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- Name it on the 'boogie' – the genre tag that won't sit still
The word 'boogie' comes from a style of piano blues popular in the 30s, but has been used to describe southern rock and early-80s disco. Simon Reynolds gets to grips with the term
When I saw the cover of Delta Swamp Rock, my first thought was: "Has Soul Jazz run out of black music then?" Releasing a compilation of early-70s southern rock seemed like an unlikely move for the label famous for its Dynamite! reggae anthologies and deluxe box sets such as Can You Dig It? The Music and Politics of Black Action Films 1968-75.
A little reflection cleared up the mystery: southern rock as a style was born at the confluence of blues, country and soul, so in many ways it's exactly the sort of white-on-black musical miscegenation that fits the Soul Jazz worldview. Like Blood and Fire and Honest Jon's, the label belongs to a tradition of British connoisseurs who venerate black American music, a lineage that stretches back through 90s house headz, 80s soul boys, 70s roots'n'dub fiends, 60s blues rockers, all the way to 50s trad jazz.
This is one long continuum of white Brits who strove to master black musical idioms and also dedicated themselves to being custodians of black musical heritage through their parallel activities as DJs, discographers and archivists. The only difference between the Brits and their white Southern counterparts was that the former had to consummate their passion largely through recordings, whereas the latter grew up surrounded by the music and could draw directly from the well-spring.
Emerging from the deep south in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement, at a time when some politicians still openly supported segregation, naturally meant the politics of southern rock were complex and cloudy. There's no better example of this than what may well be the genre's defining anthem, Sweet Home Alabama. The statement being made by Lynyrd Skynyrd on their 1974 breakthrough hit is confusing, to put it mildly. The first verse gives the finger to Neil Young (not even a damn Yankee, but Canadian) for his hit Southern Man and equally rebuking Alabama. OK, that's just wounded regional pride lashing back. But the next verse is dangerously ambiguous: it refers to George Wallace, Alabama's pro-segregation governor, in a way that could easily be read as an endorsement and definitely falls well short of condemnation. Finally, Sweet Home ... pivots to a celebration of the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and its resident rhythm squad, the Swampers. "Lord, they get me off so much/ They pick me up when I'm feeling blue," exults Ronnie Van Zant. But in a further fold in the pretzel that is southern rock, while the Muscle Shoals team played on records by many black artists (Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, the Staple Singers) all four of the Swampers were white.
Whenever I hear Sweet Home ... on the radio, I start out trying to decode what the song is saying, then give up and surrender to the mighty groove. There's plenty more groove action to be found on Delta Swamp. Like Area Code 615's Stone Fox Chase: even if the name and title don't click, you'll probably recognise it as the smoky harmonica-riffing theme to The Old Grey Whistle Test. Hearing the full instrumental for the first time made me realise how near it is to a contemporaneous funk combo such as War. Then it goes into an eerie plinky-percussive section that for all the world sounds like something by polyrhythmic post-punks the Raincoats. A decade after its original release, Stone Fox Chase became the source of a prized hip-hop breakbeat. Yet Area Code 615 were actually a bunch of Nashville session musicians who mostly backed up country artists.
Another revelation on this double CD is Bobby Gentry's Mississippi Delta: with its bullfrog horns, rasped vocals and grinding funk, it belongs to the R&B realm of Lee Dorsey and Inez Foxx far more than the country-pop world of Glenn Campbell and Tammy Wynette. But Delta Swamp's detailed booklet reveals just how tangled up black music and white music could get in the south of the late-60s/early-70s. Phil Walden, who founded leading southern rock label Capricorn (Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker Band, Wet Willie, Grinderswitch, and more) had originally been Otis Redding's manager. Funding for Capricorn came from Atlantic Records via Walden's friendship with Jerry Wexler, the journalist-turned-A&R who reputedly originally coined the term "rhythm and blues".
If Delta Swamp has a flaw, it's that there's a bit too much soul and not nearly enough jazz. The hippie-fusion freak side of southern rock that involved 20 to 40 minute-long live jams (Allmans being the pioneers and prime perpetrators) is not acknowledged. Generally, the anthology veers away from the hard rockin' end of things (populist arena-pleasers such as Elvin Bishop, Charlie Daniels Band, Molly Hatchet) towards stuff that has some kind of non-rock cred (Link Wray, Johnny Cash, blue-eyed soul singers such as Boz Scaggs and Billy Vera). I guess soul boys can only go so far into the hard'n'heavy guitar zone. But does Big Star, a band who'd never dream of appearing onstage with a Confederate flag behind them, really need to be shoehorned into this context?
Southern rock overlaps with that broad strip of 70s blues-tinged rock called boogie, which ranges from ZZ Top to Brit combos such as Humble Pie who toiled on the US arena circuit and became vastly more popular in America than in their homeland. Boogie has a technical definition: a musician friend explains that it has to do with 4/4 being subdivided by 12 rather than 16 notes, with syncopations on the third subdivision of each beat. But the best way of conveying it is to just point at examples: Get It On by T-Rex (Bolan's 1972 T-Rextasy-exploitation flick was titled Born to Boogie), Slow Ride by Foghat, Whatever You Want by those dependable boys in blue denim Status Quo (who then got parodied by Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias on Heads Down No Nonsense Mindless Boogie).
