Depeche Mode :: Waiting for the Night
If you were born anywhere in the world between the years of 1970 and 1977, it is a scientifically proven fact* that you love Depeche Mode. This is also true if you were born in Russia between the years of 1977 and, um, now. It is true even if you keep it a secret. It is true even if you think it is not. Seriously Russians and people in your thirties—You. Love. It.
Choosing one song from this album was very hard. But I know you have Violator in your closet, tucked somewhere between the first eyeliner you stole and the first love letter you found in your locker. I know you can still scare it up if you really, really need to hear Personal Jesus right now. And you probably do.
* With credit to the Bush administration for the expansion and/or implosion of whatever meaning wherever ‘science,’ ‘proven,’ and ‘fact’ used to have.
Waiting for the Night (8.4MB MP3)
Depeche Mode (homepage)
Nina Simone :: Feeling Good
I’m kind of working on this book. It’s the dissertation in African American studies I’d be working on if I lived in a part of the country with a PhD in African American studies. (Damn you Cornell.)
As a consequence of the project, I’ve been immersed in Black history in the era (or three) between about 1913 and 1985. It’s a fascinating period. For one thing, rapid changes in the Black condition during this time caused rapid changes in Black cultural perspectives. Duh, right? But I mean relatively constant and relatively damning 180 degree shifts. Values on which African Americans hung their hats would transmogrify into the values of a scraping Uncle Tom—and then into wholesomeness once again. What was once a welcome representation would become classic ‘coon’—and then back again.
But, of course, that’s just how it looks on the surface of things. In the roiling culture-making underneath, it’s all always alive and well: the church lady and the race man and the dealer are all present on the pre-riot corners of James Baldwin’s Harlem. Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson step into the ring together, necessarily of and by and for the same era.
Maybe that’s part of why I love Nina Simone so—for the way she swims seamlessly between perspectives and stances, never being any more Black in one moment than in the next. To my ears, Feeling Good starts in the mode of an old Negro Spiritual—elemental, solitudinous, hopeful, day lit. But at 39 seconds, the brass kicks in. Suddenly the song is all satin and hips and nighttime swing, even if Nina’s singing about dawn. It is my most favorite Nina song of all.
Feeling Good (3.5MB MP3)
Nina Simone (wikipedia)
(originally written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd)
Johnny Cash :: In the Sweet By and By
For two or three months after the September 11th attacks we weren’t allowed to go to work. Our office was three blocks from the Trade Center, an area of heavy contamination and debris.
The rubble smoked until January, though we were back at work before then. About the time the New York City winter began in earnest—cold, gray, dreary—we were admitted below Canal Street with proof that we belonged there. An address, a pay stub. We’d show it to a guy holding an M-16.
Eventually the checkpoints disappeared. In the meantime, Giuliani’s administration changed the city’s wound back into a tourist destination. Smiling, well-intentioned tourists would stop us on the street to ask which way to the Trade Center. Just walk toward the big hole in the skyline, we’d say.
Those of us who worked in the midst of it just trudged through in a surreal kind of way. We grieved, of course. But somehow the effort of getting on with our days kept a lot of the emotion at bay. We’d shake our heads over lunch, take a walk uptown after work, drink until 5 the next morning. But sooner or later everybody had a breakdown—a desk drawer would slam and somebody was headed for the door. Sometimes you went after them, sometimes you didn’t.
One day in April I had to walk to the Battery Park Post Office—past Liberty Square, past the packed viewing platforms, past the little church whose gate was covered in hand-painted prayers from family members, past tourists posed beside them. It was a beautiful day, and somehow that was killing me. I made it to the post office, mailed whatever I was mailing. On my way back, a women’s choir of old-order Mennonites was singing at the church. As I walked by them, they started on In the Sweet By and By. That was it right there—my breakdown. I have no idea what it was about that song, but in the face of it I fell utterly apart. It was horrible, and cathartic, and really, really overdue.
In the Sweet By and By (3.3MB MP3)
Johnny Cash (homepage)
Pieta Brown :: I Never Told
A few of country music’s most talented and interesting women have found a following in the wider music listening world: Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams, Neko Case. In my (admittedly humble) opinion, Pieta Brown deserves to join their ranks.
