Frank Kogan

I found it! Live recording from the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival, 1965, Duke Ellington "Second Portrait of the Lion," first track I heard affixed to the word "jazz": instrumental (so to speak) in fixing in my brain the idea of jazz as quick notes in a pointillist haze.



(Surely I'd heard jazz previously in movie scenes and on TV shows: lounge singers and their accompanists, as private eyes and wise guys pass through. But not part of my sense of a genre "jazz.")

[This is in regard to my post here (The Elephant And The Giraffe) (or in deeper context at Freaky Trigger) regarding my teen jazz tokenism, and the strange early appearance of the Duke.]

I'll be creating several "2016 Revisited" and "2017 Revisited" posts shortly, and I figure that if I'm to claim that such posts re-visit those years, I'm implying that I'd only visited those years the first time through, rather than inhabited them. Which is silly. But does one inhabit a year? All of the year, everywhere and at every moment? —Well what does "inhabit" mean here? In any event (or any year), one doesn't suddenly leave one's socioemotional abode once a new year's hits. One takes one's habits and habitude along. And when you say you're revisiting old habits, this usually means you still inhabit or are inhabited by them anyway, right? But this time you're giving them a more critical eye.

Anyway, years aren't containers, and though we're in this one that doesn't mean other years aren't in us too and here's a song that hasn't been officially released nor maybe even gotten its final studio workover, so we can say we're as yet just visiting* it rather than being incarcerated along with it.

[UPDATE: Weirdly, Royal KD have taken this performance down from their YouTube site, and may have also changed record labels. So maybe this song isn't going to be a single. It's still up on Facebook, here. And someone's posted a different low-sound performance of it on YouTube. Fingers crossed.]

So:

Small-label idol-pop hip-hop from 2018 Korea, but shouty sorta like how mid '80s Queens/Long Island hip-hoppers might've sounded if they'd been immersed in Bo Diddley vamps from 1959 or Velvet Underground vamps from 1969 (which they weren't, but I still am). Not that this has the urgency of old Diddley, Velvets, or Def Jam, but it does evoke grinding moodiness while still being good knockabout fun (which is sort of what Diddley, Velvets, LL, and all did/were, too).

Here are sly-seeming labelmates Blah Blah, equally low on tiers.**



*Ref. to board game Monopoly.

**"No tiers" and "low tiers" and "tierless" are shorthand that davidfrazer and I use to indicate that a group or label isn't on an upper commercial tier but is just as good as those groups and labels that are, hence no tiers for the creatures of the night.

Generic songlist intro: Had mostly completed this a month ago, felt I ought to say something about some of these, hence the delay in posting. Here's the YouTube playlist:



1. Lil Debbie "F That"
2. NCT 127 "Limitless"
3. MC G15 "Deu Onda"
4. CLC "Hobgoblin"
5. Juan LaFonta ft. Big Freedia "Bounce TV"



6. Pristin "Wee Woo"
7. Steps "Scared Of The Dark"
8. Jovi "Ou Même"
9. Vince Staples "BagBak"
10. Cherry Coke "Like I Do"



11. K.A.R.D "Rumor"
12. Alternative TV "Negative Primitive"
13. K.A.R.D "Don't Recall"

Lil Debbie. By strapping herself tight to rhyme and meter schemes she becomes taut and virulent.* NCT 127. If this had been Super Junior doing the "baby it's you" part, the hair-on-the-neck harmonies would've been shivery and cold. NCT sound warm doing pretty much the same, and good for them. MC G15. The genre is "funk ousadia," Google translating it from the Portuguese as "daring funk" or "bold funk," which in this case is a slow goofy dance on a high wire.** The melodica brings me back to Ennio Morricone and Augustus Pablo, also shivery. CLC. HyunA moves with a nice ungainly beauty into which she's instilled presence and charisma while still being accessibly goofy. She's written and produced a HyunA soundalike track for CLC, who have none of her charisma and little of her talent, and they sound almost as good anyway and almost as compelling, also goofy.*** Juan LaFonta ft. Big Freedia. 60 seconds is an effective length for Big Freedia's insistent repetitiveness, about the length of a long TV commercial, which this literally is. K.A.R.D. Immediately gripping but the grip is too tight, or anyway the beats are a tad sludgy and, surprisingly, it's the female singers rather than the males who lie too heavily atop the rhythm. Lots of promise, though, in the songs and the singing.

*Virulence can be a massive irritant of course when linked to Debbie's childish toughness, and fuck that, but it's up to better people to make better music, and at the moment they don't.

**"Sexual connotations and puns in the form of humor," Wikip helpfully opines, also with the assistance of Google Translate.

