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- Pyongyang goes pop: Jarvis Cocker unites the divided
It's the final part of our pop adventures in North Korea ... and what better way to end than playing the locals some 'communist pop' (ie Pulp's Common People)
Despite there being no internet access in North Korea outside the offices of the few western companies (you can count them on one hand), Pyongyang's embassy enclosure and a couple of very high-up officials, digital materials still have ways of spreading.
The state runs a nationwide intranet for the exchange of sanctioned material, while USB drives and CD-Rs are becoming more and more common among college and middle school students. It is through these means that the trade in illicit and anti-state media such as the sexy Wangjaesan girls in hot pants is exchanged and passed on, while the ever-growing traffic between North Korea and China has increased opportunities for the cross-border smuggling of pirated films and music from Hollywood and Seoul.
Although these outside cultural influences can be spotted in small doses here and there, North Koreans are understandably loth to admit it. The high-end Japanese-built tourist tour buses shuttling foreigners around Pyongyang are aeons more advanced than the rusting hulks North Korea has been using for average citizens since the 1970s. But ask most Koreans and you'll find that they are not Japanese. Until they break down, that is, when they become "shitty imperial Japanese technology".
Given this push/pull attitude to things from the outside, it's perhaps no surprise that western pop songs penned in a more "communist" vein can ease the North Korean listener into a new state of openness and ease inter-cultural tension. By pop in a communist vein I do, of course mean, Jarvis Cocker.
North Koreans find Pulp's Common People very, very funny. When one 24-year-old of wealthy descent living in Pyongyang heard the song, he creased up in hysterics as he tried to understand why rich people would pretend to be poor because they thought it was cool. He did concede, however, that he was happy such a song could be so popular, as it suggested people in the west could appreciate the revolutionary spirit of communism after all. You can kind of see what he was getting at.
On hearing about the Rage Against the Machine Christmas No 1 story, the same North Korean said he felt "proud and overjoyed that a socialist band could be the greatest force for good in the British nation," despite him not quite grasping the concept of record sales or The X Factor or the fact the band is American. He didn't particularly like Killing in the Name, either.
At times throughout my travels in North Korea, I'm sure I've been misunderstood by the locals. Likewise, I have no doubt misunderstood the motivations and explanations that locals brought to the table when I confronted them with pop as the world gives it to us. But the process itself of discussing pop has always eased the initial standoff that North Koreans are trained to have set as their autopilot, and reminded me of the humanity of the people held in the grip of the government's ongoing tyranny. So, if you find yourself caught up in the regime any time soon, for your sake and theirs, find out what their verdict on the new Kanye record is, won't you?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Bluebell – Normal Heights
Softly cooing vocals and DIY symphonic pop from this duo ... now with added risque video
We don't know too much about Bluebell other than that they're a duo and that the singer, Annabel Jones, used to be in a band called Lady and the Lost Boys. Oh, and that she's from Hampshire. Normal Heights, the song, emerged online a few weeks ago – all softly cooing vocals and DIY symphonic pop gorgeousness – and the accompanying, mildly NSFW video arrived over the weekend. Incorporating what looks like other people's holiday videos and private snapshots and editing them together to create a weirdly nostalgic home movie, it's the perfect visual accompaniment to a song that somehow brings to mind lost summer romances.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Ready for the Weeknd? Most R&B fans have better things to listen to
By praising the Weeknd, indie-leaning music critics are once again getting R&B spectacularly wrong
It probably counts as some sort of triple whammy of music-critic idiocy: a sweeping proclamation about an entire genre, a blundering dismissal of that same genre, and hyping up an unremarkable new act after being taken in by their marketing strategy. Last week, the music press was abuzz with R&B talk – and, as often seems to be the way with indie-leaning critics, getting it embarrassingly wrong. Sean Fennessey's declaration in the Village Voice that R&B has "changed again" was one of many pieces falling over themselves to praise a new, self-released mixtape by the anonymous collective the Weeknd as a brave new direction for the genre. In a telling show of double standards, though, Fennessey went on to dismiss the efforts of "commercial" R&B based almost entirely on their sales figures, rather than their music.
The disproportionate attention accorded to the Weeknd is reflective of an attitude towards R&B that just won't seem to die: the further away it gets from its formalist roots, the more praise is lavished on it. Conversely, those artists catering to the genre's core audience are ignored or dismissed. The former is not synonymous with being inventive or interesting. The Weeknd are thoroughly unremarkable: in terms of both songcraft and conveying emotion, they are painfully inadequate. The hood signifiers ladled into the lyrics sound forced and contrived, not least because the singer sounds bored out of his skull. The addition of vaguely lo-fi chillwave textures are a lazy way of connoting darkness – but the Weeknd's sound isn't too far removed from arrangements that have become commonplace in R&B. It's like a particularly shallow take on a Trey Songz mixtape.