I first saw her in the town of Homer, Alaska, playing a high school auditorium (the largest venue in town). She was opening for her father Greg Brown, but a friend of mine was driving four hours from Anchorage in order to see the opening act. That convinced me to go. The black stage was bare—just Pieta and Bo Ramsey and some spotlight. If there was a drummer, even, I don’t recall. I do recall that Pieta did this strange and wonderful thing while singing and playing guitar. She’d slowly lift one leg through a phrase of the song only to put it down again, then slowly raise it through the next phrase, all the time putting me in mind of a crane. Graceful, eerie, messenger-like.
It was hard for me to choose one song of hers, as, in the best possible way, they all blend into one. Not one song, exactly, but all evoke in me the feeling of rural summer. A day that’s humid, green and buggy, full of waiting. On a stretch of dirt road, one solitary house, its door too swollen to close.
I Never Told
Pieta Brown (homepage)
Matthew Herbert :: Brother, Where Are You?
A few years ago I started working jobs that require me to use my brain. Whilst this is mostly a good thing, it did have an unfortunate side effect: for at least 40 hours a week, I can no longer listen to music that demands to be listened to. Instead I’ve acquired an appallingly large library of trip hop and cocktail-party jazz. And some of the library counts as both. Enter Verve Remixed, et al.
I’d imagine most of you, dear readers, have frequented the occasional cafe or boutique that plays these remix albums, which pair an old jazz standard with a contemporary DJ. I’ll be the first one to admit that these albums contain their fair share of travesties. By travesty I mean that a goddesses of jazz is trying to sing us heartsore — except some poor fool has over-sampled the auditory equivalent of children blowing bubbles naked in the sun.
But every once in a while there is a gem. This song is one.
Matthew Herbert is, in my humble opinion, one of the geniuses of electronica. As an added bonus, the man just gets jazz, blues, and big band. I love him. I also love Oscar Brown, Jr.
The version of Brother, Where Are You? remixed by Matthew Herbert appeared on Brown’s live album Mr. Oscar Brown Jr. Goes to Washington. It is lovely and a little bit hollow. You can just feel the singer wandering city streets, on a rainy autumn night, in a solitary search for his brother.
Herbert’s version retains all the longing and character of the original while making the song rounder fuller, and just more populated. It becomes about more than one solitary man searching for his brother, and it gives me hope. In strange and inexplicable ways, it becomes about all the brothers America has lost—to prison, to gun violence. Somehow it makes me feel like there’s almost enough of us, and he’s always just around the next corner.
Brother, Where Are You?
Matthew Herbert (homepage)
Olu Dara :: Harlem Country Girl
Brooklyn is 103 degrees. You can feel the pavement’s heat through the thin soles of your shoes, and when you cross the street the asphalt displaces in small ways under your feet. Your body is mostly water, but today asphalt is more fluid than you.
The thought would blow your mind, but you are thinking about your arms. You’d meant to fill just the one canvas bag at the grocery, but the produce looked so much better than you see in your neighborhood. The plastic bags are heavy enough so your arm muscles burn a bit. The sun has your skin burning a bit, too. Heat inside, heat outside—the effect is kind of nice.
A drop of sweat slides down your side. You know there’s nothing you can do about it, and that’s kind of nice, too. Heat and resignation are good for the soul.
You come up on the small park at Fulton and Greene. Even before you see it, you hear the festival there—samples and drums, freestyling and laughter. The park is full of afros and hair wraps, West African fabrics and Negritude t-shirts. Older gentlemen wear tweedy hats. Little ones with snow cones run wild in beaded braids. You wish you didn’t have grocery bags on you. But you do, and you’re too broke to let good groceries rot in the sun.
Still, you cut through the park to bask in the party—the heat, the noise, the love. Because it’s Brooklyn in the summertime, the party has no middle. It’s all the middle. The kids run circles around you. The grandfathers nod. You pass the bandstand and you catch someone’s eyes.
And damn but they don’t catch you back.
You don’t stop. You’re not going to stop. But for a second, the light turns to honey. You are both moving slow. Your heads keep turning to hold the gaze. There is nothing else, just cool honey and that gaze.
You keep on moving. You could swear there’s a trumpet. Cool trumpet and honey, slow. And already you’ve gone past.
The honey thins back to summer light. The trumpet fades. The heat returns, and more this time. Another bead of sweat lets go. But you know there’s nothing you can do.
Harlem Country Girl
Olu Dara (homepage)