Talking Heads :: This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)
Last week, I unintentionally developed a severe crush on this tune. It grabbed a hold of me as I was watching the awkward party scene in Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl (2007). Ryan Gosling’s misanthropic character is standing there sporting a sharp three-piece suit while his artificial, ductile baby-love (Bianca) sits strategically posed in her wheelchair, dancing with some other man. The camera slowly turns from her to Lars. This lesser-known Talking Heads song from Speaking in Tongues is playing. Lars feels it. He understands; he almost seems at peace with himself. Something about Byrne’s emotive chorus crooning speaks fluently to the absurdity of Lars’ plight. Have a look.
A couple of days later I was watching Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1985) and as the nostalgia of its 80s-esque aesthetic became less captivating, I shifted my attention from Charlie Sheen’s luxurious, Darryl Hannah-inspired, fashion-disaster of an apartment to, once again, this song. As it played, Charlie Sheen/Bud Fox’s new, albeit garish, abode emerges as his financial triumph, the evidence that he had indeed ‘made it.’ At that moment, my crush on This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) achieved maximum crushiness as it demonstrated its own sonic and lyrical versatility, fitting two very different films from two very different decades, so very well.
On some level, Byrne’s number is about love and home. Beyond the physical dimensions of a home there is of course the way a self resides within itself. For Lars, one can posit that his metaphoric/metaphysical abode suddenly became, however momentarily, a comfortable habitat. In the context of the film, this stasis remains for Lars an elusive end, making the magic dance-floor moment an even more crucial part of the storyline. On the other hand, Bud Fox’s newly acquired, lavish apartment, despite representing at one time the dream to which he aspired, ultimately emerged as the physical contradiction of what he was utterly inclined to be: a more or less plain and decent fellow. You just have to see it.
I am sure that when Byrne wrote this tune he had no idea that it would be appropriated for such seemingly disparate cinematic projects. While it might be an interesting endeavor to delve deeper into how the song reflects its original physical and emotional environment (or what’s unique about the 80s in general), I prefer to confront it in the broader terms of its journey from 1985 to 2007. We often consider songs to be windows through which the intimate and sometimes obscure details of a specific historical moment come into view. At the same time, the penultimate meaning of a song is not necessarily tethered to the moment during which it was conceived. Therein lie the beauty, power, and dynamism of songs and why they say so much about society and consciousness. When tunes manage to transcend the neat and easy stylistic boundaries that ostensibly separate one decade from the next, they reveal something wholly human and, to some extent, what does not change over time.
This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) (4.5MB MP3)
Talking Heads (fan site)
Luciano Pavarotti :: Nessun Dorma
When I signed on as a contributor for this project, my ostensibly noble mission was to avoid penning any melodramatic, self-indulgent descriptions of why and how any particular song ended up as one of my personal favorites. I was determined to prevent my prosaic, subjective exposition from potentially obfuscating the broader, and possibly more important, meaning and social context of a tune (not that these two dimensions of interpretation are mutually exclusive). At the same time, from the very start of my involvement in this blog, I secretly conspired to betray my own directive; eventually, I would write an inordinately emotional piece about how Nessun Dorma, absolutely destroys me.
Sure, at first I dreamt of a way to integrate my private world with the song’s public legacy. I told myself that I could locate this song within its historic and artistic context, compose a textual exegesis, and would then use it as a worthy platform for qualifying why the song, and this particular performance of it, just splits me in half, right down the center of my metaphoric body. First performed in 1926, critics have called Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot a great many things, ranging from brutally heartbreaking to utterly misogynistic and Eurocentric. If you don’t have a chance to listen to and understand the whole of Turandot, here is the New York Metropolitan Opera’s concise synopsis.
I’m going to purposefully evade the task of intellectualizing the song and simply say that the combination of Pavarotti’s voice and the lyrics (out of the context of the story) descend on you like the still air of that monumental moment when you first realized that you would surrender all your possessions and time to the one you love. In my humble opinion, this piece is above all else pure sonic passion. It is the sound of your cauldron boiling and your belly burning. It is an eruption of desperation and hope that shatters the strictures of reason and critical consciousness. It is the encapsulation of the singular moment you realized that you were, in fact, alive, unashamed, and doomed to love someone despite anyone’s better judgment; it was on her/his mouth that you could find, for however brief, your true name:
Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!