Only a fool could think the Weeknd the most exciting thing to happen to R&B in 2011. Just the first quarter has seen several high-quality releases emerge from unexpected directions. Remember Kandi, for instance? She was the songwriter behind TLC's No Scrubs, Destiny's Child's Bug-a-Boo and Bills, Bills, Bills, and Pink's There You Go. But her own solo career failed to work out, and she all but disappeared for the best part of a decade. Her return to the spotlight came via a spot on a reality-TV show, The Real Housewives of Atlanta – in which an American friend informs me Kandi is "the lone sane person surrounded by insane, attention-seeking vacuums of self-delusion". Nonetheless, it paved the way for her second album, Kandi Koated: an understated but powerful collection of righteous, grown-woman, single-mother real talk that hits home thanks to Kandi's eye for specifics and lyrical twists. When she sings "no fly-by-night romance, I want substance" on Give It to You, it's not framed as a demand to her man, but as a caution to her own lust. The album reaches its peak with the track Leroy Jones, a tribute to Kandi's stepfather that also functions as a warning to suitors that, like him, they have to accept her daughter as part of the relationship.
Another unexpected comeback was made by the British singer Marsha Ambrosius, formerly half of the neo-soul duo Floetry. Late Nights and Early Mornings is her debut solo album and first official material in six years. Its lead single opened with the wickedly barbed kiss-off, "Hope she cheats on you with a basketball player / Hope that she Kim Kardashianed her way up"; Ambrosius followed it with a video explicitly confronting homophobia within the black community. Within the album, she finds her forte in essaying a sequence of sinuous, sensual Prince homages. All in all, it's an impressive statement of artistic intent. Fennessey, however, appeared to pay it no further attention than noting the presence of a Portishead cover, and therefore dismissing it completely.
Ambrosius may have scored an unlikely Billboard No 2 hit with her album, but true R&B has been commercially beleaguered of late, with the charts dominated by the standardised thump of cheap Eurohouse. Maybe that's why two elder statesmen of urban music have taken it upon themselves to explicitly call for a genre regrouping. On Lost In Your Love, R Kelly sings, "I wanna bring the love songs back to the radio". On its parent album, Love Letter, it is exactly that vibe he mines: the album is full of classicist balladry and heartfelt vocals. Meanwhile, Diddy followed his epic concept album Last Train to Paris with a free mixtape of R&B reworks and new tracks on Valentine's Day, Love Love Vs Hate Love. It's mostly produced by a new name, Rob Holladay; the way Holladay drapes lushly textured synthwork around Diddy's originals, like a lighter version of The-Dream, marks him out as an exciting new talent.
Diddy and R Kelly's female proteges have also been making significant moves. Dawn Richard, a member of the girl group Danity Kane before she became Diddy's sidekick in his Dirty Money trio, has also released a free mixtape this year, The Prelude to a Tell Tale Heart. The title is a reference to the Edgar Allan Poe story, in which the narrator declares that "what you mistake for madness is but overacuteness of the senses". Poe's sentence could usefully stand in as the R&B genre's overall raison d'etre, and is one that Richard has taken to heart as she picks her way through the insanity of codependency and power-play amid broken-down electronics, dramatic military tattoos and her own distorted, filtered voices on tracks such as Broken Record and Bulletproof.
Meanwhile, if R Kelly is bringing back love songs, then K Michelle, the Tennessee singer he has signed to his label, is bringing back honest-to-god emoting. She has the same rawness of Mary J Blige in her prime, but K Michelle is more likely to burn your house down or punch you in the mouth than just wallow in her pain. Her latest single, How Many Times?, is a triumph of sheer, cathartic sangin'.
On the Rob Holladay remix of Yeah Yeah You Would, Diddy defines R&B as: "Singing those songs that express that emotion that come from deep in your soul, in the pit of your chest – that profound love, that shit." The genre emphasises personality, narrative, songcraft and singing ability for good reason: to best convey this marriage of the physical and the emotional. Focusing on R&B only when it has a contrived "weird" or "arty" angle, as per the Weeknd, is to fail to adequately engage with its form and its values.
