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Writer/producer Shinsadong Tiger made music that was catchy and excellently danceable. Korea had normalized, and sometimes sweetened, a lot of sounds that had been wilder and more explosive in electronic dance subgenres and in hip-hop.* The results were often just as good, and I felt that with Shinsadong Tiger in particular, the sweetness worked as an intensifier. Even while the freestyle riffs of a track like "Hot Issue" were shortened so as to live within his song structures, they still contained freestyle fierceness, though working like jabs more than like roundhouse swings.

4minute - Hot Issue


I don't have the chops to explain what he achieved beyond saying he had a gift for hooks and melodies, though I once attempted a two-part analysis of 4minute's "Volume Up" (here and here). With T-ara, he was especially fabulous, though I wonder if the exhilaration of the music contributed to the group's becoming a focus for so much drama and hysteria.

T-ara - Lovey-Dovey (mirror dance)


T-ara - Lovey-Dovey (live mix)


*I was the only person on ILM's K-pop thread to defend Bubble Pop"'s dubstep break.** (Go here and search "dubstep.") Others thought it killed the mood – I thought using it with a hilarious sex provocateur like Hyuna made the momentary squelch and dissonance as bubbly and bratty as the rest of the song.

**TSJ was far friendlier to the track's dubstep pretensions.

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"That's Not How It Is," my favorite Toby Keith song, from Unleashed: Keith could be really sexy and really funny – this unhappy one's not funny, but he keeps his wits about him, matter-of-fact when the facts are sad. The singing is two-thirds smooth to one-third gruff, the gruffness being used to suggest a reserve of warmth that has nowhere to go.



I wrote a little more about this here.

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When I was trying to be a guitarist I'd marvel at Jeff Beck, because you just never knew where he was going to put the note – instead of playing a guitar line he'd just hold the tone for as long as he could. And then a fuzz on and a fuzz off, and later, fast, a tense start, quick splintered notes, losing their balance, about to crash.

"Someone To Love Pt. 2"


"Train Kept A-Rollin'"


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Jefferson Airplane "If You Feel"


Marty Balin. Penetrating singing, good little songs with hooks. Sentimental. "Jefferson Airplane loves you." Not a deep sentiment, but sweet.

More on the Airplane here and here: many tangents and directions; few performing units were as varied.
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Was just reading Kat Stevens's One Week One Band on The Fall and playing for Clare "Container Drivers" from the 1980 Peel Sessions. Clare said, "This is a lot more fun than Malcolm McLaren."

Of course it is fun. ALL Fall is fun, among many other things. There's always something bouncy or at least rollicking in the sound — rollicking sarcasm, often enough, I NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE, but rollicking nonetheless. The fun is being strenuously punched back into its dough container, but that's fun too, on the days when pushback is your flavor of fun.



Two years ago Clare and I were reading murder mysteries to each other, Rex Stout and Raymond Chandler. "Raymond Chandler is a much more generous writer," Clare said. She's way right about Chandler being a generous writer, though I hadn't thought to think it. Stout's in his light and delightfully bickering world, but it's not the world so it's way underpopulated. Chandler's in our world and his fierce eye records details and details, all the stucco, the stucco upon stucco in 57 varieties, items I'd never noticed, the ragged plants, the dirt, the driveways, desiccated apartments and apartments that are too plush, punks trying to comb their blond hair back.

"The members were devoted readers," says Wikipedia, "with Smith citing H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, and Malcolm Lowry among his favourite writers."



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Dick Enberg of NBC Sports, watching the Irish team on parade during the opening ceremonies of the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona; he goes into a somewhat more-meandering-than-usual monologue about Irish long-distance runners of the past, listing the great ones, concluding with, "Those were the days when Irish guys were miling."

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Shinee are my favorite of the SM boybands, though I've no particular insights into either Shinee or Jonghyun (and obviously no insight into the suicide of a young man I knew almost nothing about).

Here are my two favorite Shinee tracks; besides singing and dancing, Jonghyun wrote the lyrics on these two.*





*You may recognize the melody of "Juliette" as "Deal With It," recorded originally and then shelved by Jay Sean, subsequently a small-sized hit in America for Corbin Bleu; Shinee reworked it with all new words by Jonghyun and bandmate Minho, making it tense and tingly and gorgeous.
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Just read that Troy Gentry of Montgomery Gentry died in a helicopter crash.