Tu pure, o, Principessa,
nella tua fredda stanza,
guardi le stelle
che fremono d’amore
e di speranza.
Ma il mio mistero e chiuso in me,
il nome mio nessun sapra!
No, no, sulla tua bocca lo diro
quando la luce splendera!
Ed il mio bacio sciogliera il silenzio
che ti fa mia!
(Il nome suo nessun sapra!
e noi dovrem, ahime, morir!)
Dilegua, o notte!
Tramontate, stelle!
Tramontate, stelle!
All’alba vincero!
vincero, vincero!
I should also note that this entry comes with a heaping portion of irony: people stop me in the street to tell me that I am the spitting image of Luciano Pavarotti. I used to protest vehemently, declaring that the man has got at least 150 pounds on me and that I’m a hell of a lot better looking. Of late, I’ve changed my tune and actually don’t mind bearing the resemblance. Pavarotti, despite being somewhat of a flake and a letch, was an opera god whose artistic efforts challenged the elitist boundaries that formerly kept opera under snobby lock and key. Here’s the proof.
And let’s not equivocate, Pavarotti can really fucking sing. My recommendation is that you close your eyes and play this track as loudly as you can. Suspend your preconceived notions of what Opera might be. Forget pop music for just a couple of minutes. Let the song pull from you the amorous force of your design. Answer the song when it asks you whether anything on this earth could possibly stop you from adoring and serving the people that you love. Let it allow you to suddenly realize that everything that might be good in our lives and in this world extends from those uncertain moments during which we dared to love one another far beyond the best of our ability. I also suggest that you listen to this song while reading its lyrics unless, of course, your Italian is fluent and you don’t need a translation. In case you do, here’s a rough conversion:
No one sleeps, no one sleeps…
Even you, o Princess,
In your cold room,
Watch the stars,
That tremble with love
And with hope.
But my secret is hidden within me;
My name no one shall know, no, no,
On your mouth I will speak it.
When the light shines,
And my kiss will dissolve the silence
That makes you mine.
No one will know his name
And we must, alas, die.
Vanish, o night!
Settle, stars! Settle, stars!
At dawn, I will conquer! I will conquer! I will conquer!
Nessun Dorma (4.1MB MP3)
Luciano Pavarotti (homepage)
Booker T & the MG’s :: Green Onions
In 1960, prominent civil rights activist and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. aid Reverend Samuel Kyles arrived in Memphis and immediately observed a city where “there was not one thing integrated. From the cradle to the grave, everything was segregated in Memphis.”1 Despite the social, political, and economic restrictions created by institutional segregation, guitarist and sound engineer Steve ‘The Colonel’ Cropper worked closely and amicably with both black and white members of the Stax music-making community. In a recent interview featured in the 2004 film Soul Comes Home: A Celebration of Stax Records and Memphis Soul Music he stated:
The word ‘integration’ didn’t even exist in our vocabulary and the segregation of black here and white there, however you want to define it in today’s terms, also didn’t exist. It was just guys gettin’ together. There was absolutely no color in that studio; color never walked through that door.
Cropper’s candid testimony underscores the fact that Stax studio and the music it produced defied America’s ubiquitous segregation orthodoxy. At the same time, Stax’ profitable model of racial collusion offered the promise that black and white citizens could transform a Memphis where civic leaders defiantly shut down schools and pools rather than abide by a federal mandate to integrate them.