It's telling that the most striking track of 2011 for R&B audiences is a simple acoustic ballad. Like the Weeknd, Timothy Bloom's debut single, 'Til the End of Time, emerged seemingly from nowhere, accompanied by an equally eye-catching (and NSFW) video. The production is tactile and beautiful – understated guitar strums and brushed drums – but it's the tour de force performances of Bloom and guest vocalist V Bozeman that make it so engrossing, their voices intertwining until they're wrapped up in each other. It's an intimacy and physicality that the Weeknd could not hope to match.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - 50 great moments in jazz: Jan Garbarek, ECM Records and the 1970s European renaissance
From the late 1960s onward, European jazz musicians began to look to their own cultural tradition. The first steps were tentative, but by the mid-1970s they had become giant strides
Eberhard Weber, the jazz-raised German electric bassist, is reputed to have told his band in the mid-70s, "you can play anything, as long as it doesn't sound like jazz". Weber's view marked a seismic shift in the music's development - toward Europe as a source of fresh ideas, and away from the received wisdom that jazz invariably had to sound like something that had first been forged in Chicago or New York.
This series has inevitably concentrated on six decades of mercurial musical evolution in the United States – jazz's birthplace, because of a unique collision of American, European, and African cultures and traditions on that continent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But from the late 1960s onward, European musicians – widely perceived up to that decade as skilful but obedient jazz disciples – began to look to their own cultural traditions, personal experiences and playing partnerships to open up paths of their own. The first steps were tentative, but by the mid-1970s they had become giant strides, and a generation of players emerged that reshaped the course of jazz all over the world.
When I first encountered Eberhard Weber's 1975 album Yellow Fields I recall being struck that everything about it seemed different, from the sound to the sleeve-art. The cover was a primitive painting of trees in an empty landscape, a long way from the iconic Blue Note images of rugged sax-players – in button-down collars and gangster hats, and probably leaning on chrome-encrusted cars – I was used to. And though the music clearly connected to post-Coltrane American jazz, it was spacious, patient, meditative and richly textural, and seemed to draw its lyricism from folk melodies very different from the blues. In an interview with Jan Garbarek years later (Eberhard Weber's ECM Records label-mate and one of the most distinctive European players to emerge on to the world stage in the 70s) the Norwegian saxophonist recalled his stylistic transition to me this way:
"I suddenly realised," Garbarek said, "that the phrase I was about to play was exactly like such-and-such that was usually played at that moment, having been drawn there because the musical surroundings I was involved in were exactly like that sort of approach, right out of the jazz tradition. That was a very uneasy feeling, to find that I no longer wanted to do that. I stopped for a while, didn't play much. I learned from Miles Davis, that if you do stop, leave space for what others are doing, you get ideas."
Garbarek was describing a mood of change sweeping over European jazz from the mid-1960s on, a growing creative confidence and urge toward independence that Munich record-producer Manfred Eicher, the founder of ECM, so astutely tuned into. But it wasn't restricted to the often folk-inflected and low-key music of the north Europeans – in England, former art-student Mike Westbrook had begun splashing his own colours over the American big-band tradition in the company of rising stars like the saxophonist John Surman, and jazz material in the UK was steadily moving from Broadway standards to original composing. The innovations of American free-improvisers like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor were encouraging like-minded free-fall experimenters all over Europe, not only to develop their own methods, but also alternative infrastructures to challenge the dominance of established jazz promoters and record labels. Some of the newcomers were closer to the jazz tradition than others, but they were all plugging into an expanding network of kindred spirits – as well as to increasingly open-minded public arts-funding provisions – all over the continent as the 1970s dawned.
ECM Records founder Manfred Eicher, a one-time double-bassist, had been involved in the production of German saxist and painter Peter Brotzmann's free-jazz burn-up Machine Gun in May 1968, a fiery conjunction of radical British, Dutch and German musicians. Eicher then encountered Norway's Jan Garbarek, a young saxophonist who had been studying with American expatriate American composer George Russell (Russell called Garbarek "the most original voice in European jazz since Django Reinhardt"), was intrigued by John Coltrane's interest in Indian music, and by the timbral advances of shortlived American tenorist Albert Ayler.
In 1970, Eicher produced Garbarek's Afric Pepperbird, a mix of electric fusion (through the sound of impressionistic rock guitarist Terje Rypdal) and free-jazz. Among many other exploratory young European artists from jazz, experimental-rock and contemporary-classical backgrounds, the open-minded Eicher then discovered German classical cellist-turned-electric bassist Eberhard Weber - not only a musician but a theatre and TV director who perceived music-making through its connections with drama and the evocation of visual imagery. Weber wanted a band that played with an understated rhythmic approach, textures drawn from rock and the new electronics, and a flowing melodic sense - while still improvising.
