👁 Image
koganbot

• RSS

Frank Kogan

APT Thai

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

December 12th, 2025

Current Music:

Silvy Kumalasari "APT Thailand X Culik Aku Dong"

[REVISED VER. DEC 26, 2025: Happily for us, a second viral story has been found lurking just beyond the first, so I've added gobs of edits and updates and two massive new footnotes since I first published 14 days ago.]

Haven't put much thought into music going "viral" and the various things it means these days (as opposed to what it might have meant in 1966 – if they'd used the metaphor – when "Hanky Panky" started to get airplay while it was still a bootleg). But what follows is the story of a motif, a riff, a meme, how it's been traveling – through SE and South Asia, mainly, though I wonder where it will go from there.

Recently posted a new Eardrums playlist – proud of this one for how I torture you with art in the first half and pummel you with dance in the second.

Emergency (Frank's Eardrums November 2025):


My playlists are probably the art-type endeavor I'm most happy with recently, the way I make them flow and jar and contrast like cassette mixtapes of old. There are a slew of them on my YouTube channel if you want to look.

You'll notice that several motifs recur on the new playlist, insinuated in one song here, another song there. I'm devoting this essay to the motif that recurs most. Keep in mind that not only don't I know the local culture of these musics, I'm also grossly ignorant of the great nation-state of TikTok – especially haven't figured out how to search it. So maybe I've got the story all wrong, but nonetheless I can tell this as a kinda story, so here goes.

[ADMIN sentence: I'm linking whatever tracks I can. Think of this as a technical experiment to see how many links a blogpost can bear.]

When a linked track is also on the playlist I put the track's number in parentheses.

As I recount my story I mostly hold back on song titles and performer names. I think doing so emphasizes best – and most humorously – how the story pings internationally across borders. I do list artists and song titles in a "Legend" at the end. And for those of you going in with confusion regarding what is where, I recommend this primer on East Asian placenames by Alex Chilton.

I'll preface our tale by linking a nice song, Indonesian, from 2020, a sidelight but it does enter our story a bit later – guess I'd categorize it as "pop" though it feels a bit indie; am not sure why I think so, maybe 'cos of the video, the skirts, shirts, shorts, roadway; though categorizing it as indie disregards the bouncy keyboard that seemed even then to be inviting a budots bubblegum treatment. [EDIT: My "indie" designation turns out to be hilariously wrong – or if not entirely wrong, it's overwhelmed by the track actually having lifted musical elements that in 2020 are already dance and TikTok viral; I'd had no idea of this when I originally posted! This doesn't affect the main line of the APT Thai story, though, so I shunt this nice song's own viral tale down to brand new footnote 4.]

Now, for the story proper, we're going to flip back to 2010, Thailand, a movie, a comedy whose title is given in English as Holy Man 3. In a short cameo, a white-haired comedian, who's made up to look older than he is, delivers a combination chant, incantation, and love spell, hamming it up as if a bit agitated and unsettled by the power he's pretending to unleash, while those around him dance to his rhythm. The clip shows up on YouTube in 2015 with the title "Thai Ghost Funny movie" and then with better visual quality on YouTube again and TikTok on the same day in August 2021. [EDIT: Have discovered that the first part of the incantation goes back at least to 2005, though it's the 2010 version that makes the belated splash. But we do get yet another new footnote out of this: footnote 5.]

Chant, incantation, love spell (excerpt)


I surmise that the incantation-love-spell subsequently gets more TikTok posts, because a year later, in 2022, a pretty boy-idol type teams up with White-Haired Comedian (having grown into his makeup) to put forth a slamming rock song prominently featuring White-Haired Guy and his love chant – now with melody and chord progression! – the video tagged "TikTok" in the YouTube caption, implying some notoriety already, though the tag could've been added later.

Slamming rock song w/ love chant:


Helpfully, the YouTube post also includes the song lyrics; and by running them through Google Translate we discover that the chant syllables don't translate. That is, they are just that: syllables. They don't represent other Thai words, any more than "abracadabra" represent some other English word usable outside its magic purpose – as opposed to, say, "Eenie meeny chili beanie, the spirits are about to speak."

So, "อะนันตะปัดชะเย อะปัดติเถเถนา อะปัดติยา อะปัดติเถเถคือ อะปัดติโถ อะปัดติกึด กึด กึด อะปัดชะเย," Google Translate giving us "Anantapatchaye, apatti the na, apattiya, apatti the the khe, apatti tho, apatti kud, kud, apatchaye" but that actually drops a few syllables; I've transliterated it myself (giving you "ay" for the long ā sound and "i" for the long ee):

Anan-tah-pah-tchay-ay a-pah-ti tay tay nah, apah tay-yah a-pah-ti tay tay koo, a-pah-ti-toe a-pah-ti kud kud kud, a pah tchay-ay-i-ay-i-ay-i-ay

The way he says it, the "anan-t" is sort of introductory, so it's like "[anan-t]ah-pah-tchay-ay a-pah-ti tay tay nah" etc., which will be important for further orthographic and cultural developments.

Also, I have no idea if our chant has had previous life in Thai culture or whether the comedian and/or his scriptwriters thought it up themselves. [FOOTNOTE 1]

And I don't know the adventures of our motif over the next couple of years, really, except that it does show up at least now and then on TikTok both as chanted by the shaman and excerpted from the rock track (playlist Track 9), as well as live clips. But then – *pause* *for* *dramatic* *emphasis* – there's the fateful day in October 2024 when a New Zealand-born member of a K-pop superstar girl group releases a super-catchy track whose start and hook are based on a Korean drinking game. By coincidence it's spoken vehemently, not exactly an intonation or a chant, but not NOT a chant, either; and though the rhythm and sound are not a precise match for our shaman love spell, the opening vowel "ah" and top 2 consonants "puh-tah" of the drinking game's not-quite-chant, ah-puh-tah puh-tit, are the same vowel-consonant-consonant of syllables 3-4-5 of the first word of our love spell and syllables 1-2-3 of love spell's second word and most of the rest. So within two days someone on TikTok does a cut-up of the Thai shaman chant, mashing it over the NZ-Kpop beat. A few days after that, someone else on TikTok mashes the NZ-Kpop quasi-chant into the shaman chant (both using the shaman's chanted version rather than the sung version), then comes another, a day after that.

None of those initial shaman-NZ-Kpop TikTok mashups actually work for me as mashups, as enhancements rather than just "well, here's this, and this." But nonetheless, going forward from here, our anantapatchaye (or however it's been getting spelled, e.g. "ana pad chaye") not only has gotten yet another title – "APT Thai," "APT Thailand," "APT Thailand version" – this new attention has caused the floodgates to pour forth (does TikTok even have gates? can gates pour forth? these do).

So we're now getting reposts of the mashup and also – riding the hot new title – more posts of the white-haired spellmaker guy's chanted excerpt and of his sung excerpt; and, going beyond TikTok into the world as a whole, especially (for our story, anyway) down in Indonesia, our ana pad chaye is being grasped and grappled with by local DJs, live DJ mix sets, "Apt Thailand," mixed with or running into this track and/or that track, e.g. "DJ Paling Enak Sedunia || DJ Apt X Menina Do Job X Moki Moki Style Terbaru Paling Banyak Dicari" (this particular mashup, btw, if I'm getting it right, is – among other things? – an Indonesian DJ mashing a Thai rock track into a Brazilian favela funk track as well as into a track using a Punjabi vocal). These Indonesian DJ sets garner millions of YouTube views (e.g., here [flashing lights] and here and here).

DJ Paling Enak Sedunia || DJ Apt X Menina Do Job X Moki Moki Style Terbaru Paling Banyak Dicari


Meanwhile, remember our nice maybe-a-little-bit-indie pop song from our tale's prologue? In late December an Indonesian teenager gets the idea, or is given the idea (is it for a talent show?), to sing that song but to include APT Thai (the sung version with melody and chord progression) as its intro and its break. Maybe the two songs had already been run together in a DJ set or remix, though if so I haven't found it on YouTube. But now, not only does her new APT segment get merged into DJ sets, but (it's January 2025 now) a different singer, a young woman in her twenties, definitely a talent show contestant, basically covers the teenager's intermix of the APT Thai and the nice a-little-bit-indie pop song. [EDIT: Er, definitely not a talent show, either version, just a couple of labels that promote artists through live performances; I simply misinterpreted what I was seeing. By coincidence, turns out our nice indie-pop song from the prologue is getting its second, third, or sixth wind as its own viral phenomenon in mid-to-late 2024 (for more of nice song's backstory, see brand new footnote 4), which is why our teenager and then our young woman are singing it in December 2024 and January 2025 – young woman's agency had already tried it out on a different singer a month-and-a-half earlier, though without the APT Thai interpolation. Afaik interpolating APT Thai into it begins now, late December 2024, with our teenager. And there's a genuine achievement here, what the Indonesian teenager does, which the young Indonesian woman capitalizes on, putting the two viral tracks together, nice pop song and APT Thai. It's not just "We've put two songs together." As intro and break, APT Thai sets the pace and feeling of the whole. Each song ends up enhancing the drama of the other. The combination is a song in itself. Do think the young woman's version isn't just sung better, it's put together better than the teenager's, which still feels scotch taped. But it couldn't have gotten there without the teenager's.] [FOOTNOTE 2]

Indonesian 2nd intermix (Track 14):


This new one, the young woman's cover, changes the game once again, reflooding the gates in the ongoing rush of going viral, the young woman's version getting so much attention that for practical purposes she's created a second canonical version of APT Thai to compete with the white-haired guy's. It's a hit (according to the Internet) in Tamil-speaking sections of India (more from India a few paragraphs down; here's a man and woman singing gentle mashups on Facebook). On TikTok and YouTube it's now the 30-second APT Thai intro by the 2nd Indonesian intermix singer that gets gets lip synced and danced to.

Meme is danced to (Track 19):


This singing really is lovely, and forceful, and catchy; as, actually, was the gruff shaman comedian's in its sung version, catchy and beautiful for all its gruffness.

I'll add that the young Indonesian woman's syllables differ slightly from the shaman's in that she leaves out the first "t" in the initial word, and two syllables later she skips the "ch" (so his "Anan-tah-pah-tchay-ay" becomes her "Ananna-pah-tay-ay"), and at the end she skips the ch again, so his " a pah tchay-ay-i-ay-i-ay-i-ay" becomes " a pah tay-ay-i-ay-i-ay-i-ay." So for those singing along at home, the young woman's version is:

Ananna-pah-tay-ay a-pah-ti tay tay nah, apah tay-yah a-pah-ti tay tay koo, a-pah-ti-toe a-pah-ti kud kud kud, a pah tay-ay-i-ay-i-ay-i-ay

As for the transliterated title (when we're not getting "APT Thailand" and such), it's sometimes "Anan Ta Pad Chaye" for the guy's version; but, also, this spelling is sometimes used as the title for hers, too, even in the closed captions, though she's definitely not singing the ch. "Apataye" or "Apateye" has become a standard title when they remix her in the Philippines (which we'll get to), leaving the introductory "anan" out of the title (the song dispenses with the "anan" in the second phrase anyway). --On the guy's version I've no trouble with transliterators substituting d for t (in English t's can be pronounced "t" or "d" depending on the syllable, ditto d's, e.g. the word "stopped").

Over in India, the title is "Annana Pathiya," matching our young woman's pronunciation. [FOOTNOTE 3]

A popular remix mashes "Annana Pathiya" into (among other things) a couple of Telugu hits, fiercely percussive tracks. Other Indian DJs take this idea and embellish it, mess with it, e.g., this, and here is the best messed (though with dropout in the middle):

Best messed Indian mashup:


And mashed into yet another Indian language (I think) here.

Next we go to the Philippines, which for now is our last stop, though for me it was first: I initially ran across our little motif when strolling among the two hundred or so tracks and remixes DJ Danz put forth between January and November, and I immediately said "What is this?" and started searching. Turns out the excellent Danz is only fourth-best among the budots versions I've linked here. My favorite of the budots is this one, for not losing the young woman's sweetness even though he chipmunks her.

Fave budots version retains sweetness even when chipmunked (Track 16):


(And a couple more are here (Track 20) and here.)

A little bit counterintuitively, since they're what grabbed me originally, I'm ending up a bit disappointed by the budots mixes; their being so-called "Thai" remixes – see footnote 2: the budots tracks are still Filipino but (I'm presuming) are meant to be in more of a Thai style, which at least in these instances means the bass goes less onto exuberant offbeats, and the rhythm is steadier (incl. steady gtr chording, even though the guitar is on the offbeat) (but maybe my ears are inventing a distinction that isn't there – see the footnote).

One could argue that the incantation that's our source is already funny-HaHa and funny-Peculiar enough even before budots adds its high pitch. So a supposed "Thai" mix's relative steadiness is what you want from the rhythm. And obviously it works plenty well, worthy of both my Eardrums playlist and the rabbit-hole it pulled me into. My feeling, though, is if we were to add a gregariously pushy bass, it would improve the remixes by pushing us more towards peculiar rather than ha-ha and potentially bringing us back to the menace, danger, and disruption inherent in a mystery spell.

Maybe something like that is happening in India? Those Indian remixes seem to be pushing the tonal and rhythmic envelopes, sounding deliberately chaotic, or maybe it's just that I don't know enough to know what they're doing.

