Music Features Archives — Page 19 of 51 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

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Songs of Norway

November 24, 2009

MUSIC Hey Annie fans, relax. How many pop princesses are savvy enough to begin the intro verse of an album’s kickoff song with a couplet that casually and subtly incorporates the titles of Shannon’s "Let the Music Play" and Chaka Khan’s "I Feel for You"? Years in the making, Don’t Stop (Smalltown Supersound) has gone through more permutations than a combinatronics expert could comprehend, yet our girl brings the goods — the first seven songs are quip-sharp, catwalk-strut perfection, especially the initial one-two-three punch. The opener brings its introductory marching band motif back around at the climax with a potency that Tusk–era Fleetwood Mac might envy. "My Love is Better" is so sassy it’s funny, and so catchy it’s near fatal. Resplendently melancholic, "Bad Times" matches the femme finesse of Saint Etienne’s best uptempo moments and the melodicism of Johnny Marr and Kirsty MacColl’s peak collabos.

The higher Annie’s feather-light voice soars, the deeper the undertow of sadness in her words, and in that regard, "Bad Times" is her second album’s "Heartbeat." It might not become everyone’s pop song of the year the way her "Heartbeat" so obviously ruled 2004, but that’s only because it’s a little too introverted. If anything, it’s more sublime.

There are some interesting subtexts or subplots at play in Don’t Stop. One is its meta-pop aspect: at least a few songs address fellow songwriters and pop stars. "I Don’t Like Your Band" delivers a series of conciliatory kiss-offs and pieces of advice. This gambit would be deadly if Annie wasn’t on point, but she serves up immaculate wit and melody. (Robyn has to admire this track.) "Songs Remind Me of You" flips the Casey Kasem-era Top 40 conceit of an old song conjuring memory of an old love — in this case, Annie wonders if the pop prince or princess she’s singing to is haunted by his or her past creations when they materialize from a nearby radio.

That "his or her" is worth noting, because Annie has almost never added gender-specific touches to her songs. For sure, when she’s put together a put-down lyric, it’s easy to imagine a boyish man on the receiving end. But Don’t Stop‘s one plaintive ode to a particular person, "Marie Cherie," addresses an ill-fated girl "who never made her sweet 16." Some unimaginable yet just-right marriage between Claudine Longet and P.J. Harvey’s "Down by the Water," it’s as seductively Sapphic — and remote — as a daughters of darkness fantasy. Annie at her best: more than strong enough for a man, but made for a woman.

Punk-rock farewell

November 24, 2009

cheryl@sfbg.com

MUSIC In late October, I spent a particularly thrilling evening at Annie’s Social Club, watching North Carolina-by-way-of-Venus band Valient Thorr fling copious sweat beads into a beer-soaked crowd. Annie’s, one of my favorite spots in San Francisco, was the perfect setting for the show — cozy (but not cramped), dark and low-ceiling’d enough to feel like the coolest basement ever, and packed full of friendly punk and metal fans. On that night, the décor had been ghoulishly enhanced in honor of Halloween, complementing the bar’s usual mise-en-scène — red lighting, a black-velvet painting collection, and ever-present horror and sci-fi flicks on the bar’s TVs.

"I always tried to make it feel like an extension of my living room, where people could just come in and feel comfortable, no matter what scene they were in," says the joint’s namesake, Annie Whiteside. On Nov. 13, Whiteside and co-owner Sean Kennedy announced, via the SF Indie List (where it was soon widely re-reported in local blogs and media), that Annie’s Social Club would be closing New Year’s Eve. Though the posting didn’t offer a reason, Whiteside is forthright in her explanation.

"The recession just got the best of us. We tried really hard to keep the place going, but with the recession the last two years it’s just been really hard on us," she says. "The overhead in San Francisco is so high, and our mission was really to support small bands and small touring bands, and keep our cover low and keep our drink prices low. Try as we might, we still just couldn’t cover the bills."

