Frank Kogan

I'm implying at the start of my last post that at least some of the Airplane's visceral excitement comes from how the different personalities/musical elements often sound on the verge of falling apart or exploding into conflict. If you put them too close they annihilate each other, too far apart they're inert.

Don't want to make this Airplane versus Bowie and Roxy, given that most observers never notice the many similarities. But with Bowie, I get an emotional kick from his intentions more than his songs (bear in mind, though, that I know his intentions only through the songs, so obv. the latter deserve some of the credit — cf. my liking Springsteen the person more than his music, but of course most of what I know of the person is through the music). He's got a potentially exciting choice of musical elements. Where I'm claiming (not very clearly) that Jefferson Airplane's parts were better "integrated," this is based on my feeling that in Bowie and Roxy the pieces-parts have a clumsy fit but while bumping one another don't generate sparks. They coexist too peacefully.

You shouldn't infer here that aesthetically I prefer confrontation to coexistence. The former is easier to write about, though.

Really, the Airplane's visceral superiority may just be owing to Jack Casady's being a smart, powerful player who takes the bass on convoluted journeys while never losing the groove. But when the Airplane splintered, his and Jorma's particular post-Airplane shard, lifeboat, new craft (my metaphor is splintering too), Hot Tuna, was dull dull dull. (At least the first two albums. I didn't stick with 'em, so they're due a reevaluation.) It's as if they need the challenge of Paul's and Marty's and Grace's chord patterns, rather than Jorma's own more traditionalist and blah ones. (How many soul bass players get to run a slalom course as novel as Paul's "Crown Of Creation"?)

These are all quasi-germs of quasi-ideas that I doubt I'll be able to develop usefully. To continue on half-assedly, an interesting way of looking at Jefferson Airplane is as a precursor to Whitfield's work w/ the Temptations when the latter went "psychedelic," e.g., soul bottom, psychedelic guitar (though I also think of Whitfield as an accidental forerunner of dub, whereas I never heard any "dub space" in Jefferson Airplane). And to Funkadelic, of course. Roxy's Phil Manzanera deserves mention here too, his psychedelic guitar wending its way interestingly through Roxy's architecture.**

*"Spare Chaynge" and "Bear Melt" may be total refutations of my hypothesis, since the former is a pure improvisation centering on Jack and Jorma, and the latter something of an improvisation, and both tracks are great. (I'm overlooking drummer Spencer Dryden here: I haven't really come to any assessment of the guy's work; note that it's his departure after "Mexico" that marks the border between previous Airplane greatness and later Airplane-Starship mediocrity (though "borders" are never so simple and I actually like the post-Dryden Long John Silver more than I dislike it). Also note that I have zero albums by New Riders Of The Purple Sage, whom Dryden joined in 1971.) Subjects for further research are too numerous to detail here, but surely should include KBC Band and SVT (Wikip: "During his SVT tenure, Casady actually taped his fingers together to force himself to simplify his highly articulated playing style"), not to mention three decades' worth of Hot Tuna.

Watch on YouTube

**And let us not forget Rare Earth and He 6!

Links to the Mark Sinker–curated conference, Underground/Overground: The Changing Politics of UK Music-Writing 1968-85. By "music writing" he means the sort of thing Simon Frith does, not the sort of thing Jagger & Richard do (not that you should think there's a gap between the two sorts). I believe but I'm not certain that this is edited down (from about 12 hours to 8).

Participants included Richard Williams, Simon Frith, a host of others, including several of my lj friends (Mark,* Hazel, Tom, not that they're around lj anymore).

https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/undergroundoverground-the-changing-politics-of-uk-music-writing-1968-85-part-1-25th-may-2015

https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/undergroundoverground-the-changing-politics-of-uk-music-writing-1968-85-pt2-25th-may-2015

https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/undergroundoverground-the-changing-politics-of-uk-music-writing-1968-85-pt3-25th-may-2015

https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/undergroundoverground-the-changing-politics-of-uk-music-writing-1968-85-pt5-25th-may-2015 (this is actually part 4 mislabeled)

https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/undergroundoverground-the-changing-politics-of-uk-music-writing-1968-85pt5-25th-may-2015

https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/undergroundoverground-the-changing-politics-of-uk-music-writing-1968-85-pt6-25th-may-2015

https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/undergroundoverground-the-changing-politics-of-uk-music-writing-1968-85-pt7

https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/undergroundoverground-the-changing-politics-of-uk-music-writing-1968-85-pt8-25th-may-2015

The Who "Substitute"

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I haven't (as of 11 June 2015 AM) had a chance to listen myself. Mark wrote some thoughts afterwards, and there was something of a discussion at Freaky Trigger and a good bit less of one on ilX. I managed to be shocked by how inarticulate ilX was, even though I should know better than to expect anything different.** I got frustrated by the inarticulateness of the much-more-articulate Freaky Trigger convo, too; I'll probably manage to get frustrated by the inarticulateness of the conference as well, when I finally listen. But anyway, old Brit rockwrite/musicwrite does not get attended to or thought about much, at least within my earshot, and for me is mostly terra incognito (of the panelists, and not counting the latter-day moderators Hazel & Tom, I've read a lot of Frith, read a little Ingham in the late '70s, read Toop on hip-hop, and as far as I know that's it except for a Richard Williams interview at rockcritics.com). But anyway, as to the question, why care now what they said then, that's like asking why learn another language, why visit another country? For the surprise, for the familiarity, for the new view, because it's there, 'cause the past is different and the past is present. Maybe I can give more specific answers once I listen. If Mark cares, if Simon cares, you're likely to care.

( I'm the comment-thread era, not the article-review era )

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.

Here's HyunA displaying her Pikachu voice (segment begins 26 seconds in), anticipating how a year later she tells Psy he's just her style. But what's striking me now about the clip is Jihyun saying, right at the start, "We're famous for not having talents." I can't tell if this is just a quick quip, a "talent" merely meaning a special side attribute, or if the comment is coming from somewhere deeper.

Watch on YouTube

There's a TV clip a bit later (here, and continues here) of their discussing how they deal with harsh comments, the guys who told them, "It's okay, just get your faces done first" (i.e., told them that their performance wasn't bad but that before they debut they ought to all have plastic surgery*), and people later who called them "deud minute," an acronym for "I couldn't even listen to or see 4minute." Those of you who've been following this longer and more attentively than I have: Are 4minute's looks considered a challenge to typical idol-girl faces and fashion? HyunA, of course, is Sex Symbol Of The Moment in K-pop, and she seems a master at being able to switch from goofball and brat in one second to total command in the next, donning and shucking off cuteness at will, while nonetheless coming across as fundamentally warm and spontaneous, and a light-hearted attention grabber. (If you stick with the Mr. Teacher vid beyond Pikachu, you'll see a funny sequence where HyunA's videoing the rest of 4minute head-on as they walk along a Kuala Lumpur street, but complains that it's scary for her to walk backwards, so makes all of them walk backwards so that she can be walking forward while continuing to work the camera.) But I wonder if the rest are considered non-idol-style in their looks and demeanor (and if that's felt to be a plus by their fans). Gayoon's face looks squashed-in, and Jihyun's can fall into a weary or sardonic droop, though I don't think that makes either of them unattractive.

I also wonder if HyunA's quick image switches make the general K-pop audience uneasy; to me she's thoroughly coherent and has done a smooth job of disarming the opposition.

( Update: All hail Jiyoon )

*I gather that their label president encouraged them not to. And as Jihyun says, it's too late now anyway, since everyone knows their faces.