***Hence the question I asked 30 days ago: "'What if the Rolling Stones had written and produced hits for the Shadows Of Knight?' (Well, what if HyunA wrote and produced CLC?)"

Stubs of ideas, some of which may turn into future posts:

(1a) A punk votes for a punk (Johnny Rotten says nice things about Trump). Okay, he's not necessarily saying that he did vote for Trump, though from what he said it's a good assumption he did; but anyway, my armchair psychosocial analysis of the Trump win already had been "Punks voted for a punk," my using the word punks in a sorta pre-punk-rock sense, meaning people who compensate for subconsciously feeling weak by scapegoating and bullying and hurting the vulnerable; but such "punks" can include normally nice people too, people who let the punk aspect of themselves do their electoral thinking.



(1b) Only "sorta pre-punk-rock" given that original garage-rock punks such as ? And The Mysterians and the Syndicate Of Sound and the Seeds were indeed punks in the old sense, weak bully-type punks (and sexists as well),† but most of the great punk rockers — I'd start "punk rock" w/ Stones and Dylan, actually, with the caveat that the true punks, the garage rockers, weren't Stones and Dylan but the garage kids who'd dumbed Stones, Dylan, and Yardbirds down into punk, which'd be a fine explanation except that no one limits "punk rock" this way; most critics etc. would also include the Velvet Underground and MC5 and Stooges and Patti Smith and Richard Hell and Rocket From The Tombs and even more would include Ramones and Sex Pistols and the Clash and the Heartbreakers and X-Ray Spex and Black Flag and Nirvana and Hole, generally self-aware nonbully types, and if you're going to do this you've got to go back and count Dylan and the Stones — ...anyway, most of the great punk rockers (as generally defined) were about punk way more than they were punk; nonetheless, being self-aware, they drew the connection between actual inner true punk impulses and the punk rock they were playing, understanding their own weakness and that bullying and scapegoating were in there lurking, sitting dangerously inside. But anyway, of all the great punk rockers, the Sex Pistols, who were maybe the greatest ("They make everyone else sound sick by comparison," said my friend Bill Routt), were the ones who were true nasty punks as much as they were about punk. They were the band that made punk safe for fag-bashers (fortunately only somewhat safe).* None of which explains why Johnny Rotten would shit his brains down the toilet and support Trump (apparently, Johnny can't tell a racist from a hole in the ground). If you want to turn to social affinity and group identification as an explanation, Johnny's loyalty is to real punks, not to punk rock. (Yes, there's no way to come up with a unitary reading of the word "punk" in this paragraph. It'd be a stupider paragraph if you could.) I doubt that many self-identified "punks" — those who embrace the music as part of their social identity — voted for Trump. These people veer left instead. If you go by social category, Trump got many of the rocks and hoods and greasers and grits and burnouts — at least, more than he should have — but few of the punks. (Among whites he got a significant amount of the jocks and middle managers, too, and their psyches are probably as much punk as the hoods' are, but that's not relevant to Johnny Rotten's social identification.) I doubt that many Trump voters had ever bothered to listen to punk rock (not counting the garage hits they heard way back); if they had, the aboutness would've stung them, and they'd have been repelled. Nonetheless, I think I can understand that what makes the Sex Pistols sound true and real to me, the screaming squalling blind attempt to stand against anything acceptable and settled that can get you by, is what makes a lying hollow pathological bully like Trump sound transgressive and therefore real and true and honest and substantial to a lot of his fans.

(1c) Of course Trump doesn't win if he gets only the punks. And my armchair analysis isn't based on any actual research of mine into "the Trump voter." As I said two sentences ago, there's more than one type of Trump voter, and individual voters are multi-faceted in their urges and ideas anyway (so a particular Trump voter can be more than one type). I'm actually doing two questionable things: (i) reading the characteristics of the voter off of the characteristics of what they voted for, rather than actually asking the voters who they are and why they like what they like; (ii) using a psychological model that can apply to an individual person to explain the behavior of a group of people (the punk types who voted for that punk Trump), as if the group were an individual writ large. Obviously I think the analysis kinda sorta works, or I wouldn't have made it. It's a strong hypothesis, punks voted for a punk, strong in my mind anyway, though maybe someone more knowledgeable could beat it down with an alternative. ("Strong" analysis? Seriously? How so? It tells you what most of you already know: (1) that I don't like Trump, (2) that I think many of his voters voted for a lot of what I don't like about him, even if they don't understand the policy implications, and (3) that he's a punk. You already knew that. He's a punk. It's maybe a correct analysis, but not strong, since it doesn't tell you anything you don't already know. Maybe it makes you think harder about punk rock, and what I write below maybe'll help you think harder about social class.)