Don't think I have any special insight to accompany my story: we've got a motif that – thanks to musicians and DJs and dancers, on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube – changes its emotional and social complexion as it travels. This of course is true of any music that travels, even just from one ear to another, or from orchestra to orchestra and singer to singer, and sax player to trumpet player, etc. and now from many hands to many ears on the Internet. Don't know if my eyedropper's worth of description ("slamming rock song," "this singing really is lovely, and forceful, and catchy") even tells you much about the socioemotional life of the music as it hits me. Hope my general tone-of-voice conveys something, and hoping to uncover lots of written commentary on SE Asian dance music though I don't yet know where to look.

Finally, though (so I was wrong: the Philippines aren't our final stop), let's return to the song's country of birth and a non-budots remix, a "racing" remix by someone I assume is an actual Thai (though I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Thai DJ is consciously mimicking Filipino budots' ideas of a Thai remix).

Thai racing remix:


LEGEND:
--Indonesian pop song, feels a bit indie: Nisa Fauzia "Culik Aku Dong" (2020) [FOOTNOTE 4]
[--EDIT: Viral phenom that "Culik Aku Dong" is lifting from: Jawsh 685 "Laxed (Siren Beat)" (2019)]
--White-haired comedian: Noi Chernyim [FOOTNOTE 5]
--Slamming rock song: Ek Anupap ft. Noi Chernyim "Anantapatchaye Khunsai" (2022)
--Chili beanie: Bullwinkle the Moose.
--Super catchy pop chant&song by NZ-Kpop star: Rosé & Bruno Mars "APT." (2024)
--Favela funk track: MC Xangai "Menina do Job" (2024)
--Indonesian teenager: Niken Salindry "APT Thailand X Sayang Culik Aku Dong" (2024)
--Young woman, 2nd Indonesian intermix singer: Silvy Kumalasari "APT Thailand X Culik Aku Dong" (2025)
--Popular Indian mashup: DJ Love Rajesh "Annana Pathiya Vibe Mix" (2025)
--Popular and fiercely percussive track that I believe is in Telugu: Ramu Rathod "Ranu Bombai Ki Ranu" (2024)
--Best messed Indian mashup: DJ Strange "Anna Na Pathiya X Bombai Ki Ranu X Peelings" (2025)
--Favorite budots APT Thai remix: DJ EJ "Apt Thailand (Apateye) TikTok Viral (Thai Budots)" (2025)
--Racing (non-budots) remix by an actual Thai: DJ Tebang "APT Thai อะนันตาปัตชะเย New Version ThaiRemix SSKK Ver.BUSTEC" (2025)
--(Ref in footnote 2) Budots "Thai" mix of nice Indonesian pop song: DJ Kent James "Culik Aku Dong Thai Mix" (2025)

Meta paragraph for Substack: [FOOTNOTE 6] "Viral" is a kind of word-of-mouth where you get to listen to strangers, though that doesn't mean it necessarily (or even generally) picks good stuff: what I'll vaguely call "appeal" may give a track a slight leg up over the competition as to what gets popular (read my piece on Duncan J. Watts's cumulative advantage experiment), but I may not like what others find appealing anyway. In this case, there does seem to have been an arc of improvement: Rhythmically adept comic in ham comedy produces rhythmically adept chant-spell-incantation --> this becomes rhythmic-melodic centerpiece of slamming rock song --> both chanted and excerpted sung versions get presence on TikTok --> the chant-spell in both chanted and sung version gets viral boost when mega-popular track comes along with several accidental similarities to original chant and to its sung version --> DJs grab sung version for their various mashups and mix-and-matches --> Indonesian singer does a particular mix-and-match --> a second Indonesian singer covers this mix-and-match and makes it better --> her sung version of the chant-spell gets excerpted and goes viral itself, may be the best sounding version yet --> Indian remixers take to this, as do Philippine budots remixers, create their own tracks, where I – finally – hear it. (Wouldn't say that budots remixes improve it, but they add to the song's range, while the Indian remixers have added something wild.) [EDIT: Meanwhile, the arc of "Laxed (Siren Beat)" (see brand new Footnote 4) is both one of depletion (catchy in the context of siren mixes rising to --> fun TikTok meme but falling to --> mediocre American pirate --> mediocre authorized ver. --> godawful American-Korean Kpop mix) and one of improvement (catchy in the context of siren mixes --> fun TikTok meme falling to --> mediocre American pirate but rising to --> pleasing Indonesian song (albeit also pirated) --> teenage Indonesian singer doing inspired mix-and-match by interpolating APT Thai into pleasing Indonesian song, creating even better song, and this is where our two viral sensations come together! and next Indonesian singer makes it even better than that, etc.).]

( FootnotesCollapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/394572.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: frank's eardrums, language studies, playlist

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

Cleveland gtr is something special (my bonus noms for 1975 Peoples Pop Poll)

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

July 10th, 2025

Current Music:

Waylon Jennings "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way"

This was the special pleading I did on bsky on behalf of my three bonus nominations for Tom Ewing's World Cup Of 1975. All three made it in! (Someone else had already put Waylon Jennings's "I've Been A Long Time Leaving" into the tournament as their main nomination, and I was fearing Tom might not think there was room for a second Waylon track.)

The competition gets under way today. Go to peoples-pop-polls.bsky.social for how to vote and for the discussion threads; #Pop75 is the hashtag.

Is likely that anyone reading this would have a blast taking part – you can do as little or much as you want. Tremendous way to learn about music. People sharing joy in discovery, giving sound the benefit of the doubt, giving each other the benefit of the doubt, somehow achieving this in only 280, 300 characters. Wrote a perspective back in 2023 on my experience of it (Frank's low scores people's pop world cups).

So these were my pleas:

Waylon Jennings "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way"



To make a case for a second Waylon Jennings cut, "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way," this is where country sounds most like the Velvet Underground, grinding into the ground and into the drone and a voice poised between disillusion and excitement.

Ali Chukus & His Peace Makers Dance Band "Ana Azor Eze Azor"



'70s West African guitar is something special, not relying on sustain like Anglo-America but still exploring the landscape and its colors in needle-like jabs. Singer declaiming, humming, running.

Pere Ubu "Heart Of Darkness"



Cleveland gtr is something special, Peter clawing, digging, scraping, throwing dirt while he and Tom still tickle the toes, the sound occasionally arising to an exuberant fanfare and then digging down again. Singer wavers between excitement and disillusion.

And my main nom:

Lieve Hugo "Een Pot Met Bonen (Oh Marie)"



Haven't written anything yet for this; being my main, it was in automatically, so it didn't need any pleading. Smooth and hot at the same time. I wish I could write like this, the way this sounds. (Not all the time. I'm fine being me, you know. Just to be able to draw on cool moments of heat, here and there.)

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/394321.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: #pop75

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

And the Trump people *are* continuing to defy the judiciary

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

March 18th, 2025

Current Music:

The Rolling Stones "We Love You"

Right now, as I write this – March 18, Mountain Daylight Time, 10:00 PM – if you (or I, or anyone) are physically in the United States, you can be seized and taken prisoner without any charges being put against you – much less proven – and be put on a plane and sent to a foreign prison; and the people who do seize you and who spirit you away don't even have to release your name or any information about you. In fact they don't even have to know your name or have any information. Nor do they have to answer to anyone other than the people who ordered them to do it.

Of course, in doing this they are defying the constitution and breaking the law. But they are doing this. Right now. They did it several days ago.

Now, the government people can say that the only people being rounded up are immigrants and gang members. And you can say to yourself that, if you yourself are not an immigrant or gang member, this puts you in the clear. But it doesn't. If charges don't have to be brought and legal procedures don't have to be followed – and information doesn't have to be released! – anyone can be rounded up. You can be picked up:

• for being in the wrong place


• for having the same name as someone else


• for supporting immigrant rights


• for having supported a Democratic political candidate


• because someone owes you money and has a friend in government


• because you're dating someone who someone else fancies

You could say, "Hey, but nothing like that happened last weekend," but that's not true. Something like that did happen. Someone was called a gang member, someone was called an immigrant, with no evidence given of anything (and being a gang member or an immigrant is not in itself a crime) and with no review, and that is being snatched from the street or from an apartment or from your life with no overview, no accountability, for any reason or no reason.

In reality, when I say "anyone" could be snatched and taken prisoner without the rest of us knowing, that wouldn't be true if you were, say, Marco Rubio or Taylor Swift. So, show of hands, how many people reading this are Marco Rubio or Taylor Swift?

The Rolling Stones "We Love You"


The rest of this post is about writing.

I don't spend much time on politics and haven't been much of an activist, so don't know how useful it is to write this post as I have, with specific scenarios ("because someone owes you money and has a friend in government"). I imagine – maybe incorrectly – that if more people were writing like this, rather than relying on abstractions like "rule of law" or "constitutional crisis" – or calling people "fascist" or "Nazi" (those are abstractions too) – but actually give examples of what is at risk, then people who are not yet alarmed would hear us better. --Not that one shouldn't point out that there's a constitutional crisis, and what this means; and not that the rule of law isn't under threat. Saying "Nazi" and "fascism" seems to me to be acting out our feelings of powerlessness, reaching for extreme words to counteract our trouble at achieving anything actually effective – not that those words can't represent my own fears of what's potentially coming down the line.

People who write bland newspaper prose have been at this awhile, maybe have some experience of what actually gets across, ways of taking their truth to people who won't listen to mine.

Btw, a lot of my own best writing isn't "clear" and definite, instead is convoluted, full of digressions and deliberate contradictions and uncertainties, hesitations and qualifications, parentheticals and allusions, and if all goes well some of my political writing will be like that too, since a lot of politics isn't clear (for instance, I'm torn and confused about whether Senator Schumer was right in letting the continuing resolution go up for a vote – what the consequences will be, what they would've been if he hadn't let the vote go through – and if you're certain one way or another on that issue and have no sense of what counterarguments there might be, you're not altogether to be trusted, at least not right now by me (btw I'm leaning towards thinking Schumer did the best that one could do, but also to be honest I've not made my way to writers who've genuinely tried to meet his points and counter them (because, honestly, I haven't looked that hard, there are so many other things to think about))(and btw I'm not certain what a good, sane, functional immigration policy should be, just that we've had 100 years to come up with one and we haven't, my belief (not certainty) being that that's because too many people profit from the issue not being resolved, none of which is any immigrant's fault, it's America's). Anyway, this is how I like to write, but sometimes bullet points are useful.

• Because people pay attention to bullet points


• Because I pondered using "whom" rather than "who" in the Edmond Dantès sentence


• Because Trump prevails unless people who, unlike me, are not liberal-left nonetheless also come to oppose him

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/394222.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: writing

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

New York Dolls (part three): Hurled In Their Fun

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

February 27th, 2025

Current Music:

New York Dolls "Human Being"

Dolls In The Days Of The Good Old Times¹

Am reprinting here my New York Dolls piece from 1997, which because of its length I've broken into three parts, this being the final part. Printed originally in my fanzine Why Music Sucks #11. Thanks to the University of Georgia Press, who published my book Real Punks Don't Wear Black (and here), where I reprinted this, and are letting me reprint this now.

"Actually, if I were a young person I think I'd be most interested in having old folk like me write about what things were like back in the day: what the Fillmore was like, what the crowd was like at a Dolls show in the early '70s, etc." So Lucy Sante wrote me recently [i.e., October 1997]. Good timing, as I happened to already be at work on "Boys in Makeup." But as for what the crowd was like: Despite my having seen the band six or seven times in the space of about ten months in 1973–1974, I find myself unable to say what the crowd was like, at least not with any accuracy. Partly I don't remember, partly I never noticed in the first place, and partly I rarely can come up with the words to describe anything, even when I do have a picture in my mind. As for what people were wearing, I don't know. My defense against fashion while I was growing up was to put up a complete block in my mind, so I really didn't see what people were wearing. I only got vague impressions and such. Since I wasn't going out searching/shopping for clothes or thinking of clothes items as constituting a potential ensemble for me to wear, I never learned a vocabulary, I never learned to see how shirts, shoes, makeup, etc. went together, I never could describe why (or how) a person looked freaky or hoody or glam. I never had a sister, either, so I was culturally deprived in major ways, no knowledge of makeup, magic beauty secrets, hair styling. Also, I was in general (and still am, of course) too busy in my own mind thinking, calculating, imagining, and so on to see what was in front of my nose. I do remember being eventually disappointed that there wasn't a more interesting sartorial response among Dolls fans, that there wasn't more of a visual echo in the audience of what was happening onstage and in the music. Maybe the crowds were fairly nondescript. The way I remember it, the dressed-up girls in the audience weren't looking nearly as glittery, cheesy, slutty, cheap pasted-on glamorous as they could have been (nor were the boys, of course). The look of those trying to make an impression was more a stylized stylishness: I'd say Early Goth, maybe, with a lot of ornate towers and stained glass and flying buttresses and... oh, I went off there, sorry... the look was, you know, black – black clothes, dark eye shadow, pale makeup. At least it was on one young woman whom I remember, first row center in the basement of the Viking Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, who, at the end of the encore, was helped up onstage, along with a woman friend, by Johnny and Arthur and then accompanied the band backstage as it went off.