ECM, financially secured by its best-selling release of Keith Jarrett's Koln Concert album, went on to become one of the world's most creative and influential labels, which it remains. Its output has been immensely diverse, but Garbarek's haunting, voice-like saxophone sound and slow-burn unfolding of a musical narrative, seems to represent its vision especially vividly. Garbarek has worked in many settings, on ventures with Indian musicians, with Gregorian chanters, and with American jazz stars including Keith Jarrett and Bill Frisell, but his presence is audible from his first notes, whatever the context. At the top of this article is a sample of that inimitable sound, with Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous and American drummer Peter Erskine, on a theme called Jumper.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Guardian writers cover Creep by Radiohead
Radiohead have published a newspaper, so Guardian staff including editor Alan Rusbridger attempted to beat them at their own game by recording their version of a Radiohead classic
On the off-chance that your first question is "What were they thinking?", here is what we were thinking: if Radiohead were really going to publish a newspaper alongside the release of their latest CD), shouldn't the Guardian mount a response? If a band could wade so recklessly into the Guardian's area of expertise, could we not wade into theirs? It was immediately decided that the Guardian would put out its own music CD to promote the release of Monday's paper. Whatever radical innovations a bunch of musicians might impose upon newspaper publishing, we could still bring one of the great skills of journalism – doing things really quickly using whoever happens to be around that day – to bear on the lumbering music business.
Within hours of an appeal being launched for musicians among Guardian staff members, our ambitious aims had been trimmed to suit the time frame. There was no way to produce a CD in a day, or time to compose and record an album. It would have to be a stream of just one song – a cover of Radiohead's 1993 hit Creep. But there was no turning back – hired equipment had already begun to arrive.
We may never know how many talented Guardian musicians were simply too busy with work to answer the call, but by lunchtime there were enough bodies and instruments in place to attempt a halting run-through. It was not in the least encouraging.
At 4pm the full band – hastily christened Radioeds – got together for the first time. Our last-minute keyboard draftee – one Alan Rusbridger – was obliged to sight read the sheet music. Lead singer Ed Vulliamy declared himself unfamiliar with both the lyrics and the melody, though he was able to draw on a severe toothache as an emotional touchstone. He may only have heard the song for the first time that morning, but in his vocal one hears a raw howl of angst induced by genuine pain and, quite probably, painkillers.
It is, all in all, a fairly faithful and straightforward rendition of Creep, except for a haunting banjo-and-trombone intro destined to be described as the trick Radiohead missed in their version. After just three live takes – the third being by far the best – the band went their separate ways, citing creative differences. A reunion tour is, at this point, a distant possibility awaiting an unlikely outcry.
As for the recording, you will have to judge for yourself. How good is it compared to, say, Radiohead's newspaper?
The lineup:
Lead vocals: Ed Vulliamy, Guardian and Observer writer
Guitars: Jon Dennis, multimedia production manager; Mark Rice-Oxley, Guardian assistant foreign editor
Bass: Rick Peters, Guardian food and drink subeditor
Banjo: Tim Dowling, Guardian Weekend columnist
Drums: Katrina Dixon, Guardian Guide contributor and subeditor
Trombone: Pascal Wyse, multimedia producer
Vocals: Sarah Russell, Public Sector Portfolio Manager, Guardian News & Media
Keyboard: Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief, Guardian News & Media
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Flaming Lips and Neon Indian - Is David Bowie Dying?
It's hardly commercial and it doesn't exactly answer the titular question over David Bowie's wellbeing – but it's always nice to have the Flaming Lips around
It's been mooted for a while but confirmation has finally arrived, in typically irregular fashion, of a collaboration between the Flaming Lips and chillwave supremo Neon Indian. Flaming Lips singer Wayne Coyne tweeted last week that he was dropping off boxes of the untitled EP to two record shops in Oklahoma and Dallas and, lo and behold, here's the lead single, Is David Bowie Dying?
At six minutes long and featuring big chunks of distorted guitars, rudimentary beatboxing and layers of sonic squiggles, it's hardly chart-bound, but as the song unfolds it manages to mesh the more hypnotic end of the Flaming Lips' work with Neon Indian's dreaminess. The second track on the EP is Alan's Theremin, which we can only assume is the big hit single.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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