"Boogie" originally comes from "boogie-woogie", a piano-oriented style of blues designed for dancing, which emerged in the 30s and filtered into numerous corners of American popular and roots music. As adopted in rock, it signifies a black-and-bluesy swing, a funky shuffle feel. What's odd is that boogie today has a third, completely different meaning: it is used by DJs and collectors to refer to an early-80s post-disco style whose slick, synthetic funk couldn't be further from the low-down earthiness of southern rock.
The origins of this other boogie go back to the late-70s when the word started cropping up in the titles of disco-funk tunes such as Taste of Honey's Boogie Oogie Oogie, Earth Wind and Fire's Boogie Wonderland, the Jacksons's Blame It On the Boogie and Heatwave's Boogie Nights. The week before Delta Swamp Rock arrived in the mail, I received a boogie CD-mix from a DJ friend, Paul Kennedy, which he'd titled Juicy Nights and crammed with post-disco gems by outfits lincluding Change and BB & Q Band. A few of the names were familiar to me from the 80s, when another DJ pal of mine used to buy US import 12ins, an outlandish concept to a student on a grant.
What defines this boogie is that it's disco but slower and funkier: 110 to 116 beats-per-minute is the prime range, says Paul, with a strong accent on the second and fourth beats rather than disco's straight stomping four-to-the-floor. It's mostly played by bands, as opposed to being the creation of a producer, but synth-bass, electronic keyboards and drum machines get more prominent the deeper you get into the 80s. Some of the most famous examples of the style are hits including D-Train's You're the One for Me, Peech Boys Don't Make Me Wait, and Yarborough & People's Don't Stop the Music, while pioneers and exemplars include Kleer and Leroy Burgess (of Black Ivory and Aleem).
Thing is, I don't recall anybody calling this stuff "boogie" back then; they'd just have talked about "club tracks" or "disco-funk". In DJ Greg Wilson's exhaustive etymological history of the genre, the word "boogie" crops up as a vague reference in the occasional club flyer or record shop section, or as a verb equivalent to "get on down". But boogie only really becomes a genre tag retrospectively, to describe a kind of music no longer made, and even then only by a small number of London-based soul cognoscenti. It's really only in the last decade that the term has achieved serious currency as a record dealer and collector buzz-word.
Boogie is a prime example of the creative remapping of the musical past that is rife today, with DJs and compilers retroactively inventing genres that had only the most tenuous existence in their original heyday (see "acid folk, "junkshop glam"). One of the prime movers behind the emergence of boogie as a collector-prized zone is Joey Negro, the DJ/producer behind the Destination Boogie compilations. Though the primary impetus is enthusiasm for the sound, there's an economic aspect to this syndrome: it reminds me of the way that real estate agents transform hitherto unprepossessing urban zones – often nameless hinterlands between established neighbourhoods – into up-and-coming areas with twee names like, oh, Chisholm Village. The ploy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because once the urban pioneers move in, shops and restaurants start to spring up. Similarly, once you start looking for "boogie" or some other semi-fictitious genre, you'll find more and more obscure vintage tracks that fit the parameters. No harm in that if it unearths some lost gold and reshapes the pop past into entertaining new patterns. I just think they should have fasted on another name beside boogie, which does rather bring to mind long-haired, pot-bellied guitarists from Jackonsville, Florida trading solos for 18 minutes. It could lead to confusion.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Wild Beasts – Smother: album stream
Wild Beasts' third album picks up where Two Dancers left off, with songs of love, longing and wanton lust
It's less than a year since Wild Beasts were pipped to the Mercury prize by the xx, but the Kendal band are already back with a new album, Smother. And it seems the relative success of their last LP, Two Dancers, hasn't had a detrimental effect on their sound.
If anything, the band's third album further explores desire, sex and mindless brutality, themes that underpin an otherwise gentle and immaculately arranged record. But Smother offers a more emotional response to lust and longing than its predecessor; Reach a Bit Further, for instance, is a call-and-response track in which singers Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming offer each other assurance: "Yes I will do anything that you ask of me." Elsewhere the subtly ebullient Bed of Nails sees Thorpe listing the sacrifices he'll make for his lover whereas Plaything, in which the singer demands they "take off that chemise", is the closest the band get towards wanton fervour.
Smother allows each band member to shine; Ben Little's opaque, dextrous guitar and Chris Talbot's textural, ambient drumming are as prominent as Thorpe and Fleming. It shows the band have confidence in each other, and so they should. While Smother sounds both ambitious and restrained, its overarching quality is of a continually interesting band making rich, engaging music sound effortless.
Smother is out on 9 May through Domino Records. Wild Beasts will be interviewed in this Friday's Film&Music
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Sounds of Nonno – The Crush
Never mind that their label describes them as 'happy but dull electronica', these beats and bleeps have a robo-pop edge
We don't know anything about Sounds of Nonno other than they're Swedish and signed to Jämmerdosa. The Crush is their new EP and features the vocal talents of Jenny Wahlström, Terese Fredenwall and Fredric Johansson. The short bio on their website doesn't really shed further light and may have lost something in translation, with phrases such as "happy but dull electronica" and "slightly dance inspired". Thankfully, we're only interested in the music and The Crush EP offers four tracks that suggest great things to come from this band. The title track, in particular, is a stunning mix of intricately programmed beats and bleeps that jerk and jolt in all the right places, the childlike vocals lending it a sweet pop edge, while the pulsating Friend darkens the mood slightly with a heavily treated robot-voiced duet.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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