New York Dolls "Personality Crisis" live (Don Kirshner's Rock Concert)


As for what the crowd was like in its behavior, let's see, first show: I didn't yet like the New York Dolls; I'd heard the record once or twice and thought it was sludgy and lumbering, not all that different from Grand Funk, it seemed, who were hitting at the time with "We're an American Band." So I saw the Dolls in New York at Max's, and Jay and Maureen and maybe Robin (Jay's mother [a real sweetheart, by the way]; I forget if she went along with us) got a table up in front while I stood farther back with my arms folded, having no real response within me and not yet hearing the beauty that was embodied by the sludge or connecting to any of the starts and stops and syncopation that gave the music movement. My arms weren't folded in disapproval, just in nonconnection. Next to me was another boy with his arms folded too. I don't remember the crowd. The people cheered after songs. Afterwards, Jay and Maureen were radiant and ecstatic, saying it was the best concert they'd ever seen. I was puzzled, not having felt anything in the air, in the music, in the event. Not quite true; there was one moment, in the middle of "Subway Train," where a wail attached itself to the melody, like the guy's voice was a train horn, and I got a sudden sense of tunefulness. This is important, because later that night I couldn't get that one song out of my head; so I said to myself, "There's at least one song I like, even if they play like clodhoppers."

The next show was a different story. I'd absorbed the album, memorized the album, knew as much of the lyrics as I could make out (about 65%); what had been sludge now felt like thickness of emotion. I and my friend Steve (not a Dolls fan, but he went along with us) drove from Tolland, Connecticut, where we shared an apartment, to Providence to pick up Maureen from Brown and then headed down south to the University of Rhode Island, in Kingston, where the Student Activities Committee had, for some reason, booked the Dolls. At Brown that afternoon Steve and I had sat in Maureen's dorm room and listened while she – in a monologue I'll never forget – talked about the day her mother had died, and how no one would tell her that it had happened, and (if I'm remembering this right) she was first told to go sit with one person, then another, or maybe she was sent from one house to the next. Her mother had committed suicide – Maureen was about nine when it happened. I'd known there'd been a suicide in her past, I think Jay had told me, but Maureen had never talked about it, never mentioned it, until that day. Down at Kingston we discovered that the Dolls would be playing in a cafeteria. We were second in line. First in line was a young woman and her boyfriend who'd come all the way from Boston – the boyfriend seemed like a regular guy (not that he necessarily was, but that's how he dressed, like the guy in the bar, the guy in the mail room). The woman was dressed more like – well, in a dress, a light-colored dress that seemed interesting on her because it was like an adult person's dress, not a young woman's dress, like a cheap version of something Jackie Kennedy would wear; it wasn't part of the youth uniform and it wasn't glitter. But it did announce a stab at fashion in some way, and the Dolls may have inspired this in her. Nowadays this would be no big deal, someone dressing up at a rock show, but in 1973 it said something. She talked nonstop, too, full of opinions and dissatisfactions, and kept saying stupid things and being real irritating. I think Maureen and I had a common disappointment, that this would be the first person with whom we'd share the potential rapport of Dolls fandom.

New York Dolls "Human Being"/"Jet Boy" (live)


The performance room – the cafeteria – had been cleared of tables and seats. People were to sit on the floor, or stand. Maureen and I went up front, though Steve stayed back. The place was packed, all these college kids sitting on the floor. Maureen and I and one other person, right by the stage (which was a platform not very high off the floor), stood and danced to the music, made motions to the band, shrieked between songs; in back and to the sides some other people were dancing too, and applauding, maybe twenty-five or so of them. And the rest of the crowd, maybe a couple hundred, sat, immobile, not applauding, not leaving, watching the band and the three of us as if we were space creatures. In my memory, it's all brightly lit, everything's in clear view, the three of us are in clear view. This memory is wrong: It was a show, it was night, it was dark, only the stage was lit. But I felt exposed, which was kind of thrilling. Close to the stage, maybe we were wavering between dark and light as we danced. My shrieking might have been forced – hey, I'd never had the chance to be a teenybopper, had only learned recently to respect teenyboppers, and now at age nineteen I was shrieking. Steve said later that it was obvious that Johansen was playing to the three of us. As the show ended one of the dancers from the side came up and asked me to try out for his band. I explained that I was from out of state. Then Maureen said, "Hi, Mac." It turned out that he was a friend of hers at Brown. He was a tall black guy, halfway between a dressed-up '60s freak and a glitter guy; I think he had Lou Reed shades and Hendrix scarves or at least an air of Hendrix-like flamboyance, but maybe some leather too.

There was tension and excitement in all this: the uncomprehending crowd, the audacity of us standing next to the band. That was a year when a few crucial critics (Christgau, Paul Nelson, Dave Marsh) liked the Dolls, but most others and the music press in general had a general attitude of contempt. "All flash and no music" was what they said. I remember constantly reading putdowns. One jerk I think it was in Rolling Stone joked that the Dolls were really dental students who only dressed that way for the money. This was part of the atmosphere too, part of the event for me, standing up and dancing, withstanding the contempt.

New York Dolls "Chatterbox" (live)


The next Dolls concert was that one in the basement of the Viking Hotel. It was me, Maureen, and Mac. This time those who didn't like the music left right away, leaving forty or so of us who wanted to be there, and it was one of the best concerts of my life. In my memory it looks warm and hazy and dark. As for how the crowd looked and acted, though, I can't remember. Dancing, cheering, being happy. At one point all of a sudden a crazy wild-eyed guy started hitting Mac, and Mac pushed back at him. The band handled this well; the roadies lifted the guy right onto the stage and let him off on the other side, where he was away from Mac. Johnny made a funny comment about practicing his Kung Fu fighting, and the situation was defused. When the tussle had started some people had jumped between Mac and the crazy guy to separate them, and I'd grabbed Mac as if to hold him back; Mac got angry at me, saying that he wasn't trying to fight, he'd just needed his hands free to fend the guy off. I mollified Mac by saying that I wasn't trying to restrain him, I was trying to make the crazy guy feel safe, like the threat was over. This was a quick thing for me to say, but I was probably lying. I didn't know Mac, really, and maybe he was a crazy guy too.

As an intro to "Vietnamese Baby," David said, "This song's about a soldier who falls in love with a whore in Vietnam and then he comes home to his mom."

The band seemed happy. It was a different Johnny Thunders from the one we'd see later with the Heartbreakers; he wasn't sulking, wasn't yelling at the sound man. At the end of the show he gave his arm to the girl in black.

Next show, Orpheum or Orpheus Theatre in Boston. I was in the balcony, and maybe this is why I felt more distant. One guy sitting near me – regular-type guy, again, longhaired hard-rock type – pointed at Arthur Kane, the bass player, and said to me, "I think he's a faggot." This guy was not using the word "faggot" with much precision, since Kane – whatever his sexual tastes – was not at all femme. He had the look of a hulking stevedore, and in drag he was a knock-you-down broad. I don't think the guy was saying "faggot" with any particular hostility, either, but he must have had a sense of the band being foreign to his regular-guyness. I read all this into him, anyway, in a glance; I gave him a shrug rather than an answer.

Before the show we'd stopped off at some friends of Mac's, who were also going. Roxy Music was on the record player. Roxy sounded ridiculous and wooden and put-on – all due to Ferry's voice. This was the first time I'd heard them, obviously, and I hadn't yet connected to the guitar playing. Mac's friends – a couple – were dressed in really stylized stylishness, in deliberately falsified high fashion. Unfortunately, I can't remember more than that. The woman might have had her hair up, and earrings, and maybe an intentionally obvious blonde dye job.

Mac had grown up in Manhattan. There'd never been a rock star from Manhattan, he said. They were all from the Outer Boroughs or out of town. All the Dolls were from the Outer Boroughs. Mac was going to be the first star from Manhattan, he told us.

We got his New York phone number, his parents' number. This was probably when we were in town for Iggy and the Stooges' New Year's Eve show. I never had reason to call him, but I remembered the number for several years after because it spelled out L-U-M-P-Y or W-A-R-P-I-N-K or something. Or maybe we were supposed to dial W-A-R-P-I-N-K and ask for Lumpy, like he had to use Lumpy as his nickname within his family because perhaps his Dad's name was Mac, too.²

( Chaperoned and out-of-placeCollapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/393829.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: hoisted from the archives, real punks don't wear black

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

New York Dolls (part two): You're so sorry, busy sorry, that's all you'll do

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

February 22nd, 2025

Current Music:

New York Dolls "Vietnamese Baby"

Am reprinting here my New York Dolls piece from 1997, this being the second post in a three-post series. What you're reading today is simply the three original footnotes to the part of the piece that I'd reprinted Wednesday. What's lost in this reprint is the way that, in my fanzine, I'd had the text and its footnotes snaking around each other, as if the parts of the story were in conversation with and against themselves.

At the start of each footnote below, I link its location in Wednesday's post's text, if you'd like to see where the sentence I'm commenting on lives in context. (Am linking to the Substack version because its software allows me to single out and jump from text to footnote and back. The simple HTML I use in Dreamwidth and LiveJournal doesn't let me set that up, so on those platforms you have to scan the pieces to where I put superscripts and asterisks and such. Better off following my links to the Substack.)

Thanks to the University of Georgia Press, who published my book Real Punks Don't Wear Black (and here), where I reprinted this, and are letting me reprint this now.

Footnote 1 (link)

"It'll be pretty hard to explain why this image meant so much to me."

But I do want to talk a little bit about how the band sounded, since not only did they play dress-up – you know, like little kids let loose in their big sister's wardrobe – they played music. Really, it was a lot like how they looked. It was tough – it was a hard r&b sound, like the Stones infusing soul with nasty blues riffs – but it was warm too; Johnny played thick guitar, it was almost syrup, with a noisy blues-whine and a way of careening up into the right pitch rather than hitting it head on, and he would play pretty counter melodies or his guitar would harmonize against the singing. The style was influential. The Dolls invented a sound I call "the loud pretties" meaning they'd mix the noise and the hard blues and the ugly yowls with loud beauty, so the clamor and the beauty were inseparable, all one big roil (I'm contrasting this with how, say, the Beatles or Raspberries or Cheap Trick or Sweet would put pretty vocals merely on top of raunchy instrumentals). The Clash and Nirvana played later versions of the loud pretties. Of course the Dolls were about ten times more fun. They brought back a lot of the rock 'n' roll silliness from the pre-Stones days: animal sounds, novelty tunes, shoo-wop shoo-wop oompahs. Rare for the "progressive-rock" era, especially since they didn't seem like an oldies band doing it. They sounded like little kids let loose in their big sister's record collection – but then gone off on a rampage, with the sound attached to their raving ugly beauty. Except I also have to say that they didn't quite do it: They rumbled forward, but their rock sound never quite got a roll to it, though they tried. This is what I meant way back in WMS #5 when I said that the Sex-O-Lettes sounded the way the Dolls looked, really got on record with the rolling in-your-face exuberance the Dolls were shooting for. And I was certainly implying then that disco could do it but "rock" couldn't anymore. This is why the Dolls are only 27 on my albums list, rather than number 1.

New York Dolls "Jet Boy" (on the Old Grey Whistle Test)


Footnote 2 (link)

"As if I just didn't care how I looked."

I realize that this doesn't convey very well how I actually dressed. The fact is I don't remember. Teen popularity/nonpopularity was so traumatic for me that my mind froze and I wouldn't pay attention. And that was part of my rebellion, too, not to pay attention. I liked summers because I could wear T-shirts. All T-shirts were white then. I think I wished that I could wear single-color pullovers in other months, as I'd worn when I was a little kid. I didn't like shirts with collars and buttons. But I always wore them, because that's what my mother bought for me. To buy my own shirts would have taken money that I used for records and books. It did not occur to me to tell my mother what I wanted. As it is with traumatic subjects, I wanted to turn them off, not bring them up. I remember making two fashion decisions in high school. The first was to wear my shirts tucked in, despite the cool trend that said wear them out. I tucked them in because wearing them out made me look heavier. Second, in tenth grade I let my hair grow long, a complicated decision (no matter how I looked, I'd be giving in to someone) that was simplified for me by the fact that it caused great conflict with my parents, who tried to forbid it. My dad said that he was upset that a generation of young men was looking like fairies. This was just the thing to make me resist him.

Given that my mind is blank, I've gotten my childhood friend Jay Carey to describe how I looked.

Jacqueline Carey: You dressed in high school as if your clothes were chosen by someone else – presumably your mother. You wore various colored slacks and dress shirts, patterned but based on the color white. They were generally opened at the collar to reveal an undershirt underneath. This is a look I don't really remember on anyone else except Sandy [her husband]. Eventually (and reluctantly) I took over the job of buying his clothes from his mother, and I bought undershirts with V-necks, thus radically revamping him.

One difference between the two of you is that he often wore blue jeans with dress shirts, and you almost never did. I remember my amazement when you showed up in (straight-legged) jeans one day in high school. In fact, I'm still curious: Who bought them?

Yours was probably a pretty smart approach to fashion; it somehow took you completely out of judging range. I remember Susan Long (much later) saying, "How does he get away with it? He wears polyester, he's not even ironic about it, but he gets away with it."

