it?" she says, and he says, happily, "Yeah," oblivious to her sarcasm, and winning her over. In my dream, disco doesn't ignore the sophistication and the sarcasm; it incorporates it, discofies it. Again, what does this mean? How do we take sarcasm, knowingness, a sense of tragedy, politics, and make it gaudy, turn it into a circling disco globe? I'm working on it. A flash of glitter, dime-store glamour. The vision is made of scraps and probably won't amount to much in the daylight. But fuck the daylight, that's not what music's about. The point of having a vision is to use it, not to check it for accuracy.
The most consistent postdisco for me has been "Latin hip hop" (misnamed, because it's singing, not rap), which, while not too heavy on the sarcasm, has got audacity and glitter and gaudiness and pink wigs and electrobeats and passionate wails and fancy clothes and tacky clothes and exposed midriffs and divas and ass wigglers and orchestral flourishes and intertwisting rhythm lines and dancers and breathtaking melodies--until about two years ago, when the melodies dried up across the board, from Miami to New York, and the genre just about died.
And now suddenly it's undead. Well, the latest miracle in my life is "Temptation," the Corina single. It's sexy and it's right there and it's also somehow tough and striking and nonapologetic. The first thing I notice is the chord shifts--no, I'm lying, the first thing I notice is the sexiness, right out of my radio. The second thing I notice is how audacious--I use that word a lot--how audacious and severe the chord changes are and also how effortlessly the song rides up and down those cliffs like they're nothing. So the chord shifts make it sound real dramatic, like a movie soundtrack, but it's still just as casual as a song. The 12-inch has this photo in front with her handcuffed and bare shouldered and presumably in bed and unclothed under a satin sheet. There's a long explanation on the back that claims the cuffs are not about bondage, at least not in the way that you think, but about the terror of going to parties and having your life ruled by a Temptation (capitalized in the original) or an addiction. (Her bare top and satin sheets must represent something equally metaphoric.) The record itself is full-steam about sex, she likes the way he touches her, temptation is a part of life, it makes you do what you like. The liner notes say you should control your life, the lyrics say you don't and maybe you don't want to; a previous song was called "Out of Control," her voice has this dark-brown power to it, and the best words on the rest of her album, Corina (Cutting Records), the ones by her, have her praying to an inattentive universe while life walks her on into pain.
And the video's a riot. There are these funny bits of nonchalant overstatement that go by fast as a shrug. She's in tight garish purple. She's got two-inch nails to match. She wears a plastic ruby ring that's somewhat smaller than a pickup truck. She gets passionately involved with her reclining chair. (If I were a transvestite, this is what I would want to look like.)
Before this single her voice was an ordinary, not-very-flexible thing. The voice hasn't changed, but now it's a personality. On the rest of the album she can't really maintain this personality; they go through various song types, slow song, fast song, Prince song, countryish song, haunting violins, a towering pain-guilt-anger song called "No Excuses" that ought to be the next single, all done rather well, with a lot of subtle smart things down in the arrangement, a wah-wah here, a honky-tonk there, for dancers to do counter-wiggles to, but it ends up diffusing the persona rather than expanding it. I wish that rather than showing off her range she'd stuck with the tough temptress voice and let the other emotions, the vulnerability that suffuses her lyrics, sneak in around the edges.
On the album notes she thanks the Almighty Father for giving her the strength to continue and also thanks her mom and dad (though I can't say any of them created her fingernails), but on "Now That You're Gone" she calls to Mom and God to give her solace, and it's unclear that they're not the ones who are gone. And you know she's really got a theme: she's a believer whose God has left her to drift into impulse and tragedy. (Hey, that God of Love's a motherfucker, but that's my opinion.)
Funny thing about those handcuffs. She really means them. I'm touched. I think there's more to come.
--The Village Voice, September 10, 1991
Hot, strong
Date: 2013-06-18 10:53 am (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSzVAREfrYo
no subject
Date: 2013-06-18 11:53 am (UTC)