There was a deeply unsettled push and pull in Montgomery Gentry between rejection and rapprochement, standing their ground and reaching beyond it. Their sound gave an appealing glisten to outlaw country, what I inarticulately describe as "adding a lot of color." Of course "color," as in black and white, as in potential racism, is what scared me in them but it also seemed to scare them, in complex ways. Obviously I'm not exactly the "hip-hop mess" they were trying to brush off in "She Couldn't Change Me," but inexactly I kind of am and so are you.* When the woman returns at the end of the song, how much from the outside does she bring with her? Are they merely winning her over or are they genuinely taking her in? In any event, it was this song of theirs that pulled me in, not just to their music but to the country genre itself. I'd listened before but never really tried to grapple, never was willing to feel it so much.

Troy had the gentler voice and the gentler look. Even though "She Couldn't Change Me" uses Eddie's dark and apparently implacable singing, Troy is the face of the video, so becomes the face of acceptance. The ending is sweet, where he embellishes her colors rather than trying to paint them over.



And of course a few years after "She Couldn't Change Me" was "Some People Change," which may seem only a gesture, but gestures matter. Anyway, there's always the longing for something more, elder wisdom, God, something more feminine, rejected parents. They never sat easy.



That said, as I let my country listening drift away in the '10s I let Montgomery Gentry drift away too. I'm not really on Facebook, but I do check in to see what Dave is up to. I once posted 6 or 7 music favorites, including Montgomery Gentry, so the Facebook algorithm puts Montgomery Gentry up on my news feed.** The duo (on Facebook, anyway) treated the election as if it didn't exist, no mention of Charlottesville, and so on. Probably just playing it safe, but one can always imagine they didn't talk up Trump because they actually couldn't stomach Trump's racism, despite their being the kind of people he was claiming to stand for. —Well, one can do some research, too, which I haven't. Perhaps I'll catch up someday, if I'm not too scared. They made the most reliably good music of the country '00s, the deepest social-emotional poetry, and I put their album Carrying On number two on my albums of the decade list (all genres). Notice the double meaning of "carrying on," which is both holding on, persevering, on the one hand, and causing a ruckus, creating a scene, continuing on in a disruptive or improper manner, on the other.

This is where I wrote about them in the Voice, sliding around, trying to find and lose my own feet:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2001/07/17/d-dang-a-dang-me

https://www.villagevoice.com/2002/12/24/the-onslaught (Ctrl-f "c&w whiners")

*Notice how narrow I expect the readership for this post to be, my saying "so are you" with such confidence.

**The Kinks too. So Dave Davies and Ray Davies and Dave Moore and Montgomery Gentry are my window into the Facebook world.
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Hoisted from lj comments, a couple of paragraphs I'd forgotten I'd written, 4 years ago, upon the death of Pete Cosey:

To me mid-'70s Miles caused as much a revolution in my idea of what sound could be as anything did short of James Brown and Richard Meltzer; so it's on the order of dub or hip-hop in making me rethink. Don't have good words for the rethink, it dating from around 1978. But let's say that one was previously thinking of music as made of rhythms and melodies (not necessarily how I thought of it in my life, but as a musician I was trying to get good with rhythms and melodies), and maybe chord progressions and harmony, though I was never all that competent with those. And "call-and-response," which in my mind symbolized the idea of notes in interaction, musicians in interaction. But with Miles I was getting an expanse of "space," though since music unfolds in time this space is mostly temporal. But imagine a room, and what happens when you stretch a rod from a floor corner diagonally up to the opposite ceiling corner and then start hanging cloth from the rod. The room is divided differently, it could be several rooms now. Anyway, I think of Miles as creating a space and then in a couple of seconds reorganizing it with a horn blast here and a wah-wah squiggle there, so there's constant reorganization even while the funk rumbles on. I also had in my mind the image of the sound running forward and then suddenly halting, leaving kinetic energy in the silent space that follows (and rarely would the sounds stop all at once; a particular instrument would stop unexpectedly, and this absence would help shape our perception of how the rest of the sound seemed).