Frank Kogan: Probably it was my exquisite handsomeness that allowed me to get away with everything. I don't remember who bought the jeans. It may have been me. You'd think I'd have remembered. There were school rules against jeans when we started (also against girls wearing pants). This outraged me in principle, but I can't remember when the rule was allowed to lapse. I don't remember pulling the "undershirt" ploy until after high school, though Jay's memory may well be correct. The undershirts she's referring to are the white T-shirts I mentioned above. In high school I think I only wore – as undershirts, that is – the regular Stanley Kowalski undershirts that my mother bought me, which are as deep as V-necks and so wouldn't have been visible (they used to be called, generically, "undershirts"; Hanes and Fruit of the Loom now call them "A-shirts" or "athletic shirts" to distinguish them from white T-shirts, which are now also called "undershirts"). After high school I was only wearing dress shirts (1) when I had to work at an office, or (2) when I'd run out of clean pullovers – which unfortunately was often, since I was still generally unwilling to spend money on clothes when there were records out there, still unbought.

( Footnote 3, David was asking if you – if *I* – could make it with the monster of lifeCollapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/393635.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: bob dylan, hoisted from the archives, real punks don't wear black

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

New York Dolls (part one): Boys In Makeup

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

February 19th, 2025

Current Music:

New York Dolls "Frankenstein"

Groucho, as Freedonia's newly installed president, is handed a report from the Treasury Department. "Why, a four-year-old child could understand this!" he scoffs, then quickly turns to an aide and says, "Run and get me a four-year-old child."

So, I wrote this in my early forties in 1997, and fortunately my inner 19-year-old had me by the throat, insisting that it's his 1973 that needs to get told, the truth of his damaged and agonized perception. And maybe I could now add words fore and aft that would help you understand this boy and his world better, but they'd weaken the piece, make it too soft.

Or maybe you in your own perception can hear what's around the story's edges. "The kids in these songs have never heard of the Cool Generation. They are actively, hopelessly involved," wrote Richard Goldstein in 1966 about the Shangri-Las. And to me, 1973 – even before I'd heard the Shangri-Las – was about my failure and my world's failure to live up to those kids. But maybe my prose was good enough to show something more?

I do need to say, though – the reason for this introduction – that despite what's written here, Reggie and Kerry, for instance, are actually in my mind as happy memories. So part of me at the time must've known more than the official story I was telling myself. (Was I more willing to count their cheer as genuine cheer than my story admits? I feel like a jerk for not thinking that it was genuine when I wrote this, though see "blame" below.) Meanwhile, Fred is damn near the hero of the story. And some of what I wrote about dullards can't be true. ("Some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.) Still, in case you, or me, in our wisdom, want to go back and counsel 19-year-old Frank, "You don't need to blame everyone so much; you don't need to blame yourself so much," 19-year-old Frank has an answer: "Self-blame is beautiful."

I wrote this for my fanzine Why Music Sucks. It's long, so I've broken it into three parts, the second made up of what had originally been footnotes to part one. In the fanzine original I'd had the footnotes snake around what they were commenting on, so you were seeing words and their reflection looking back at each other. I don't have the formatting ability to do that here.

Parts two and three get posted soon, I hope.

Thanks to the University of Georgia Press, who published my book Real Punks Don't Wear Black (or here), where I reprinted this, and are letting me reprint this now.

In this piece I refer to the one by Liz Armstrong, which came right before it in my fanzine, and contained the following paragraph.

Liz Armstrong: Although absolutely crazy/strange things seem naturally attracted to Sarah [freshman roommate at the University of Missouri] and me, we usually aren't running around all the time. Normally we just sit around and watch television (I'm now an addict, thanks to her), flip through magazines and sigh, sleep, and generally look for excuses not to do homework. At least once a week we play dress-up. Sounds silly, but it's so fun! See, we shop quite often at this really neat vintage shop and buy all sorts of things that we'll never be able to actually wear. My most recent purchase is a vintage linen, lace, and satin prom dress – very Victorian looking. Anyway, we make a mess out of our room with all the clothes. We try stuff on until we find a particularly stunning outfit, and then we spend lots of time on each other's hair and makeup. When satisfied, we decide where we'd fit in in real life. I usually end up in a Calvin Klein ad or a rock video. From there, we adopt a "voice" (sometimes foreignly accented) and make up a line or two. Me (as a CK model) (in a really bad British accent): "Be dangerous. Be careful. Just be." As a rock video chick, I don't say much; I just walk around, dazed, with semi-watery eyes and a slack jaw. Sometimes I'll press a finger near my nose and sniff violently, like I'm all coked-out. After doing little skits for each other, we walk up and down our hall, past the open doors of the hallway gang/slumber party crew, and talk loudly about either stupid stuff that happened or racy stuff that never happened. When back in our room, we make a halfassed attempt to tidy the place, but we always end up leaving ⅞ of our stuff lying around. Finally, we do something overly normal (like homework) while still dressed up. It gives us a sense of excitement while performing a mundane task.

Frank Kogan: I related very well to what Liz wrote about playing dress-up with her roommate. Interesting: When I was a freshman in college my roommates and I would do the exact same thing. We'd go to the clothing stores or thrift shops and buy the tackiest women's clothing we could find, either really sleazy stuff (vinyl was just coming in; so were tank tops) or ridiculously lacy and satiny shirts and dresses. We'd claim they were presents for our sisters or girlfriends. I'm not kidding. We also had contacts in the drama department who got us wigs. And we'd dress in these things and decide what role to play. On one weekend we'd prance around the hallways telling outrageous stories about sexual adventures we'd supposedly had, and we'd address each other as "Bitch" in really loud voices, and argue about Broadway shows that we'd never actually seen. The next weekend we'd be high-school girls from the '50s and carry on loud conversations about "dreamy boys" and about our daddies, and we'd pretend that we were getting high on cough syrup and vanilla extract. I cultivated a really annoying giggle at this time, which I've still got.

All right, I'm lying. We did no such thing. I made it up. But wouldn't it have been interesting if we had done it? —But there's no way I'd have had the courage.

I was really lonely and unhappy freshman year in college. I'd grown up in a university town with a high-powered intellectual dad and mom and older brother, and for college went to an east coast prestige school, so you'd think I'd have been on home ground, but I wasn't. I was very alienated. High school had been very interesting: very traumatic at times but full of life. Since it was a liberal college town with a lot of faculty brats, the freaks were an influential group in the high school, large enough to undermine the status of every other group but not strong enough (or confident enough) to establish their own status, so the social life was very unsettled yet open. And freakdom and hipness there didn't have the same contempt for ideas that one probably found elsewhere. People were very messed-up, but I had the sense that, smart or dumb, everyone was really willing to try things out and not pretend they knew what to do or who they were. I probably romanticized this in my mind and romanticized it even more in my memory, but anyway, romanticized or not, I carried this image into college of what I expected young people to be: people who weren't taking things lightly, people who were really trying, you know? So I got to this prestigious college where everyone was supposed to be the smartest of the smart, and I expected students to be intellectually or emotionally adventurous or something, and they weren't. They were smart but they were dullards. It's as if the top boring two percent were scraped off of every high school in the country and sent to my college. They weren't offensive or snooty, usually; depressed would be a better word, or suppressed or repressed. And no doubt some – but only some – of the problem was me: my not actually being able to see into these different people's different lives. But the atmosphere of the place wasn't inspiring people to express what was interesting in their lives either, it seemed to me.

So after freshman year I dropped out, then a year later I didn't know what else to do so I went back and was actually much happier. My opinion of the place didn't go up, but I'd figured out how to get what I wanted from it. I actually liked a lot of the teachers and a lot of the course work. This was disconcerting compared to my high-school years, to find that I liked the teachers more than the students. But it stopped bothering me that the students seemed so bland, and I made some friends, etc. etc. I still don't really respect that time of my life – it was limbo. But I learned a lot in my classes.

Back to freshman year, a year when I wasn't dressing in interesting clothes. My roommates Kerry and Reggie hated each other, so each was very cheery towards me – because by being cheery towards me each was proving that he was basically a friendly person not a hateful person and that obviously, therefore, the other guy was at fault, the obnoxious other guy, and deserved to be hated. We could never completely avoid each other, since we shared a three-room suite that was set up so that both Kerry and Reggie had to tramp through my room to get to their respective rooms, and the phone was in my room so they had to come out to take their calls. Kerry was handsome and blond and dressed very well but otherwise was a complete slob and would never pick up the place, and his dirty clothes were everywhere, all over my room as well as his. I didn't really mind this, but it infuriated Reggie. Reggie was persnickety and complained a lot, and he'd go into rages at Kerry, whereas Kerry would just glide in and out like he couldn't care less. He had a few records that he'd play in his room over and over, an Elton John that made me learn to hate Elton for his hamfisted piano playing and oafish vocals. I think there was a Carly Simon record that bored me and a Linda Ronstadt record that bored me and a Bonnie Raitt record that had "Love Has No Pride" and was really quite beautiful. I thought his taste was impossibly square compared to mine. I had Velvet Underground records that I thought of as great hard rock but that completely baffled everyone else. They thought it was awful noise. I'd put on "Sister Ray" whenever I needed to drive people out of my room so that I could work or sleep. My room became a sort of meeting place, actually, mainly devoted to our listening to records. I kept buying old Kinks albums from back when the band was good, and Reggie and I would joke about not being able to leave for class until the side ended (and he'd go and I'd end up cutting the class). The people from next door were often visiting us. One of them, Fred Smith, had gone to my high school. We'd been friends in grammar school but not really in high school; he was politically conservative (actually moderate) and I was liberal, and that had made me uncomfortable, and there were other differences that I don't know how to identify, differences in outlook, and I was often really afraid of differences back then. In college by some awful coincidence (I thought) we were assigned to suites right next to each other, and to my surprise he turned out to be the most interesting person nearby, and we became friends. So he and one or another of his roommates would often be visiting my room. Fred played up his eccentricities – he would go from comically cute to comically gruff, and he'd always answer his phone "Smith speaking!" and then when he was in my room he'd pick up our phone too, when it rang, and say "Smith speaking!" And he got to the point where when our phone rang he'd dive for it, knocking people aside, and say "Smith speaking!" into the receiver. And then his roommate Timothy got into the habit, when he was visiting us, of answering our phone too and saying "Smith speaking!" This must have confused callers. They must have thought we had a butler. Once a friend of mine from my home town called, and Timothy answered and said "Smith speaking!" and so my friend went "Oh, hi Fred," and chatted with him for a while thinking he was talking to Fred, until Timothy identified himself for real. Well, this must tell you how uninteresting my freshman social life really was, that the most vivid thing I remember is how people answered our phone. Once Fred was visiting, and Reggie was visibly depressed about something, and would clomp through my room to his, and slam his door shut, and then come out and go through my room to the outside and then return through my room back to his without saying anything, and slam his door shut after himself. Fred thought this was pretty funny, so whenever Reggie made one of his trips-with-slam, Fred would follow up by opening Reggie's door a crack and then slamming it. After Fred had done this for the third time Reggie came charging out and dived on top of Fred and started pounding him. We pulled him off; the freshman advisers found out and, I think, forbade the two of them to be in the same room with each other. But later, after the ban was lifted, Fred and Reggie became friends and even became roommates the next year, though Fred could get irritated by Reggie's depressions and stuff. Reggie seemed too tired for me, but, as you've gathered, I wasn't likely to look into what was really going on with people.

As for Kerry, he ignored us except when he had to counter Reggie's criticisms. As I said, the place didn't inspire people to display their interestingness. I remember once Kerry was doing acid with his girlfriend and I could hear them having sex in his room and after he'd come he said, "That was fantastic," and the whole thing – acid, sex, and Kerry – seemed totally vacuous. At least from my side of the door.

So I did nothing creative with dress-up. Freshman year my creativity was all in letters, sent to the outside world. Real life was elsewhere, real life was a fantasy, real intensity was a hope or a memory.

( boys in makeup changed my lifeCollapse )

Footnotes:

1. "It'll be pretty hard to explain why this image meant so much to me." (Marking this here for anyone reading the next installment who wants to see the context of the note.)

2. "As if I just didn't care how I looked." (Marking this here, etc.)
But anyway, here's Poison.

Poison "I Want Action"


3. "David was asking if you – if *I* – could make it with the monster of life." (Marking this here, etc.)

4. Substack has such an ugly-ass design that, as inducement to get people to look at my Substack, I began adding special Substack-only meta paragraphs at the end of my Substack uploads. Being extemporaneous, they were often better-written and more alive than the posts proper. So I've now decided that a month or two after I initially post, the meta paras get added to my Dreamwidth and LiveJournal versions of the post as well, e.g. this one.

5. The full passage goes, "the drive towards academic diversity tends to run aground not on the question whether intellectuals can appreciate an Elvis, but on whether an Elvis can make it into the social group 'Intellectual' – while still remaining Elvis. In the average white high school, over the last fifty years [I wrote this circa 2003 [EDIT: but lifted "last fifty years" and the "rocks, greaseballs, hoods..." vocabulary from my Columbine piece 1999]], the refusal groups are – depending on time and place – rocks, greaseballs, hoods, greasers, grits, rednecks, farmers, burnouts, stoners, jells, dirts, dirtbags, skaters. And if greasers etc. want to join the Intellectual Gang, they have to stop acting like greasers. It's a vicious circle: The greasers are anti-intellectual because they've been excluded from the 'Intellectual' group, and the 'Intellectuals' exclude the greasers because the greasers are anti-intellectual. But excluding the greasers is itself anti-intellectual." That's where I'll leave my thought for now, pregnant but not giving birth, with phrases like "acting like greasers" and "excluding greasers" vague and less bloody than real life.

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/393251.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: dress, hoisted from the archives, real punks don't wear black

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

What do we do if Trump & Musk continue to defy judicial orders?