Annie’s Social Club opened at Fifth and Folsom streets (site of the storied CW Saloon, which closed in 2002) in 2006. Prior to that, Whiteside had operated Annie’s Cocktail Lounge, a little further South of Market, for seven years. Annie’s Social Club built off Whitehead’s experience working at Slim’s and other local music venues; besides bands, Annie’s hosted rock n’ roll karaoke, stand-up comedy, and burlesque shows.

"It’s a community of people I really liked supporting and being part of," Whiteside says. She’s especially upset about saying goodbye to her employees, who’ll all be out of jobs come 2010.

"I feel so badly that they are all gonna be out of work at the beginning of the year, which is a horrible time to look for work," she says. "So anybody out there who wants a good staff, I got a great staff."

Add Shawn Phillips, who books metal shows at Annie’s and other venues under the moniker Whore for Satan, to the list of folks who’re sad to see the club close.

"It took a special person like Annie to bring back the old CW Saloon format when she reopened it as Annie’s Social Club," he says. "Those people are few and far between these days. Annie’s was a home away from home for a lot of people."

Whiteside, who says she hasn’t met the incoming occupants of Fifth and Folsom, didn’t want to comment on the future of the space. It doesn’t seem likely, though, that raucous noise will be part of its milieu. Phillips points to clubs like Thee Parkside, El Rio, the Knockout, and the Hemlock as being well-positioned to help fill the void after Annie’s shuts its doors.

"The live music scene in SF may miss its footing in the pit and land on its ass for a second, but we’ll pick it up, someone will give it its shoe back and it’ll keep going," he says.

Whiteside, too, will keep going — she hopes to eventually regroup and open "bar No. 3" if and when the economy ever turns around. For now, she’s grateful that Annie’s had such a great four-year run.

"It’s been a lot of fun," she says. "I want to thank all the bands and other performers and staff and customers for supporting us for as long as they did. Believe me, I cried a lot of tears when we had to make this decision. I feel like I’m losing a member of my family. It’s been really hard. I’m sure some people don’t care, but the people who do care, care a lot — and that has meant a lot to me."

www.anniessocialclub.com

Perfect kiss

November 18, 2009

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC When Black Sabbath comes on, I’m instantly transported to those high school days of driving myself to class and headbanging to every track on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (Warner Bros., 1973) so hard I could barely see the road. Led Zeppelin forced me to do ridiculous amounts of air guitar in my room, while the Beatles saw me go through puberty and live in fear of the male species. Years later, Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (EMI, 1985) was my soundtrack to falling wildly, truly in love.

The floating world in which memories exist is the same zone where the narratives of our lives take form. For any music freak, certain albums, guitar solos, or screeched lyrics bring the mind’s-eye back to that realm. Alan Palomo, the man behind the electro-psych project Neon Indian explicitly mines this tendency with a laser-like synth sound that seems swiped directly from the early 1980s.

"Music is getting more and more referential," said the Mexican-born, Texas-raised Palomo. "It’s becoming all about context. It’s not just about hearing a song, it’s about hearing it reverberating out of a room and trying to find sense in that. It’s about hearing a song playing in the other room when you were four while eating Cap’n Crunch."

What ’80s kid doesn’t get wistful about watching cartoons in the morning over a bowl of soggy cereal? The music Palomo creates on keyboards, samplers, and mixers taps into the collective consciousness of anyone who lived through that particular decade. Neon Indian’s seamless first full-length Psychic Chasms (Lefse) fuses the more dancefloor-oriented sounds of New Order with the chugging electronic pop of Electric Light Orchestra. Lyrically, it taps into themes of youth that are forever cherished in the corners of our brains: mindless delinquency, the lazy days of summer, and unruly hormones.

"I feel like it was a whimsical generation," Palomo says regarding the pop culture decade that spawned many of his influences. "The music had a really strange quality. It’s cheesy but very sincere — there’s a heartfelt vibe. A lot of music these days doesn’t really attract me on that emotional level because it doesn’t have the same narrative qualities. Those songs [from the ’80s] tell stories, and now people are afraid to do that."