(1di) ( Trump got more working-class whites than he was expected to )

(1dii) ( The terms hoods, greasers, grits, and burnouts as stand-ins for current social identities )

(1diii) ( The class systems in people's immediate experience are not an exact match for the upper-middle-working class grid )

(1div) ( They voted against Clinton because she's a student-council type )

(1dv) ( Kids who bombed out of the classroom still hurt by it )

(1e) ( Middle class divided )

(1f) ( Want to hurt people and feel good about hurting them )

(2) ( The failure of education )

(3a) ( Duncan Watts criticizes idea of 'representative agent' )

(3b) ( How would we measure 'punks voted for a punk'? )

(4) ( The principle of the inferred et cetera )

(5) ( Top 100 singles of 2016 )

(6) ( A punk votes for a brat )

(7) ( Etc. )

In the meantime, Badkiz cover a Badkiz song.



(This is a very subtle post that only davidfrazer will appreciate fully.) (Also see our conversation regarding Badkiz' impact on Korean Taekwando outfit K-Tigers, and the impact of Melbourne bounce on each.)

In an egregious breach of self-discipline, I posted on an Ann Powers facebook thread* whose subject was "rockism." Given that the thread was mainly stupidity and floundering, and it didn't jostle anything loose in my own thinking, I fear that there was little useful I achieved. My justification, if there is one, is that the stupidity I refer to is relative, and I genuinely believe that if someone somewhere takes in and masters my ideas regarding the "authenticity" thing it would save her several years of wheel-spinning.

Antirockists have never had the slightest actual interest in the people they call "rockists" or in the phenomena they call "rockism." So the conversation has been about defeating phantom enemies rather than about understanding the world.** This makes antirockists frustrating but it doesn't always make them boring, since their beating up on "rockism" is an attempt to use a crowbar or pole vault to get out from under something — even if they won't figure out what it is in themselves and their world they're trying to surmount.

This is what I wrote. I do urge you to click the two Rules Of The Game columns I link down at the bottom of my third comment. Might help your wheelbarrow gain traction.

( Antirockism is just rockism with a few of the words changed )

Saw Ash-B's first appearance on Unpretty Rapstar and went, "Oh, no, they're making her/she's making herself sound tough and real and it won't work and she'll lose," so I averted my ears and avoided the show.

To my barely informed mind HyunA is now the dominant rapper in K-pop in that whenever anyone in Exid or 4minute who is not HyunA starts to rap or sing, I go, "This sort of sounds like HyunA but now I'm waiting for HyunA herself to show up." "Red" last year established this for me. (The wait is longer in Exid than in 4minute, obviously.)

Crayon Pop continue to score by ignoring past achievements; SHINee and Wonder Girls explicitly wallow in a past that's of course been implicit all along throughout the genre; most interesting freestylish moment, though, is "Delete," which casually pairs old NY-Philly-Miami riffs with cool autonomous vocals that you'd never ever have heard on an actual vintage freestyle track.

Since spring I've barely listened to anything that isn't medium-old jazz (Lee Konitz, Miles Davis).* So this list suffers, esp. in its dearth of No Tiers discoveries.** I've basically been relying on YouTube-generated playlists for K-pop and on random looks at the Singles Jukebox for everything else. I found Lila Downs via her "Cuando Me Tocas Tú" linked on Jonathan Bogart's Tumblr. (That track and Wonder Girls' "One Black Night" are candidates for my Freaky Trigger ballot, which allows album tracks.)

So, what have you been listening to?

1. Ash-B "매일"
2. The Seeya "The Song Of Love"
3. Azin "Delete"
4. Rihanna "Bitch Better Have My Money"
5. HyunA ft. Jung Ilhoon "Roll Deep (Because I'm The Best)"



6. Crayon Pop "FM"
7. ZZBEst "랄랄라"
8. Titica "Você Manda Fogo"
9. Momoiro Clover Z vs KISS "Yumeno Ukiyoni Saitemina"
10. Red Velvet "Ice Cream Cake"
( Daphne And Celeste through T-ara (11 through 20) )
( SHINee through GFriend (21 through 33) )

*In jazz, I didn't like what I heard this year from previous fave Matana Roberts. Sounded like a parody of a 1950s bohemian séance.

**But let me reiterate my liking for the missed-by-me-last-year "Babomba" from the impressively overlooked (and now personnel-shifted) Badkiz.