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

February 12th, 2025

Current Music:

Magic Sam "21 Days"

If Trump and Musk and their people continue to defy judicial orders, what will happen and what do we do about it?

I mean, what do we do now? What do we do in the next ten days? These are genuine questions. I'm looking for guidance.

I'm not a political writer and I don't have ideas you can't get elsewhere, but I'm a good writer so maybe throwing thoughts onto the screen here will jostle something among the fifteen or so people who read this. Or maybe you'll feel – I don't know – less isolated? More prepared? More scared? Anyway, I'm drawing on Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Paul Krugman (Substack), so I recommend you read them.

Overnight (that's about 24 hrs ago now) I read a piece in the Washington Post that made me think that the next 10 days or so will be critical to whether Trump gets to set up a framework for a dictatorship. Not that if he falls short now he won't succeed later, but there's danger right now.

The WashPost piece ended up getting folded into a larger one, and if the original is still on the site I can't figure out where (here's the longer) and they both fell off the page in the flood of news. What it said was that District Judge John J. McConnell, who'd originally ordered the administration to stop its freeze on federal grants, had found that the administration had, in fact, not unfrozen those grants as he had ordered. So he was again ordering the administration to unfreeze the funds.¹

And this is it, our Lexington-Concord. I'm baffled that the issue isn't getting a larger slice of the news screen. Maybe few others feel my 10 days – there are about 40 judgments telling the administration to halt, don't know if the Trump-Musk crew are ignoring or defying them all, or are pretending to comply on some of them or what.

Anyway, bearing in mind that I don't really know the law, the political situation, how federal payment systems work, or what I'm talking about, this is the risk:

If the administration gets away with ignoring the courts, so ignoring the orders to stop DOGE's access to Treasury and health payment systems – so Musk's access continues – this is what I foresee. Musk and his confederates not only continue to block payments to congressionally authorized projects that they don't like but also block payments owed to contractors – say, block payments to contractors unless the contractors donate to the Republican party – or simply don't send salary payments to VA doctors and nurses in areas that vote Blue, and don't send funds owed to hospitals in such areas, and they close the buildings that judges who've ruled against them work in, or withhold their salaries, or loot the bank accounts of such judges (at least the ones who've ever gotten a tax refund, so their routing numbers and account numbers are now on Musk's server). Or delay or not send tax refunds owed to members of a liberal advocacy group or to people who work at a disfavored business firm. Or simply not pay disability benefits to people who express dissenting political views, or to people whose relatives have.

Anyway, I don't know how federal payments work, don't know how easy or hard this is to do. For that matter, even if there were no DOGE, over time the Trump administration could corrupt all the relevant institutions. But the Trump people seem to want to be forcing the issue early. And what's key to me is that they can do these things if they can get away with defying or ignoring judges' orders. Right now we seem to be relying on judges and on states attorneys general to block this impending dictatorship. I want to know what effective social and political support we can give to those judges and attorneys general, to show them we have their back. I mean, in the next ten days! This post began as a letter to one of my senators, Michael Bennet of Colorado. I don't follow congress and senators well enough to really know, but he's a Democrat, I think something of an oddball and not always right, but he's courageous. Writing to him and Jason Crow and to Hickenlooper is what I can think of to do, so that's what I'm doing. Seeing what I can manage to fit on a single page.

Wondering somehow if I could reach some moderate or conservative somewhere, to convince them that their own life and freedom are at risk too... They'll probably think that I'm hysterical with what I wrote here. Well, I'm extrapolating from what Trump tried to do to Zelensky in 2019, what Trump got impeached for, telling Zelensky that he wouldn't release the funds that congress had authorized for Ukraine unless Zelensky lied and said that Ukraine was investigating Joe Biden for corruption. I'm hypothesizing that what Trump tried to do to Zelensky he'll try to do to you, too. (Some of what I wrote is just copying Krugman, btw.)

Also, for what it's worth, in the long run I think democracy is going to win and Trump and Musk are going to lose,² that they've misjudged badly and weakened their efforts. Well, that's what Ezra Klein thinks and I'm parroting him but in my own vocabulary, obviously. Trump and Musk don't really know how to take control and run a government, so they're waving their dicks around trying to convince themselves that they do. But it's better if we can counter them now, at least semi-successfully, rather than after years of protest and civil disorder and pain and suffering to millions. I mean, there will be pain and suffering; Trump won the election and is going to do a lot of damage. But there can be less, the more successfully we act – even if I don't really have much of an idea what to do.



¹Here's a piece, oddly seems to be on a site in India, which contains a bit of interesting information, a piece of law I didn't know, which was in the original WashPost article but that didn't make it into the later amalgam. It's the final sentence, "The judge further added that White House officials were required to comply with the directive, regardless of their expectations about the case’s outcome." So saying that you think you're going to prevail at a higher judicial level doesn't get you out of following the restraining order now, and facing contempt charges if you don't follow it, even if your argument about funding does eventually win.

²But then, I thought Harris was going to win, too.

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/392999.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: paul krugman

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

Ari Falcão

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

September 20th, 2024

Current Music:

Ari Falcão, Christopher Luz "Toma Xota Na Cara"

Like her colleague MC Pipokinha, Ari Falcão sounds insistent, grabbing, enticing, potentially lacerating.

Ari Falcão (prod. Christopher Luz) - Toma Xota Na Cara [flashing lights]


In addition, though, she's got a rich singing voice that's capable of great gobs of sadness.

MC Pipokinha & Ari Falcão (prod. DJ Glenner) - Sensação


MC Pipokinha & Ari Falcão (prod. DJ Glenner) - Ampulheta [flashing lights]


Have only found lyrics for "Sensação," so far. Its words don't know how to talk about anything but sex, far as I can tell; anyway, they won't acknowledge the melancholy. ("Just put it all in your wet body while I suck you," and on like that, not particularly inspiring in themselves,* at least as rendered by Google Translate.) The song's videos - there are two of them - are equally free of sorrow: a romp in the clothing store, then someone's awful idea of a sensuous photo shoot. Maybe sentiment, what I discern of it, can only exist when it's being passed over.**

In addition, Ari Falcão gets drawn into favela funk's craving for sonic experiment. This, w/ producer DJ Traka, is the barest buzzy riff and chatter clatter, and mouth rhythm, and it's still a dance party.

Ari Falcão, MC ZL (prod. DJ Traka) - E Esse Pacotão Aí [flashing lights]


But now she throws a party that resolutely won't get started. Fodder for a future koganbot blogpost (scroll down to (6)) to celebrate tracks that don't get on-track.

Ari Falcão, Pucca Tsunami (prod. Digdin) - Você Prefere Whisky Ou Cerveja [flashing lights]


So what's this delicately high melody doing here? - like a ray of sunrise intruding on the nightlife:

Jheny Jheny, MC Bragança & Ari Falcão (prod. DJ Alvim Mpc) - Deixa Sua Marca [flashing lights]


*A writer at the letras.mus.br site has a more hopeful view (again, it's being translated by a bot, so may lose something): "The language used is purposefully vulgar and explicit, which can be seen as a form of empowerment, where the artist [MC Pipokinha] claims the right to speak openly about her body and her desires. The collaboration with Ari Falcão adds a layer of dialogue and interaction, reinforcing the idea of ​​reciprocity and consent in the sexual context." Btw, I assume that Pipokinha and Falcão are smart, that there's intelligence, their minds at work, in their acting out; but this doesn't necessarily mean I'm ever going to understand it. Or that I can't be disappointed by lyrics. That the site writer's terms - "empowerment," "consent" - are teacher's pets' buzzwords make them false even when they're true. I tend to associate intelligence with a sense of complicity and compromise, myself. But anyway, good luck to all. Regarding complicity, does telling your producer, in song, "I just want a piece of you inside me (the dick)," make this more emotionally complicated than what I thought when I called the lyrics "uninspiring" an hour ago, when I wrote the above? Inspiring or uninspiring for whom? Empowering for whom? At whose expense? Complicated for whom? How do we know? Who decides? Was the writer whom I've just called a teacher's pet empowered by what s/he/they wrote? Conforming? Both? Neither?

👁 source: imgur.com


**[UPDATE: Found a couple more lyrics: (1) Ari does a duet with Grazi Arlequina on "Te Amo de Graça," a boring sing-song, but not about sex; quasi-interesting lyrics about not always telling the truth but not breaking up. (2) Ari features on MC Erik's "Sacada," mostly sex again, but smart words that have a strong sense of obsession, addiction, the lovers pulling each other in, while danger lurks outside, "It's midnight and the forecast is for a fight," then "The sun was rising and there was only botada, breakfast in a different way," which is witty. The music is duller, though. (Might botada be one of the derivatives of botar, "to put it in"?)]

[EDIT: Something that didn't come across to all readers, so to be clear: I mean this post as fundamentally VERY favorable commentary on Ari Falcão's music, the sort of thing that if I were to read it I'd say to myself, "I've got to pay attention to this Ari Falcão person, right now!" I especially LOVE the six tracks I embedded. Of course, my loving contains ambivalence and lots of ignorance, and maybe in the writeup the ignorance and ambivalence overwhelm the rest. That often happens with the way I write, and I don't necessarily think that's a flaw in my writing. But maybe I need to do a second post.]

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/392881.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: mc pipokinha

• 1 comment
• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

"Who? Why they *sound* like this? Why she cut..."

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

August 28th, 2024

Current Music:

XG "Woke Up"

"That gotta be the craziest one in the group. Hey! Dat gotta be – She's scary, I'm not even gonna hold ya -- She is scary, and she hardest one in the group. SHE GIVIN HERSELF A CHOP CHOP IN THE VIDEO!" [Max Sigo]


So our rabbit hole today is reaction vids to XG's "Woke Up." I've watched a score of them, but YouTube's got scores more.

It's performance, mostly, the social and the psychological in physical and vocal form – more vocal than verbal, I'd say, or rather the verbal is as performative as the vocal, the YouTube content creators relying on our having the relevant society and psychology within us already, enough of it to understand the why of their response without their having to explain it to us.

Within that restriction, Max Sigo, for instance, is really good. His laugh is as good as Walter Brennan.

Oh, and if you want to get this right, watch the videos on full screen, so the XG video is large enough to see, and the content creators are larger than life.

"She said 'Gotta lift weight for the bag.' That mean her bag is BIG! As in, there's so much money in it...

"That's a double entendre. That's a bar-- as in her bag, the money bag? She said 'Gotta lift weight for the bag.' The money is heavy and you got the bags, you know, you got CHANEL, all these type of bags, it get a little heavy, you know?" [Terell]


Been merely noticing the fact of reaction vids, noticing for a while now, seeing them in sidebars, but never looked at any of them. Today, though, my feelings put me on alert, an intuition said to watch these. Maybe there was a title out of the corner of my eye, a description that called to me: "XG finna make my quit."

"Her shit just come on so clean."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7KLQbSPLug

These guys savor their surprise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZD8QySmffw

These guys act out their surprise, like in Mexican football when someone scores a goal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V5_xo2vxMY

So far, I like the chair-kickers more than the precision guys. But I hope somewhere among the ones I haven't seen yet there's a Lester Bangs or two to put it together, to bring the feeling and the body language while surprising our analysis with their own analysis rather than allowing us to settle for what's already inside us.

This guy likes internal rhymes. Asks his YouTube commenters to tell him what "unnie" means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdKetyCyT6c

"The football helmet with the grills?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZPrXVPgEoA

"'Skirt'! and 'catchin my drift,' though? Come on, bro."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEo-4ujxltY

"She had a slight pause with 'hilarious' to make it rhyme with 'more the merrier,' right?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZxunLMD2Ak

"You just lost your mind! Why'd you just shave your head on camera and make it look fire?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lCMHXV-cmU

"'A small group but we a powerhouse' is what she sayin."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHRWIS71aWg

--Btw, I'm not a 10 on this song – I'm rarely 10. Is an 8 or 9, probably; we'll see how it shakes out. It doesn't have São Paulo's pole-vaulting imbalance or Recife's insinuating chug, or Soundcloud rap digging deep into its own dust. And being credibly hip-hop and credibly tough and braggadocious isn't the astonishing never-heard-before-from-women-and-Asians achievement that the reactions think it is. I do appreciate – adore! – the dexterity, the syllables, the various different styles of pebbles against windscreen, the differing flows, all seven of them but esp. Maya and Cocona. 8 or 9 is a good grade! The quicksand of the beat is an accomplishment; so's the Korean work-ethic (yes, I know they're Japanese but they're being marketed in Korea), Harvey: "You can tell we all made it work for us/Made it but we had to work for it/Work, work, work, so perfect/That it hurt, don't it?", and since I don't hear much these days that's in English, I suppose I should take being able to understand the words as gravy; but I'm still not hearing surprising content, not hearing a human story, an idiosyncratic biography; nor vulnerability, puzzled narratives, lost libidos, misplaced mosquitos, unmapped journeys, actual dizziness, living-your-life vertigo. But as the conformist genre exercise that this is, it is pretty damn exhilarating, moment-upon-moment topping the previous moment of pleasure, gulping up the available air pockets and sliding through every bank's time-lock. And it is a thrill, Jurin's "Rappin in a skiiiiiiiirt [screeched]/Catching my drift" (I had to look up "drift" as The Fast & The Furious Tokyo Drift and a car-racing reference, deliberate loss of traction in the racecourse turns (says Wikip), but I also love the olfactory implications of "catching my drift"!), while standing like a colossus over Tokyo.