Some writers have pinpointed Neon Indian as part of a blossoming sound that boasts newfangled genre tags like chillwave, glo-fi, tape-hiss, or hypnagogic pop because of its laid-back, homespun, synthy, foggy-eyed psychedelic artistry. It’s been everywhere since this summer, as hazy bits of songs from the distant past of cassette music and analog sound are lovingly reinvoked by a slew of new outfits such as Washed Out, Toro Y Moi, and Memory Tapes. But Palomo, who performs with a full band onstage, believes that Neon Indian is distinct.

"I don’t see myself in chillwave, even though others do," Palomo says. "Neon Indian is not completely about nostalgia. It should also be about songwriting. And it’s not necessarily just revisiting stuff. I always see it as a continuation of the sound. Why does a genre have to end? It can just evolve. People really want that kind of emotional experience in music."
Psychic Chasms is a heady collection of inventive retro-futuristic pop homages that play with funk and disco, Nintendo bleeps and burps, bent and breathy vocals, and distorted guitars. Palomo, a self-described extrovert, wrote the album over the course of three weeks fueled by intuition and solitude. "I felt like a deadbeat and wrote music all the time," he explains. "It’s called Psychic Chasms because it sounds like an interior land survey, like I was trying to map out the way my mind works, the memories that plague me consistently, and how they determine my emotional dispositions now. The older you grow, the more convoluted memory becomes."

NEON INDIAN

With The Love X Nowhere, Nite Jewel

Thurs/19, 8 p.m. $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

The sky is his

November 18, 2009

arts@sfbg.com

Call it revenge of the G-funk era.

Yes, the sound that sparked a bicoastal beef and led to the murder of two rap superstars has made a roaring comeback. It invited mimicry (Kriss Kross’ 1992 "Jump" and the Notorious B.I.G.’s 1994 "Big Poppa"); scorn ("It’s the money," DJ Shadow noted with dripping sarcasm as he queued up that bleating keyboard line once more on "Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96"); and eventually got played-out like flannel shirts and Doc Martens. But now, it has returned. British music fans, always keen on a good nickname, call it "boogie-funk," referencing an additional presence: the early 1980s computer-funk of heroes like George Clinton and Dirty Mind-era Prince. The two scenes and sounds — 1980s post-disco funksters in their outrageously gussied-up costumes and processed hair, and 1990s West Coast hoo-bangers paying homage to their childhood with P-Funk and Isley Brothers samples — seem entirely dissimilar. But Damon Riddick, known as Dam-Funk, bridges the gap.

"I’m not a fad," says Dam-Funk. "I didn’t discover this six months ago. I’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s real and sincere. It’s not fake."

With his straightened windswept hair and imposing mustached visage, Dam-Funk looks like a funk lord from the early ’80s — a potential target for Dave Chappelle. But he’s not being ironic. On his new album Toeachiszown (Stones Throw), as synthesized melodies waft about angelically, when he sings the title words of "The Sky is Ours" in a slight falsetto, his emotional sincerity is palpable.

Dam-Funk is both badass L.A. dude and sensitive soul. He misses the "boogie-funk" era, and the svelte keyboard-and-bass-bottom of Mtume’s 1982 "Juicy Fruit" and the Dazz Band’s 1983 "Joystick." It briefly flourished in early-’80s black communities before other forms like hip-hop, house music, smooth jazz, and New Jack Swing buried it. Mostly forgotten by scholars or inaccurately mixed up with disco or house, the "boogie-funk" period rarely drew serious attention until recently.

"What I’m trying to do is further the love of groups like Slave, Aura, One Way, Mtume," says Dam-Funk. "When Run-DMC dropped with "It’s Like That" [in 1983], it was over. Everything went hard, masculine, balls-out, throw your fists in the air, that kind of thing. Now that we got [past] the giddy excitement over that aspect of hip-hop, people are discovering the beautiful chords. It’s okay to do chords that feel good inside."