I've been wanting to comment on an ever-increasing number of Mark Sinker posts, especially this on Freaky Trigger where he continues a convo (prior installment here) that, among other things, draws on my hallway-classroom metaphor. Here's a preliminary map (or something) of how I might start responding, when I get the chance.*

1. I'll start with the question, "What would Mark say that he's saying here?" although, in order for this to be an exercise in understanding rather than typing, I'll try wherever possible to avoid using the words he uses.

Or you should try, if you want to anticipate me in taking a shot at it. Also, "saying" is a generic here that includes "doing."

2. You can walk and chew gum at the same time.

In other words, if I say or do A, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm not also saying or doing B, C, D, E, and F, including some K's and L's and M's I'm unaware of.

3. A special instance of the principle "You can walk and chew gum at the same time" is my attack on the hallway-classroom split.

The split goes, in the hallway you talk to and about each other; in the classroom you talk about some third thing: the subject matter. My claim is that good rock critics don't buy into this divide, so they refuse to honor the boundary between hallway and classroom.

4. I'm an alienation addict.

( Notes )

*Posting here on my lj since I don't know if Freaky Trigger has fixed its spam filter problems, which had been delaying the posting of comments on old threads.

From Korea, middling sellers or out-and-out commercial failures that I like a lot. Alphabetical order.

A.Kor "But Go." On the 2NE1 template, being haughty and inviting at once.

Badkiz "Ear Attack." Shouts, whistles, social seriousness, and a squiggle from "Party Rock Anthem." (I wrote about the vid here.)

Choi Sam "Answer." Beat rumbles tectonically; voice dark like rubber that won't go elastic.

Delight "Hate You." Sentiment is evergreen, voices are rough.

GP Basic "Black Bounce." The singers circle relentlessly.

PungDeng-E "잘탕 (잘 시간이 어딨어)." PungDeng-E PungDeng-E Go! PungDeng-E PungDeng-E Go! What others are getting from Lip Service's "Yum Yum Yum" I'm getting from these kids.

Ray.B "살만한가봐." The pang of an '80s New York night, now done better in Seoul than anywhere else.

Scarlet "Hip Song." Also a hiccup song, the vocals jumping and stuttering in rhythm.

Switch "39˚C." Bleary nights, wandering from club to club. [UPDATE: Track seems to be off the Internet, but here are the lyrics.]

Wa$$up "Stupid Liar." Slow, brooding, bruising. This group has depth and variety, if anyone's ever going to notice.

Z.Hera "D Island." Last year her decor was études and preludes. This year she's livin in smoove. Still impressive, still aches.

Zizo ft. Nan Ah Jin "Spy." Guest singer gets the close-up, rapper feints and darts around her.

They're too popular for this list, but I'm currently also digging Hong Jin Young's "Cheer Up" (h/t Mat), Vixx's "Error," BTS's (Bangtan Boys) "BTS Cypher PT.2: Triptych," After School's "Shine" (Japanese), and everything Orange Caramel have laid their hands on this year.

Watch on YouTube

Even with S. Korea having canceled spring on account of the ferry disaster (as Subdee says), I'm woefully behind on K-pop, and my listening elsewhere has been too random and intermittent even to be called scattershot. But anyway, int'l dance cheese goes strong at its most opportunist (Chainsmokers, Orange Caramel, Badkiz [the "Party Rock Anthem" influence still potent in Seoul], PungDeng-E, Arcade Fire, Mia Martina), whereas the boring int'l amalgamated danceR&Bglaze&crud that's been weighing down charts worldwide since 2009 somehow manages to sound touching in the hands of a Shakira and a Rihanna who've had all their distinctive characteristics removed. Danity Kane go retro, referencing Teena Marie; equally retro Dal★shabet, who still can't sing for shit, nonetheless find themselves immersed in great freestyle riffs. Ole punk manages not to be dead in the hands of poignantly desperate and angry Kate Nash and Courtney Love. T-ara, Jiyeon, and Puer Kim veer smoove and After School master smoove. Few boys' mouths, as is usual on my lists these days; fewer still who sing. And as the biz still invests almost nothing in us oldsters, funky fresh young Crayon Pop represent on our behalf.

SINGLES:

1. Wa$$up "Jingle Bell"
2. The Chainsmokers "#Selfie"
3. BiS "STUPiG"
4. Kate Nash "Sister"
5. Courtney Love "Wedding Day"



6. Orange Caramel "So Sorry"
7. Tinashe ft. Schoolboy Q "2 On"
8. Nicki Minaj "Lookin' Ass Nigga"
9. Crayon Pop "Uh-ee"
10. After School "Shh"
( Future through Shakira )
( Bass Drum through Rascal )

ALBUMS

1. After School Dress To Kill [Avex Trax]
2. Kali Mutsa Souvenance [Shock Music]