👁 source: imgur.com


This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/392690.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: walter brennan

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

A Blonde Woman Named Anne (Days Of Future Posts, May 2024)

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

May 2nd, 2024

Current Music:

Anne Williams "Cries In The Dark"

The in-person day-to-day life has been overwhelming me for several months so instead of a well-wrought well-thought post I've got this catchup, things I hope to write or might write someday, fast thought, not too wrought, we'll see.

(1) Put Pipokinha In It. Making YouTube playlists may be the thing I do online that I care about most these days. Created a new Eardrums playlist in February, long overdue, am aching to write it up and scared of blowing it. South Africa, USA, and Brazil – more Brazil than the rest combined – favela funk hitting me not only as wildly experimental but as heart-touching, just as the K-pop/hip-hop of E.via and 2NE1 were touching me in 2010: a scrawny young woman in São Paulo whose twerking and dancing are barely competent but who seizes the spotlight and puts excitement into sound, gets recorded and sampled all over, all everywhere (but maybe that's only in the minds of the few of us who are looking for it, our minds hindered or aided by our not understanding the meaning or the social landscape). Brazil's northeast rhythmically reworking songs like hers, and in the process São Paulo penetrating the northeast.

Bota Pipokinha em tudo (Frank's Eardrums February 2024)


Note, Grateful Dead content, track 18, the Dead more than holding their own (a band that was adventurous in mood, texture, and rhythm as well as guitar solo, who stretched out and cut up, and Jerry Garcia's singing could be fetching). --One afternoon in 2003 a young woman, very smart and openhearted, early 20s, announced to the rest of us that she was of the Rave Generation (the context: the planning of a conference with dance attached).

A couple of days later, she told us she'd gotten tickets for the Dead.

The playlist also contains Linkin Park content, but I'll let you find it yourself.

(2) "A blonde woman named Anne." In September 1988 a woman gave a tremendously touching and edgy live performance, left me thrilled and with a lump in my throat and with lots of questions. "Eying someone in the audience, she breathed 'I really need you,' a tinge of sarcasm in her tone." Is quite possible that some of the edginess had to do with (unknown to me) her having been hired to pretend to be somebody else! In Wikipedia she's mentioned once, "a blonde woman named Anne," it says. If I had any reportorial chops I'd have long ago searched for and found and interviewed her, embarrassing myself by showing her what I wrote. --Yes, I'm being cryptic, this likely only making sense to someone who read my article (published in Jack Thompson's Swellsville in 1989, "Nietzsche With Tits," then collected in my book, pp 265-271. So read my book! [More buying choices $2.20 and up.])

In the audience, ny friend Leslie and I thought we were seeing intellect within her edginess, and fantasized her as not just an intellect but an intellectual. I wonder what Anne would think of that, to be used in that way – used imaginatively, but still, what does that have to do with her?

This foreshadows equally ignorant extrapolations I'll be foisting on Pipokinha.

Got some bare knowledge* from the Internet, and an emotive, pretty good bread-and-butter freestyle track, the only song I could find under her own name:

Anne Williams "Cries In The Dark"


Earlier, impersonating Debbie, "I'm Searching"


(3) Yes, I can has a Substack. If you're reading this on Substack you already know I have a Substack, a free one (likely free forever). I possibly will write something up wondering what Substack is doing, esp. with Notes (like, let's be a gated community that acts like it's open to the world but is unfindable?). Anyhow, I use the Substack to reblog my Dreamwidth/LJ; in fact, everything I blog is triple-posted on Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, and Substack. The first two still allow simple HTML, result: (a) Dreamwidth is the best-looking. But Dreamwidth doesn't embed tweets well, nor does it embed vids in the comments at all, though my Dreamwidth has by far my most-extensive sidebar links as I'm a paying customer. (b) Linking to LJ seems to give the best previews, and LJ embeds tweets best. (c) Substack is the easiest of the three to use though clunky in look, so to draw your interest to Substack I've created a Substack-only "Meta paragraph" at the end of each of my posts where I let loose meanderingly.

So I recommend you look at both the Dreamwidth and the Substack versions. But I still tend to link old posts to the LJ version because those have the original comment threads rather than the reconstituted ones on Dreamwidth. --Btw, I assume a fraction of the micro-pennies that LJ gets through ads on my LJ goes to bankrolling evil fomented by the government of LJ's home country. But rather than delete LJ and hence my past to prevent this, I mitigate it slightly every now and then by avoiding a car-trip so as to make the world infinitesimally less dependent on home country's oil reserves, and, you know, I vote against the Repubs.

(4) Guilty Pleasures. Think the term "guilty pleasure" can have interesting uses, both work-ethic guilt and more guilty guilt. Don't think the term gets its due anymore; we thinking we know better.

Inspired to make a list. For a guilty pleasure there needs to be guilt; so anyway, great music where there's something fucked about my getting off on it or throwing it in people's face or it does bad things in the world or people were hurt in the making of it,

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) August 7, 2020

…TheEastlight. by their producer, Kim Wan Sun by her manager:

Rocket From The Tombs "Ain't It Fun"
The Velvet Underground "Heroin"
XXXTentacion "Sad!"
6ix9ine "Billy"
Bhad Bhabie "Cash Me Outside Trap Remix"
The Stooges "Rich Bitch"
TheEastLight. "Don't Stop (The Show)"

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) August 7, 2020

Kim Wan Sun "The Dance In The Rhythm"
Guns N' Roses "One In A Million"
The-Dream "Abyss"
Syndicate of Sound "Little Girl"

FBG Duck's "Slide" is now obviously a contender. If I liked 'em more, "I Don't Like" and "Tik Tok" in the debuts poll would be eligible.

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) August 7, 2020

(Fwiw, I've not read Kim Wan-sun's aunt/manager's side of the story, and a quick Web search isn't finding it.)

Sure seems that anything I adore by Cassie (and there's a whole bunch) will now dive us headfirst into guilt criteria, e.g., someone got hurt in the music's manufacture.

(5) Live versions of person-to-person love songs when they're sung by groups, e.g., Dion and the Belmonts "I Wonder Why" and Miss A "Breathe." The choreographed interaction among members ends up being an interesting message in itself, often outdoing and countering the interaction described in the lyrics. A sequel to an old post.**

Miss A "Breathe" on Music Bank


The lyrics have the young women flitting and fluttering and pretending not to breathe in the presence of their crush, whereas in performance they look like they could use their legs like a nutcracker to crack any potential crush's head open, if they weren't too busy mimicking comic opera and bonding all with each other.

(6) Dave Moore recently tipped "Mega Do Egito" by DJ Ws Da Igrejinha, MC Jessica do Escadão & MC Vuk Vuk, which occupies the Venn center of two different baile funk tendencies, favela-funk orientalism and tracks that refuse to get on track. For the latter we've also got an earlier Dave Moore find by DJ Arana.

MC Lan & DJ Arana "Abcdário Da Guerra"


Uncertain where tracks end and begin, but this is where today's post ends. Unless it doesn't.

*I linked the cached version, since I sometimes have trouble loading that page. If that doesn't work for you, here's the page itself:

https://myfreestylemusic.com/debbie-deb-freestyle-music-latin-hip-hop

**And see last week's entry for the old post's reconstituted comment thread.

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/392014.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

Hoisted from the archives: Athletic R&B comments reconstituted

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

April 28th, 2024

Current Music:

BoA "Look Who's Talking"

Am expecting to link my original June 2011 LJ writeup on Miss A's "Breathe" in a couple of days; in the meantime I'm reposting here its original comment thread. This particular thread became very important to me because in it 👁 Image
askbask gave me the beginning of a primer on dancers and choreography in K-pop, and he embedded some terrific dance performances – in the case of BoA's dance rehearsal for "Look Who's Talking," I'd say simply my favorite dance performance ever, by anyone: It's not as stunning as the best of, say, Astaire and James Brown, but for basic joy in motion I've never seen anything I'd rather look at.

The reason I'm now giving these comments their own post is that most of the video embeds were eventually either deleted from YouTube or, because they used shockwave flash, they're no longer functional. The original comment thread is just a mess to look at, full of blank space and links that don't work. And because we can't update any comments that have received a reply, there's no good way to put the correct video embeds anywhere near where we'd originally posted them. And Dreamwidth, where people nowadays are most likely to discover this thread, doesn't have the capability of embedding videos in comments anyway.

And I love reliving 👁 Image
askbask's awestruck response to "Into The New World," and I want you to experience it too.*

Anyway, I recommend that you start with the original post, linked here:

Athletic R&B: Miss A BREATHE

So here's the reconstituted comment thread:

👁 Image
askbask
2011-06-26 04:26 am (local)

Athleticism.

Min (miss A) – Strong Heart


2010.10.05 strong heart_ Miss A Min Dance


Might've been mentioned before, but Min spent some years in the US, preparing for a launch and recording un-released single 'Boyfriend', before the debut was cancelled and she joined Miss A. Sounds like something Cassie also could've recorded, never released and then had leaked.

MIN (JYP Trainee) – Dancing to "Boyfriend"


Miss A released their (quite listenable) 'Love Again' single and video as a three member group.

👁 Image
koganbot
2011-06-28 12:08 pm (local)

Wow, there are a whole string of these (the rest being [her dancing to] other people's tracks, it seems):

MIN (JYP Trainee) – Dancing to "Radar"


Who are considered the really good dancers in K-pop? I'd think Min'd be near the top. There are some names mentioned in this YouTube thread.

👁 Image
askbask
2011-06-28 12:39 pm (local)

Yeah Min is one of them. The Chinese Miss A members as well, Jia and Fei.

BoA is #1.

090605 ExtraTV BoA's Raw Rehearsal


She just finished shooting a US dance flick (Cobu 3D) in the Step Up tradition, lead role vs Derek Hough.

Former BoA back-up dancer Kahi

As mentioned in those comments, Hyoyeon, Minzy

Unfortunately Sori's own underperforming singles haven't given her opportunities for Ciara-like moves.



Guys: Jay Park, Taeyang, Rain, TVXQ

👁 Image
koganbot
2011-06-29 12:03 am (local)

I like all four of the Miss A's, but Min is the standout, has an extra suppleness, as if every single one of her muscles can hear and speak. Just amazing the way she has of letting the music ripple through her.

Fei is effective in a different way: she's tall and this gives a false sense of gawkiness, with an almost comic faux frightenedness in her eyes; it's very funny and hard to keep one's own eyes off of.

Watching that BoA rehearsal increased my respect for BoA 100%. I've never gotten her as a singer, though haven't heard much of her voluminous repertoire. I borrowed her American album from the Denver Public Library last month. A lot of the material is excellent, especially the stuff from Jonback/Bloodshy & Avant, a track called "Touched" in particular. There was this dance gorgeousness, a desire ready to saturate the atmosphere. But I got the feeling I sometimes get from Keri Hilson of an absence in the middle. The tracks seemed to be waiting for their Cassie, or Britney, or someone, a missing ache or neediness that needed to seep into the music. She was singing well, but not injecting enough character.

But looking at the rehearsal for "Look Who's Talking," I see immediately that BoA's got something: her whole demeanor, a completely flexible confidence, a casual command of space and an elastic joy that's capable of owning every cubic centimeter in the room, should she find her way to it. Maybe the trouble with the album is that the music doesn't reflect this ease, this motion. Maybe she needed more hip-hop, more disco, I'm not sure.

👁 Image
askbask
2011-06-29 12:29 am (local)

Yes.. I think she shines with this stuff

BoA / 永遠




Although as you know I'm quite fond of her in ballad mode as well, and her latest Korean album. Her own compositions aren't really hip-hop-y but they're enjoyable, I like the casual lightweight sound of 'Ordinary Day' in contrast to its sinister lyrics.

👁 Image
askbask
2011-06-29 12:34 am (local)

She's generally been more rnb on her Japanese stuff

BoA / 三浦大知 "Possibility" (DAICHI MIURA LIVE TOUR 2010 ～GRAVITY～)

👁 Image
askbask
2011-06-29 02:08 am (local)

"completely flexible confidence, a casual command of space"

Exactly! Will be quoting this when talking about her strengths to others. I haven't always been happy with her singles, but am still mostly transfixed by her live performances because of this.

👁 Image
askbask
2011-07-21 01:21 pm (local)

This is the most impressive dance performance I've ever seen from a girl group. It almost beggars belief. The stuff around the 3 minute mark is just scary.

[Pre-Debut] ★Girls' Generation (SNSD)★ ▶『Into The New World』Jul 19, 2007


Helps that it's all lipsynced – it's noticably less sharp on regular performances – and that the camera is fixed so we get the amazing sync work and units moving around the stage. I don't expect them to ever match this level again because it was their debut track and they exclusively practiced this choreography for such a long time.

👁 Image
koganbot
2011-07-21 03:32 pm (local)

I quite like the popping/locking at 2:00 as well. Who was the dancer there? (I've made little effort yet to distinguish the members of SNSD; that's a subject for further research.)