With two white members and two black members, Booker T and the MG’s represented a rare collaborative project one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere in Memphis. Although Stax owners, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, were not necessarily fixated on the fact that they sponsored an integrated band, they maintained that Stax, regardless of the process by which it became integrated, was ultimately an enterprise that fostered “black and white individuals making music for themselves.”2 Stewart further acknowledged the social implications of the Stax phenomenon by stating that “we were sitting in the middle of a segregated city, a highly segregated city and we were in another world when we walked into the studio.”3
If Stewart, Axton, or anyone at Stax had misgivings about reaching across the color line, the explosion of commercial success that Booker T. Jones, Lewis Steinberg, Al Jackson, and Steve Cropper were about to experience eclipsed these concerns quickly. On a steamy summer morning in 1962—before the MG’s had even decided upon a name for their outfit—the musicians arrived at Stax studios to serve as the back-up band for a white rock and roll singer by the name of Billy Lee Riley, whom Stewart believed could deliver a chart-topping hit. As they awaited Riley’s arrival, the MG’s began working out playfully a blues progression. Since Riley never appeared that day and because Jim Stewart liked what he heard coming from the band, Stewart decided to tape the session. The result of this impromptu recording was the single Behave Yourself.4
For the flip side of the record, the band began rehashing a riff that Jones had developed a few weeks earlier. As the rest of the band played along, Cropper realized that something remarkable had taken place. He exclaimed “Shit, this is the best damn instrumental I’ve heard in I don’t know when. I knew we had a winner there.” Because Stewart had recorded Behave Yourself and Green Onions intending fully to distribute it, the MG’s had to decide upon a name for their project on the spot. Jones claimed that the band was named when “Al Jackson said ‘Booker T and the…’ and he looked out the window and saw a little MG car and said ‘Booker T and the MG’s.’ It was all just a little bit more than a joke.”5
Shortly after the newly christened MG’s recorded the track, it would go on to become an instrumental anthem for both black and white America, peaking at Number One on Billboard’s Rhythm and Blues chart in 1962 and Number Three on the Pop chart.6 This crossover success fully illustrated that the MG’s sound transcended the lines that divided American tastes into racially distinct categories. Moreover, the commercial triumph reinvigorated Stax by generating some much-needed income and bolstering Stax’ standing in the music industry. While Green Onions was distributed locally through Stax/Volt, Atlantic Records boosted its national circulation to over 750,000 copies. Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic co-owner who helped to orchestrate national distribution, returned to the Stax studio in 1963 and sang the praises of the MG’s saying:
Their rhythm was the heart of the matter, the chief reason Memphis mattered. The even racial composition of Booker T and the MG’s became a metaphor in my mind for their extraordinary harmony, in and out of the studio. Booker T Jones, the keyboardist, and drummer Al Jackson were black; guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn were white; and Duck’s predecessor was Jewish (and African American). The results were anything but gray. The boys played in red clay soil, and I was walking into fertile territory. The funkiness of the music – bare-boned, yet razor sharp – knocked my dick in the dirt.7
Green Onions (3.3MB MP3)
Booker T & the MG’s (homepage)
1 Robert Gordin, Morgan Neville, Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, 2007.
2 Stax Documentary, unreleased, showing at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.
3 Quote obtained from the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.
4 Bowman, 38.
5 Booker T Jones, Sound Opinions Interview, April 7, 2006.
6 Ibid, 39
7 Jerry Wexler and David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music, New York: Knopf, 1993, pg. 171.
Johnny Nash :: Love Ain’t Nothing (But a Monkey On Your Back)
I sometimes feel that talking about love is, in many respects, an unavoidable fool’s errand. While trying to articulate how, why, and for whom our bellies burn, we may find ourselves first having to suppress that knee-jerk tendency to employ some of the clichés that our pervasive culture industry has defined narrowly as love. From coveted blood diamonds to hokey pet names, the commercially viable “I love you” dialect has been systematically embedded in our subconscious and can impair our ability to communicate creatively and authentically how and why we adore, want, and need one another. To be sure, each of us is an inimitable occurrence in this vast universe and, despite our individuality, we continually resort to the use of hackneyed statements, predictable behaviors, and borrowed gestures in an awkward attempt to say just what we mean. I think that the poet protests this state of affairs and struggles constantly to speak of love descriptively and evocatively. Of the standardized love vernacular in question, Nietzsche said that poets and artists “despise the lax procession in borrowed manners and appropriated opinions.” Sure, such a statement is arguably pretentious and maybe even cruel in some respects as it arguably insults millions of well-meaning lovers. To be fair, the customary tongue can and does, to some extent, work. However, for the millions more that find love to be less than all it’s cracked up to be, the expression of amorous sentiment is an enterprise mired in hogwash, greeting card pretexts, and unrealistic expectations.