From Donald Creamer (On The Corner) and Pete Cosey I could hear something that wasn't limiting its sense of possibilities to what the chords and the melodies seemed to invite; so we'd get notes or riffs that could feel like streamers, or like jets of paint...
I'd say it was Davis far more than Cosey who was responsible for this reorganization, but Pete Cosey's on my mind because of an article in Premier Guitar (Tzvi Gluckin, "Forgotten Heroes: Pete Cosey"). Among other things, it sent me to these performances. I hadn't known that Cosey was the lead guitarist on Electric Mud, an album I'd passed over when it came out. I'd assumed, possibly correctly, that it was a sound that Chess had forced on Muddy.* So, hearing this for the first time; some of it's stunning.

I Just Want To Make Love To You


Herbert Harper's Free Press News


And here's a link to Melvin Gibbs' "Canto por Odudua" near the end of Cosey's life.

http://music.melvin-gibbs.com/track/canto-por-odudua-feat-pedrito-martinez-and-pete-cosey

h/t Andrew Klimeyk.

*At age 14, I think I conflated Chess's campaign for Electric Mud with one at the same time for Howlin' Wolf's This Is Howlin' Wolf's New Album. He Doesn't Like It. He Didn't Like His Electric Guitar At First Either. Cosey's on that one as well, which I also need to listen to.
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Jefferson Airplane were as much a coalition as a band, and at moments they could be the most exciting and poignant coalition/band/group in music. And at moments they were breaking in pieces, and sometimes those moments coincided.

Paul Kantner, as one of their weaker singers, the guy who wrote harmony songs, not just leads, was the one who tried to get everybody singing and playing at the same time, if not always in sync. "We Can Be Together" sounds too ferocious and has too much desperate posturing for a we-should-be-together song, which is appropriate, as neither band nor scene is going to hold together much longer.* Kantner's the one who tries hardest and longest to keep the ideals real.



*That's why I'm embedding it. Of the Kantner-only writing credits, I like "The Ballad Of You And Me And Pooneil" and "Crown Of Creation" just as much, but the latter is too focused for what I'm trying to say, and too much of a take-down of a "them" rather than a wrestling with a difficult "us." The former has too much optimism. Its "You and me we go walking south, and we see all the world around us" changes in a few months ("House At Pooneil Corners," co-written with Marty Balin) to "You and me we keep walking around/And we see all the bullshit around us." "We are leaving, you don't need us," on "Wooden Ships" comes a few months after that (by Kantner and Steve Stills and David Crosby), same alb as "We Can Be Together" and is just as much posturing and just as desperate. Backs against the wall so we retreat to fantasy, 'cause the wall's not coming down.

"I can carry my friends and I do when I can, we get by however we can."

Paul Kantner, March 17, 1941 – January 28, 2016.

(I didn't stay listening to Kantner and crews much beyond 1972, if any of you would like to point me towards what's most interesting in what came after.)
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Scott at rockcritics.com links some of the commentary that's followed Lou's death:

http://rockcritics.com/2013/10/30/reed-obits

At the Jukebox we blurb a number of Velvet and Lou songs:

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=8234

I make the case for the oft-derided Sally Can't Dance. Regarding my closing sentence: I was thinking of giving The Blue Mask a relisten but felt that, since I was basically looking to compare it invidiously to Sally, I wasn't really going to be listening with good ears.

Waitin' for a better day to hear what Blue's got to say.



Someone had dibs on "Heroin" but didn't make it. If anyone had paid me to write a proper memorial I'd have given prominence to a basic screaming fact that all the memorials and obits have managed to avoid and evade or not even notice, which is that the Velvets, like Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel who were already doing it* (and it was in the Stones and Airplane and a whole bunch of others then and now, really is all over modern culture), were — however ambivalently — promulgating the idea of dysfunction and self-destruction as a form of social protest against a contaminated and compromised world that had contaminated and compromised the self. A refusal, a denial. Being fucked and making an issue of it as a semi-social-marker, part of a sort of an identity politics of freaks and punks and bohos and ilk. The intersection of social class and conspicuous self-destruction.

Of course, you can like the music without this stuff being a big deal to you. But I doubt that so many people would have liked the songs so much if it hadn't, at least subliminally, been a big deal for a lot of them.