👁 Image
askbask
2011-07-22 12:05 am (local)

Hyoyeon

( TVXQ, Miss A dance tutorialCollapse )

*I doubt I'll ever really get to a wholesale updating of the embeds and links on my old comment threads. Fixing the posts themselves was hard enough, and I'm still not done. These old K-pop threads in particular, though, are crucial because I discovered through them a bunch of people (anhh, 👁 Image
tarigwaemir, 👁 Image
petronia, 👁 Image
askbask) who knew far more about Korean music than I did and who were eager to teach me (and then we were joined by a slew of others: Christophe, 👁 Image
belecrivain, 👁 Image
skyecaptain, 👁 Image
davidfrazer, 👁 Image
arbitrary_greay, 👁 Image
sub_divided, Maddie, and whoever else dropped in).

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/391765.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: miss a, snsd

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

Boom Boom, Shake Your Boom (Shinsadong Tiger)

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

February 24th, 2024

Current Music:

4minute "Hot Issue"

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.

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/391548.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: 4minute, hyuna, i hear dead people, t-ara

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

What Was THAT? (Black History 1979)

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

February 22nd, 2024

Current Music:

Paulette & Tanya Winley "Rhymin' & Rappin'"

We're doing Black Pop History Month '78-'81 at the People's Pop Polls, and here are three discoveries from '79, the latter two firmly in the category What Was THAT?

Paulette & Tanya Winley – Rhymin' & Rappin'



Tanya's the great discovery here, less grab-you-in-the-face than Roxanne Shanté, but she raps with the same insistent glue, our attention immediately glomming onto her. Her counting up the years at the end just presses and presses and presses, then the tape runs out.

Little Scotty – Going To A Disco To-Night



Sounds like a saloon in an old western movie right before the fight breaks out. Not sure what they gain from the last three minutes, though (they're sweeping up broken glass and the piano player keeps going).

Ayisha – Space Man



Lyrics have her observing from outer space, but it's more like she's down in the Mariana Trench gurgling her way upward.

[EDIT: Oops. Looks like I misattributed the year for "Space Man." It's 1978.]

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/391336.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

This isolation booth I'm in is dark and turning cold (Toby Keith)

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

February 6th, 2024

Current Music:

Toby Keith "That's Not How It Is"

"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.

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/390990.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: i hear dead people

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

EOY, EOY Oh! (unrepresentative albums poll ballot for 2023)

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

January 18th, 2024

Current Music:

DJ Jeffdepl ft. MC Danny "Vou Sentar 2"

The last album I really listened to as an album was Taylor Swift's Fearless. Which isn't to say that there've been no albums since then that have had an identity for me, such as a common sound to the whole thing or interesting ways the tracks play off and sometimes against each other. In Babes Wodumo's Crown, for instance, from my 2021 albums list, every single song on it has a density of sound and interplay unlike anything else I've heard in gqom or amapiano. So the album itself has a signature sound, just as Blackout or Exile On Main Street have. Maybe even more interesting along those lines is the Sounds Of Pamoja compilation, also on the 2021 list, a bunch of different artists from Dar es Salaam scratching the same itch and clawing the same walls.*

Except the way I use those two albums isn't as albums (in the way as a teenager I'd decide to listen to Side Two of Crown Of Creation). Rather, the songs on them became fodder for playlists, basically. Essentially that's what I do with albums these days; pull tracks from them. Or listen to them several times for "context." Or, near the end of a year, listen to a number of them (not that big a number) for the sake of finding titles for end-of-year poll ballots.

As for end-of-year polls, I use them for schmoozing, partying, and proselytizing; less for taking stock of a year much less deciding what's good or not. But it's always interesting to see if anyone likes what I listen to, and it's instructive and kind of funny to see sheets and sheets of stuff I've never heard of. Of course singles are way better than albums for sampling morsels off the passing food trucks. But albums are still what these polls center on, and if I want in on the party then I'll make a list of albums. And hope someone listens to one of those albums.

So for the sake of doing it I made a last-second list of albs for the November 30 Uproxx poll (results here), leaning heavily for my listening on recommendations from my friends Don, John, Chuck, and Dave. And then the idea was that for a bunch of weeks in December I was going to listen to at least one new-to-me EP or album a day, and of course relisten to others, and so on, in time for the Pazz & Jop Rip-Off poll. And, of course, this rarely happened, between my submitting a song for TSJ's Amnesty Week and my watching football highlights on YouTube. Then in January, um… Anyhow, with my P&J Rip-Off ballot done on Jan. 1, ballots for the Expert Witness Poll are due in one-and-a-half days [EDIT: make that one day] and I'm sort of panicking. In the meantime, this was my Albums ballot (half of which are actually EPs) for the Jan. 1 Pazz & Jop Rip-Off Poll (poll results here):

DJ Jeffdepl - Forrozinho CD De Carnaval 2023 - 14
MTS No Beat - Outubro 2023 - 13
D'Athiz x Ke-nny x Locomeister - What's The Sound? - 11
DJ Ws da Igrejinha - Caça Fantasma, Vol. 1 - 10
MC Madan - Controle Mental - 10
99 no Beat - Tremzinho do 99 - 10
Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra - America: The Rough Cut - 9
NewJeans - Get Up - 8
V/Z - Suono Assente - 8
Actress – LXXXVIII - 7

DJ Jeffdepl - Forrozinho CD De Carnaval 2023


The Jeffdepl CD is part of a trend whereby someone presumably from the Brazilian northeast takes a rural or rural-like rhythm and throws a whole bunch of urban baile funk songs or samples on top, possibly including a whole bunch of non-baile funk material as well. Or that's what seems to be going on, though Jeffdepl's collaborations with MC Danny seem to be originals. And seemingly every month Jeffdepl puts out a mix CD and usually his fans upload it as a YouTube mix (I'm including in the category "fans" people who want to attract Jeffdepl listeners to their own YouTube channels). The Carnaval CD was February. And I'm giving you two links for it, the first to one of these uploads (same as the embed above), and the second to a playlist I made separating it out into discrete standalone tracks rather than forcing you to swallow the whole thing in one breathless continuum. Also, you can find the title as Forrozinho - CD Carnaval 2023 or Forrozinho Carnaval 2023 or 2023 Forrozinho CD Carnaval or CD de Carnaval 2023 (Forrozinho). And some of those have an extra eighth track, a different one on each, which seems to be uploader's choice and sounds nothing like the rest or like Jeffdepl.

The following EPs and albs are still in play for Expert Witness, not just because I'm always changing my mind and have several new discoveries but because it has five more slots, owing to Brad's including a separate five-entry EP** category.

MC Rogerinho - "085"


DJ Alef Rodrigo - Evolução do Mandelão
DJ Arana - EP A.Mago (Playlist do Mago)
MC Rogerinho - DVD Pode Crê (Ao Vivo)
DJ Jeffdepl - Casca de Bala
d.silvestre - Espanta Gringo
Felo Le Tee x Mellow & Sleazy - The III Wise Men
DJ Black Low - Impumelelo
JPEGMafia and Danny Brown - Scaring the Hoes Vol. 1
Lakecia Benjamin - Phoenix
Jason Moran - From The Dancehall To The Battlefield

...plus whatever else I scrounge up or stumble across in the next day and a half.

The What's The Sound? EP edges out the other two South African long-players by being the most arty and abrasive of the three, also therefore getting along better on this list with my Brazilian entries (abrasion contains five-sixths of brasil).

D'Athiz x Ke-nny x Locomeister – "Gumba Fire"


I will interrupt this disquisition to say:

EOY, EOY Oh!

JJ Fad "Anotha Ho"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldrcZNTYfmA&t=91s

( MC Madan, Sparks, Rolling Stones, the life of rockCollapse )

( Old ballotsCollapse )

( FootnotesCollapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/390878.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: idolator and p&j and country critics, mc pipokinha, rolling stones, year-end lists

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

There's A Riot Goin' On

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

December 2nd, 2023

Current Music:

The Robins "Riot In Cell Block #9"

Embedding a couple of threads I'm proud of. —We've been running Unpolled Bangers From Unpolled Years at the People's Pop Polls (see footnote* for what those words mean). Tom let me have 1954 and I chose the Robins' "Riot In Cell Block #9," which gave me the opportunity to expand a thread I'd initially done for the Soundtracks poll: where the song came from, where the sound came from, what it led to, what various places the various riffs led to. I'll let the tweets tell the story, may add a word or two of explanation or embellishment. One thing: I don't actually name "Hoochie Coochie Man" in the first thread. I wasn't playing coy. Back in Soundtracks, Twitter'd flagged my tweet for "sensitive content" whenever I used the song title or embedded the song – their software must've thought it was porn – it is a sexy song! – so that's why I don't call it by its title here in the first thread; instead I break it off into its own thread. If Twitter had flagged it again, only the second thread would've been affected. Fortunately, this time they didn't flag it.

Starting with the heat itself (a tough one for my nominee).

And back to the ancient BANGERVERSE...

🔵UNPOLLED BANGERS 4.6! #PPPMatches

1 CHARLIE PARKER! https://t.co/WCSP1gsESJ
2 HANK WILLIAMS! https://t.co/LJK9AtHPPJ
3 LITTLE RICHARD! https://t.co/1SB20cOK4A
4 THE ROBINS! https://t.co/GEO8sQdxmr

— People's Pop Polls: 2003 (@peoples_pop) November 21, 2023

Thread no. 1: Working and varying a riff

Thread for "Riot In Cell Block No. 9:
In the 1954 prison film Riot In Cell Block 11 (scored by Herschel Burke Gilbert), the musical prelude starts with high drama and then stops dead for two beats, then starts the drama again. /1https://t.co/M9spLJyTIs

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

Meanwhile, a long time earlier, in a galaxy far, far away... no, at virtually *the exact same moment* actually, but in a *genre* far, far away, Muddy Waters and his band start a Willie Dixon song with a riff that goes two beats and then drops to silence for a half measure. /2

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

Not gonna embed it yet, though, 'cause Twitter thinks its title is pr0/\/. /3

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

When the Muddy song hits, Leiber & Stoller (a couple of middle-class Jewish boys), recognize its cinematic potential and create the underclass anthem "Riot In Cell Block No. 9" by the Robins, using a variant of the Muddy stop-time riff. /4https://t.co/o2Z9E4naWj

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

"Riot" is up today in the People's Pop Polls' as a previously unpolled banger, hence this thread – but the thread's not near done; and I urge you all to join the polls: w/ another Leiber-Stoller song, Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog" in the Animal poll /5https://t.co/zCDO6lYgcU

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

[Note: Animals poll has just concluded. "Hound Dog" made the quarterfinals, where, however, not only did it fail to catch a rabbit, it lost to a rabbit, a white rabbit.]

The following year (1955), Elmer Bernstein lifts Riot's variant of the Muddy riff for the soundtrack to Man With The Golden Arm, which we polled back in Soundtracks (the Frankie Machine version), so we're back full-circle to ci-ne-mah. /6https://t.co/kNTH54D6BW

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

Still threading, tho, 'cause there's more People's Pop content: same year as "Arm," Bo Diddley does "I'm A Man," which is *his* variant on the Muddy stop-time riff. "I'm A Man" gets covered yon and hither, and the riff is lifted by the Animals /7https://t.co/2xcOLgR5Ry

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

[Note: The Animals double the second note of the riff, but for practical purposes it's the "I'm A Man" riff.]

The Animals riff was in turn sampled in Girls Aloud's "Biology," which not only made our Charity Crusher, it danced all the way to Pollhalla: /8https://t.co/UcPel95hKk

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

Meanwhile, Muddy Waters himself had appropriately copied "I'm A Man" on "Mannish Boy" with a riff that triangulates Riot In Cell Block No. 9, I'm A Man, and his original riff itself. We polled Muddy's remake of "Mannish Boy" in our 1977 poll. /end pt 1https://t.co/ivepgDwrQW

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

Thread no. 2: Willie Dixon gets diplomatic

Riot Thread 2: Elmer Bernstein's score for Man With The Golden Arm, which lifted the Robins' variant on the Muddy riff, got an Oscar nomination. Wikip reports Willie Dixon saying, "We felt like this was a great achievement for one of these blues phrases to be used in a movie." /1

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

But Wikip leaves out the tone of voice from the original interview, in Robert Palmer's Deep Blues (p. 167): "'We felt like this was a great achievement for one of these blues phrases to be used in a movie,' says Dixon, diplomatically." /2

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

So here's the original "H00chi3 Coochi3 Man," written by Willie Dixon, performed by Muddy Waters, with the stop-time riff that by rights should be on Tweet 2 of the previous thread. Am hoping my l33t speak evades Twitter's buffoonery. /3https://t.co/KUP5yYhKdB

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

Dixon says the riffs were band-written, which means Little Walter on harmonica is as crucial as Muddy Waters on guitar (they're not doubling each other: Walter plays four notes while Muddy does five). /4

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

Don't want to imply that Gilbert originated the use of musical starts and stops in movie melodrama, or that Dixon, Waters, etc. did so in R&B. Palmer points to its long use in jazz, for instance. But it's Leiber & Stoller who connect the dots, use it to make songs cinematic. /end

— Frank Kogan (@koganbot) November 21, 2023

And here's a playlist. There's A Riot Goin' On.


*Here's Tom Ewing's basic primer on the People's Pop Polls. Here are my own thoughts on the polls. "Unpolled banger" is a fairly high-profile track we hadn't previously polled, by an act that has never put a song into Pollhalla. (Dif. criteria for Pollhalla for different polls, but most often means making it to the quarterfinals; unpolled year means we're not taking tracks from one of the years we've given a dedicated poll to (we have year polls and theme polls; so by "dedicated poll" I mean one of the year polls).)