Within this line of criticism, one can also discern a marked disjuncture between popular culture’s reductive definition of love and the infinitely varied ways we experience it. While the Hallmark/Hollywood love model is most assuredly flawed, academic assessments are equally dubious. That is to say that formulaic and absolutist explanations of amore fail to grasp the totality of the nebulous subject. So I ask, must the way in which we talk about love (like every other human possibility), become routine and quantifiable? Is being in love best described as a mere chemical reaction?
According to Johnny Nash, “Love ain’t nothing but a monkey on my back, a word, a word I wish I never heard.” As he belts out those lines with sultry woe, I can’t help but feel like he’s all ‘pure being’ and shit because he draws an implicit distinction between the tired concept and the elusive real thing for which pedestrian parlance (and science) has no perfect moniker. I think that he is suggesting that his faith in essentialist notions of love has brought him misery instead of the joy he once expected. While he rejects the booby-trapped trope of love, he nonetheless showers you with something reminiscent of what love might really entail as he sings with such passion, ardor, and pain. Furthermore, for him (and us) love is not yet a specific taste or a precise recipe; rather, it remains something far beyond the reach of slogans and equations. In short, there’s nothing like the real thing, baby.
Love Ain’t Nothing (But a Monkey On Your Back)
Johnny Nash (wikipedia)
Gene Pitney :: (The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance
Without question, rugged dudes beset with a wide range of military, political, economic, and cultural conflicts have come to epitomize both the history and myth of the Wild West. The most influential literary depiction of frontier manhood under duress originates from Owen Wister’s fictional work The Virginian, which was published in 1902. In this seminal novel, the Virginian is a transplanted ‘Southern gentleman’ who enters an industrializing and consequently disordered Old West. As he faces challenges and threats unique to this nebulous environment, he discovers that preserving dignity and defending wealth are challenges best met by enacting equal measures of prudence and aggression. In this emergent survivor, this dual-natured manly man, Wister arguably fashioned the very first in a long line of ‘good’ cowboy heroes. This particular brand of hero is one whose ethos translates roughly to an uneasy marriage of virility and virtue. Broadly speaking, one can ague that American foreign policy in no small way continues to bear this paradigm’s indelible mark. But when it comes to the lore of Manifest Destiny, masculinity remains a convenient distraction that recasts the frontier’s violent seizure as some kind of valiant civilizing crusade.
In this vein, some form of the Virginian - the quintessential arbiter of masculine progress and power - recurs throughout a manly bounty of both fictional and factual Western texts. In a more recent phase of this expansive tradition, we find John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) celebrating brave and principled men, eulogizing an Old West unspoiled and, at the same time, begrudgingly endorsing the modernizing process that killed it. As Ford’s final Western, the film is set in the generic boomtown of Shinbone, where the dastardly Valence, played masterfully by Lee Marven, terrorizes the good-natured locals as they endeavor to obtain statehood. Valance is not the Wisterian version of a noble cowboy; he is the prototypical ‘bad’ cowboy: a man without honor, an uncivilized thug. In a surprising narrative twist, Valance’s nemesis is not the local Virginianesque rancher called Tom Doniphan. The chief rival is instead the newly arrived, bookish lawyer Ransom Stoddard, played by the venerable Jimmy Stewart. Riding in on stagecoach, Stoddard wields nobly the scepter of democratic order and feels its power greatly outweighs that of an obsolete pistol. But after Valence robs Stoddard and beats him to a bloody pulp, Stoddard realizes that “with force threatening, talk is no good anymore.” As such, realizing the sheer impotence of the law forces Stoddard to accept Valence’s challenge to meet in a good old-fashioned duel after which “only one man comes home.”
Of course, when Stoddard enters the contest and quickly finds himself on the verge of a humiliating defeat, the ‘truly’ capable Doniphan - a mock-up of the Virginian - emerges from the shadows and smokes Valance. John Wayne plays Doniphan. So in a way, this song is more or less about what John Wayne took himself to be: a just man who remained “the toughest man south of the picket wire.” But in a larger and more important sense, Gene Pitney’s 1962 top-ten hit, which Ford intended to use as the movie’s theme song, is the nearly perfect encapsulation of prevailing Western motifs, tidily arranged in a three minute package. In the context of the film and the song, the frontier’s successful transformation from a lawless libertarian utopia into a regulated democratic civilization requires not only Stoddard’s legal expertise but also Doniphan/Wayne’s calculated brawn. Moreover, the song extols those enduring traits many continue to ascribe consciously and unconsciously to the meaning of manhood. In conclusion, the degree to which one recognizes just how intimately linked conventional masculinity is to the legacy of the Wild West is another dense matter entirely and, quite frankly, a query that is as relevant as ever (see Crawford Ranch).