*Not that the idea is new. Presumably goes back at least to Germany in the mid 1700s. See "Romanticism, Age Of." I know almost nothing about Gothic novels of the time, but later on it was in Byron and Stendhal and later still all over Hemingway and Faulkner (when I was rereading Absalom, Absalom! for college I'd put "Sister Ray" on in the background). But I don't know how much it makes it into popular song until the 1960s. Is kinda there as potential in the Delta blues of people like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.
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Freshman year in college I would hunch over my guitar and sing "When the smack begins to flow, and I really don't care anymore," and I'd feel great rhythm and power flowing through me. (Later cassette recordings don't necessarily bear this out.) But it was the messy early to mid '70s solo albums where Lou really registered, that I got the most personality out of; even though the first three Velvets albums were more authoritative and were better music.



Eventually, in New York, in the early '80s, I finally went back and got on top of the Sister Ray groove. Was the first groove I'd ever mastered, and it was actual power. But back in the ugly college '70s I felt the guy more. He was a truth teller who didn't like himself much, which brought out the wrong truths — he couldn't believe a truth unless it went against him. Or, anyway, the — true — love and idealism had to hide between the lines, a photonegative of what was going wrong, sentimental self-dislike. A thoughtful, very kind, well-behaved high-school girl told me Berlin was a "fine album." I didn't say anything in response, rather than going, "No, it's self-pitying shit." I couldn't stand to listen to it, but day by day I couldn't stop myself from singing its songs, mouthing its words:

They're taking her children away
Because of the things that she did in the streets
In the alleys and bars no she couldn't be beat

Caroline says
As she gets up off the floor
You can hit me all you want to
But I don't love you anymore

All your two-bit friends they're shooting you up with pills

How do you think it feels
When you've been up for five days
Hunting around always
'Cause you're afraid of sleeping

How do you think it feels
And when do you think it stops
When do you think it stops
Okay, I'm a rock critic, here are the two albums I consider most underrated:
Lou Reed (the first solo album) ("Ocean," "Berlin," "Wild Child")
Sally Can't Dance ("N.Y. Stars," "Kill Your Sons")



The star I identified with most.
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Jimmy Dawkins


A song I used to study, for its dignified self-loathing and the way the guitar notes roll out in stately ferocity.

Pete Cosey

Jun. 9th, 2012 11:24 pm
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Embedding the start, which is the part I love best, for the ensemble work and Miles' trumpet twists; Cosey and Lucas get to really working the guitars later (here), but I don't know how to embed a vid so as to start it in the middle.



I think of this music as a combination of probing with lasers and scraping the barnacles. Huge impact on a number of guitarists I knew (incl. me) in late '70s NY. This, Dark Magus, Pangaea, and On The Corner.
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Just want to say that the X-Ray Spex show at CBGB in '78 was among the most fabulous I've ever seen, and made of simple elements: clothing of recycled vinyl, three-chord rock not just that anyone could play but that you could imagine anyone playing to greatness, and as ringleader a roly-poly teenager who (in Luc's words) gave sex appeal to braces.

Got the email several minutes ago from Poly Styrene's U.S. publicist saying Poly died last night of cancer.

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I used her as a challenge, a battle flag, and a question mark, and what I wrote about her really pissed her off.* The challenge was that she created music way better than anyone like me seemed able to anymore - "people like me" being the children of Dylan and the Stones, now a musical marginal intelligentsia that was constantly tripping itself up and rolling itself into the fetal position, a little ball. The question for me was how do I achieve what she achieved while still remaining myself, and the answer was that I couldn't remain myself, I had to take in more than I'd been able to so far. That eventually meant committing myself to what I do best - which is to write - and to demand of myself that the writing live in a wide open space, as big a world as possible. When I was working on my review, Leslie put the problem of how to describe Teena, "How do you capture..." and then she held her arms out in a giant, reaching embrace. And so I started, "Naked To The World - that ridiculous title-... It's more like the world is naked to her, and she slurps it all up."



*Or so I heard third-hand through either Doug Simmons or RJ Smith, and Chuck subsequently confirmed when he interviewed her.

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Frank Kogan

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