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/390620.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: #pppmatches1, playlist

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

The Ministry Of Funny Beats

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

November 1st, 2023

Current Music:

Jiraya Uai, MC Tarapi "Hoje Tem Rodeio, Baile De Favela"

Funny beats! Tied to riffs that resolutely don't go anywhere, but don't go away, either. There've been several of these recently, all Brazilian funk, all fluttering around the number 10 spot on my 2023 singles list. Each is a combination of funny peculiar and funny ha-ha, at least to my various and peculiar funny bones.

Not the same funny beat on each, though – these all seem like one-offs, not particularly sounding like each other and probably not even in conversation with one another.

And it's not always the beat itself that's the "funny beat." Sometimes it's the riff, or several riffs that intertwine with the rhythm so as to wave the funny flag on the rhythm's behalf.

Jiraya Uai, MC Tarapi – Hoje Tem Rodeio, Baile De Favela



I've slotted this in my mind as a Dave Moore tip, though it doesn't seem to be on his 2023 playlist. I don't have a name for this track's musical style – Google Translate says "Today there's a rodeo, a favela dance," and perhaps the cowboy hats are meant to signal sertanejo, a rural-identified genre I have no sense of. The music on this seems pretty radical and experimental. What puts this in the funny category is its folkish-countryish tendency, the snaking gtr line and the two (!) harmonica parts (one sucking in and the other blowing out). And to call the guitar "folk" or "country" fails to communicate the psychological sense it has for me: it's the sort of line I'd have sold my kidney to write in 1979 when I was listening hard to Miles Davis's On The Corner and even more to "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose"–era James Brown and trying to twist those into something stranger and more destabilizing, aspiring to create a kind of no wave that wouldn't necessarily be abrasion so much as the feeling when you suddenly go into a roller-coaster drop.

Mary Apelona, MC Boyugo – O Apelão Me Convocou



It's a classic "accordion" part except it's perching like a dazed bird atop a tuba. The two vocalists do a low-affect version of the same thing.

"Classic"? Well, I'm being silly. In suspense movies it's not an accordion but a flute or recorder or piccolo that plays the pretty melody, which is made stereotypically eerie by being thrown off-key against its musical surroundings. In this song, half-a-minute in, the instrument (whatever it is) lands emphatically on a sour note, which recurs often enough that when turned off it's still present, poised to inflict itself again – which it finally does, two minutes in.

(Actually, it's probably a keyboard setting.)

Yuri Redicopa & DJ Bnão – Bebê Tá Solta



Is one of those piano lines that you get in movies that are trying to evoke the 1910s or the 1890s but, as Dave says, used in a compulsively nondevelopmental manner, so, as he also says, it keeps promising to fall into a trot or a basic goofy post-disco no-speak-americano Austral-Romanian Empire* dance, but stops on the brink.

MC 2K, Almir Delas, DJ Samuk – Tropa Do Arranca Pix



Our unexpected beat here is the rockabilly bass. This also has its compulsively nondevelopmental aspects – all the instrumental parts except the drums – but they're not functioning as dance bohemia experimentation but just as regular Brazilian backdrop that allows the vocalists to declaim and grunt and giggle.

( A couple of relevant tracks from 2022Collapse )

As I said above, what I'm gathering here aren't trends or any common beats; rather, they're just part of the variety that the ocean of funk tosses up onto the shore.

( FootnoteCollapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/390354.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: austral-romanian empire, orange caramel

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

Laryssa Real (Artist of the Year, 2022)

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

September 6th, 2023

Current Music:

Anderson Neiff, MC Terror, Laryssa Real, MC Magrinho "O Neiff Me Ligou"

Laryssa's voice is penetrating with a whipcrack when necessary but is fundamentally as solid and steady as she is. She's able to ride her own rhythm into other rhythms that are as aggressive and mobile as any in the world. I don't know the production process so I don't know how much it's her wending her way through rhythms, her being the center and rhythms being put around her, or her vocals being sampled and chopped into rhythm through technical means. Probably all of the above. So she's supported and punctuated by percussion, adorned in percussion; sometimes she is the percussion. She's been on several hundred tracks in the last several years, all collaborations, different configurations. Usually she's the only woman. And usually she's the central motion of the track, and the central emotion.

And that's all I know, pretty much. When I type "Laryssa Real" into search engines, they don't locate much, and don't locate her. I assume her orbit is round Recife rather than São Paulo, but that's an assumption based on the sound and the brega funk hashtag, not on any journalism. Google isn't giving me lyrics even, so I've been painfully transcribing TikTok captions into Google Translate. From what I can find, I gather that sex acts are a frequent topic of discussion. This disappoints me because I'm hoping for canny, witty commentary and comebacks on all sorts of subjects, to match the sound of her voice. And maybe within the range of what's allotted to her, slyness and wit are the actual truth. I don't know.

At any rate, it often seems like fun:

Neguin Da Base, Laryssa Real, Gelado No Beat – Vem De Boca
[EDIT: Okay, the TikTok embed code doesn't work anymore – or I can't get it to work, anyway – so here's the direct link, and a pic.]
https://www.tiktok.com/@laryssareeal/video/7137409016052993286
👁 source: imgur.com


A sampling from the last couple of years:

Zoi De Gato, Marlinho RDC, Laryssa Real – Os Ratos da Favela


A slap, and a snake uncoiling, but still incredibly friendly (for a ghetto rat). The other two vocalists sound a bit dogged by comparison. The mayhem she puts in her voice – is that the producer sampling it and adding manipulations? I think she just does it.

Neguin ZN, Klose Vilao, Laryssa Real – Vem Me Comer Vai


The atmosphere is slow humidity but penetrated by gun cocks and dings and bells. The vocalists keep cutting in on each other, so it's as if each finishes the others' sentences and completes each other's beats. Laryssa sounds happily wicked – unless I'm misinterpreting and she sounds distressed.

Neguin Da Base, Laryssa Real, Gelado No Beat – Vem de Boca


The one I TikTokked above. It's date night for Laryssa and Neguin, with a hippopotamus of a tuba to undergird the candle-lit cheek-to-cheek. But then producer Gelado no Beat shoots ball bearings across the floor, which our lovers delightedly dance upon, keeping their balance as if it's the most natural thing in the world – though for all her fun and jitteriness, Laryssa's still the center of gravity, the steady hand.

Anderson Neiff, MC Terror, Laryssa Real, MC Magrinho – O Neiff Me Ligou


Beats like machine guns, gunshots like gunshots, and a tour de force from the vocalists who keep up their own rapid fire. In the back, behind all this genius, a slow synth makes a sad, imperturbable descent. You wonder how this music emerges, with so much in it.

Same old disclaimer: With my talent for imposing deadlines and then missing them, I eventually hit upon the idea of making June the month to write up the previous year's Artist Of The Year – March being the month for my Top Singles. (Um, the last I posted a completed year's singles list was the one for 2017, which I posted the following December.) This time, I lit a fire under myself by finally posting 2021's artist this May and snapped to it to get this one up in June; but no, we see it in September, which is certainly better than losing it to a summer love, though I hope you enjoyed the Seo Taiji post, and MC Loma, and the spare accompaniments and openhearted vocals that intervened.

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/389957.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: year-end lists

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

Mouthbeats And The Openhearted (The Cars That *Don't* Go Boom, Pt. 2)

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

July 20th, 2023

Current Music:

MC Hariel "Passa Devagar"

2015 is coming up in a couple of months in the Poll, so I scrolled back to eight years ago on KondZilla and GR6 Explode, the two Brazilian funk channels whose archives go back that far.* A couple years ago I'd listened to some bare-bones Bum Bum tracks from 2017, so was already expecting, heading backwards, that I'd find settings that were more spare than those of current funk carioca. And of course the thesis – or at least the hook – of this series of posts is how, for a while, the bass – the bottom – lost its status as the core of the Brazilian funk rhythm. But still, I had a huge shock – jawdroppingly huge – at just how spare 2015 was. And I was also surprised at how young a lot of these performers were. That is, not shocked that, e.g., MC Hariel was once younger than he is now – duh – and not shocked (though somewhat surprised) that so many current performers were making music back then (when some were as young as 17, 16, 12); but was very surprised that those kids were such a big focus of the channels. Of course, this might just be the peculiarities of these two channels in 2015, the spare music and the youth of the performers, the channels happening to pick up on a bunch of kids and the bet paying off prosperously to the present. Nonetheless, here is a treasure trove, early work, voices without much accompanying sounds to cushion them.

That the accompaniments are so unadorned has the positive effect of making the singing feel really openhearted – a contrast to the raspers and bellowers I've been into in 2023. My friend Dave Moore writes via email, "Some of the spareness you identify I don't associate with the bracing spareness in 2020s funk, but with a kind of improvisatory or informal spareness of making music with your friends and a couple of cups or spoons. There's a warmth to the spareness." Exactly.

MC Hariel - Passa Devagar (2015)


I will say, though – to reveal my prejudices and maybe try to sidestep them – that if you'd teleported 12-year-old me from my 1966 world of male early adolescence to this 2015 world of kids singing songs with sexual lyrics, that I REALLY doubt that "warm" and "openhearted" would be words I'd use for either world's social life, Connecticut 1966 or São Paulo 2015. But I'll also say – trying not to derail us too drastically from the subject at hand – that what felt to me in 1966 like a constricted world of teasing and bullying might well have been more of an opening-up and adventure for some of my peers. To me dirty words felt like hate words, and for me that spilled over to any sexual content, and honestly that still colors how I hear lots of stuff.** But I don't know this São Paulo world, and 12-year-old me isn't writing this post anyway, and good for the music for sounding like it could be an opening-up and adventure. Even if it isn't.

Anyhow, in 2014, six months to a year before the songs I'm embedding, MC Pedrinho, at age 12, hit with the song "Dom Dom Dom" including the lyrics, "Kneel down, get ready, and give a good blowjob," getting the attention (says Wikip) of the local state prosecutor because of Pedrinho's age and the sex content – of course these lyrics (especially the imperative to kneel down) jump out at me as more mean than sexy (and strike me as very 12-year-old); but again the meanness (or whatever) is not the only thing going on.*** The adolescent posturing is a container or accompaniment for audacity and energy and experiment. The very earliest video on GR6 Explode is a live clip from several months later ("Se Louco Cachorrera") of Pedrinho and another four of these kids sitting behind him on a step or a stoop, no instruments except mouths and cheeks and hand claps, and the five of them are creating full rhythm and melody, the first sounds being the kid on the far right using his voice as a beatbox. Then Pedrinho grabs another boy's hand in solidarity, runs behind the other four, makes funny motions with his arms and legs as if he's diving forward, goes front again, dances a bit while MC Kevin tickles him and MC Don Juan raps; Pedrinho pulls Kevin's hand back, fooling around, then he sings in a penetrating voice, the guys clapping the clave rhythm behind him.

So anyway, this is where we are. Acks and mouthfarts and dat-dat. Vocalists in place of some of the percussion instruments and rhythm instruments, and voices that sing without the protection and accompaniment of such instruments. (Btw, I think the settings work similarly well for the singers in their twenties.)

MC Neném, MC Magrão, DJ R7 – Parafuso (2015)


On this one a drum is in there with a couple of useful thuds, and a foghorn is blowing smoke, but mostly there's a riot of mouthbeats – it starts with an "ah" repeating on the offbeat, then various clustered staccato yelps and "doo-bitta-doo doo-doo" running with and counter to each other. Of course the words too have their rhythms, even when they're struggling to be heard amidst voicebeats high and low. It's as if you took doo-wop's bouncing balls and pirouettes and changed them to cries and grunts. [Couldn't find lyrics online.]

MC Pedrinho, MC Juninho JR, DJ R7 – Manda Pras Novinhas (2015)


The rhythm is set by a voice that cries "ah" on every offbeat. Percussion and occasional instruments circle around it; but long sections of this are just the singing voice and a few bumps of percussion. [Couldn't find the lyrics, but the kids are saying "putaria" a lot.]

(A couple more tracks with a constant voice on the offbeat are "Assunto Profissional" and "Vai Ficar Ardendo." Like "Manda Pras Novinhas," they're produced by DJ R7. Btw, I assume that on a lot of these, the vocal cry is recorded and then put on the offbeat by the producer, rather than being constantly voiced by someone. But I don't know this.)

( MC Robs, MC Hariel, MC Menor da VG, MC LaisCollapse )

( FootnotesCollapse )

( EDIT: Meta para pasted in from my SubstackCollapse )

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/389709.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: miami bass without the bass

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag

Am uncertain as to the direction of Chinese temperature ambitions

👁 Image

👁 Image
koganbot

July 6th, 2023

Current Music:

Martha and the Vandellas "Heat Wave"

Am uncertain as to the direction of Chinese temperature ambitions.

Given these changed dynamics, leaders in Beijing probably also now realize that they must lower the temperature in relations with the United States. The deep chill cast over China-U.S. relations by the spy balloon incident in February has recently shown signs of thawing, with last month's trip to Beijing by Secretary of State Antony Blinken – which included an audience with Mr. Xi – and this week's visit by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
—"Xi Jinping May Be Souring on His 'Best, Most Intimate Friend,'" Ryan Hass, The New York Times, July 6, 2023

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/389402.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

Tags: sentence parsing

• Leave a comment
• Share
• Flag