(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance
Gene Pitney (homepage)
(note - Part of what inspired this piece is a NPR feature that discussed the life of Gene Pitney, who passed away recently.)
the Gizmos :: Progressive Rock
In Candide, a seminal work of social satire, Voltaire takes us to an opulent Venetian villa. Here, the estate’s owner, Pococurante, apathetically enjoys only the most luxurious delights: well-manicured gardens, priceless paintings, exquisite sculptures, rich foods, and, of course, small animals. As one of Voltaire’s model cynical figures, Pococurante also possessed an intimate knowledge of opera, which was all the rage among his bourgeois elite peers. With regard to opera’s feverishly fashionable allure and stylistic excesses, Pococurante issued to the credulous Candide a vitriolic rejection of Enlightenment Europe’s avant garde musical idiom:
“This noise,” said the noble Venetian, “may amuse one for a little time, but if it were to last above half an hour, it would grow tiresome to everybody, though perhaps no one would care to own it. Music has become the art of executing what is difficult; now, whatever is difficult cannot be long pleasing… the scenes are contrived for no other purpose than to lug in, as it were by the ears, three or four ridiculous songs, to give a favorite actress an opportunity of exhibiting her pipe. Let who will die away in raptures at the trills of a eunuch quavering the majestic part of Caesar or Cato, and strutting in a foolish manner upon the stage, but for my part, I have long ago renounced these paltry entertainments, which constitute the glory of modern Italy, and are so dearly purchased by crowned heads.”
In the spirit of such cutting criticism, I present to you the Gizmos. I confess to not discovering these quick and caustic chaps on my own; it was the discerning ear of a friend long-gone — one of the brightest men I know — that thrust the said boy-band into my life. Hailing from Bloomington, the Gizmos represented the Midwest’s cleverest and most waggish contribution to nerd punk. Not to be hyperbolic, but I prefer to call these lads “the Voltaires of their time.” As such, Progressive Rock took dead aim at what the Gizmos considered a fussy and convoluted musical style:
“Well you can learn a lot if you listen to Yes, topics taken from literature’s best. Journeys and spaceships and wives and lords, In a Gadda da Vita with classical chords. It’s called progressive rock. Really sucks don’t it? Don’t it really suck? You’re lucky living in modern days like this. Now you can boogie with taste and intelligence. You’ll be so progressive you’ll stand out in any crowd. You’ll be so cultured that you’ll never shout out loud.”
What is that you say? This song sucks and, furthermore, progressive rock practitioners are exceedingly adept at playing their respective instruments? Hold on, I’m not endorsing personally this Gizmoian polemic and I don’t mean to offend any readers who are die-hard fans of the music. I just marvel at how Pococurante’s 18th century literary lambasting of opera’s decadence and trendiness is curiously analogous to the Gizmos’ 20th century sonic censure of prog. Like Poco, the Gizmos did not find hyper-complexity and showiness too appealing, let alone meaningful beyond a pronouncement of musical virtuosity. What’s also remarkable here is that the Gizmos voiced a sophisticated critical opinion that very much belied their superficial goofiness.
Moreover, the Gizmos are not the first to lay down the prog-smack. Before the music industry deradicalized and trivialized the early passion of punk, the movement was determined to spurn what it considered a gimmick-based and pleasure-centered popular culture. In this vein, so-called punk founding father Joey Ramone, like the Gizmos, denounced prog as mere establishment-approved rubbish, regardless of how much skill its performance required. In lieu of what those old-school punkers felt about prog, it bears mentioning that almost all of the Yes catalog has gone gold. So, in the end, it appears that more than a few folks enjoy a good wank from time to time.
Progressive Rock
the Gizmos (fan site)
(note — To hear Joey Ramone’s comments, check out the film End Of The Century: The Story Of The Ramones.)