Dam-Funk’s hip-hop edge comes from playing keyboards for Allfromthai, Mack 10, and other G-funk artists in the late-1990s. His most memorable session was playing on Westside Connection’s 1998 "Let It Reign." "It was crazy to walk in the studio with [Ice] Cube on one end, Mack 10 on the other end with the red shoelaces, WC over at the other end, and there’s about 20 other dudes in the studio, with the weed guy showing up," he laughs. "And cats were so respectful, man. Nobody was really tripping. Everyone looks at those guys like they were hoodlums. But they weren’t. They were just really into music."

Earlier that decade, the man then known as Damon Riddick apprenticed as a teenager with Leon Sylvers, the super-producer behind the Sylvers (1975’s "Boogie People") and black radio hits like Shalamar’s 1979 "The Second Time Around" and the Whispers’ "It’s A Love Thing" (1981). He recorded a few demos with Sylvers. "It didn’t turn into anything, but I still kept in touch with him," Dam-Funk says. "He taught me a lot about production technique."

Dam-Funk’s L.A. swagger pops up in his song titles ("Hood Pass Intact" and "Killdat a.k.a. Killdatmuthafucka") and his postmodern (or post-boogie) approach to early-’80s computer funk. He weaves dense instrumentals that sprawl for up to eight minutes, but tosses in enough slight chord changes to maintain interest. And unlike his boogie-funk predecessors, who maddeningly flitted between brilliant dance floor ragers and sappy slow dance ballads, he sticks to a certain tempo and mines it.

At two-and-a-half-hours and two CDs long, Toeachizown is remarkably inventive. Its spacey, bedazzled vibe rarely changes, but it doesn’t bore, either; it’s like a lovely waltz. On "Keep Lookin’ 2 The Sky," Dam-Funk uses audioprocessing to chant over ascendant synth lines, creating visions of a computer-manned rocketship. "10 West," like so many of the tracks, is quiet and balletic, drawing inspiration from electronic fusion pioneers like Paul Hardcastle.

If G-funk launched Dam-Funk’s career, then Toeachizown launches him into the heavens. "The sounds [are] progressive, hood, fantasy, all those things mixed up," he explains. "1982-slash-2022."

DAM-FUNK

Nov. 24, 9 p.m., $22-25

With Warren G, U-N-I

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependent.sf

Komeback Kink

November 11, 2009

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC MLK’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations, shaken confidence in Vietnam after a bloody and vengeful Tet Offensive, Haight-Ashbury’s rapid dissolving into a breeding ground for lost and burned-out hippies pathetically clinging to the idyllic notion of a "Summer of Love," and a free Charles Manson settling in Laurel Canyon to plot the perverse and gruesome murders his "family" would soon commit. Yes, 1968 was the year the darkness had arrived. Certainly flower power had gone wrong, wilting its way toward a strong sense of paranoia that not only seeped its way into society’s psyche and politics, but into popular music as well.

Stripped in tone and oftentimes more raw-sounding than the overly-produced psychedelia that dominated the previous two years, the Kinks’ masterfully produced November 1968 classic The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society is a prime example of Ray Davies’ maturing writing skill. It especially shines as an artist’s profound expression of his own insecurities. Village Green is loaded with accounts of Davies’ vain obsessions and his fears. It’s a document of the human condition — in particular, people’s longings to leave a lasting legacy and be remembered.

Thematically, Davies works himself into a frenzy, unable to live for the moment, facing the pressures of fading British tradition (on the title track) and changes in technology ("Last of the Steam-Powered Trains"), both of which symbolize a changing of the guard and uncertainty about how the album’s protagonist fits into the world. Don’t underestimate Davies’ fears of growing old. The bitterness on "Do You Remember Walter?" is almost too much to bear. It fits well, though, making Village Green a cohesive unit. Here he criticizes an old friend who he assumes has grown old, boring, and out of shape. But his disdain stems from Ray’s fear of being Walter (i.e., washed up), and is connected to the fact that Walter has moved on in life and perhaps wouldn’t even recognize or remember his dear old friend.

With its simple and bucolic flair, "Sitting by the Riverside" seems familiar enough. The ditty should be relaxing, with its nice, easy-going melody, but Ray even corrupts something seemingly innocent with a manic "la-da-da" that chimes in on occasion before bursting to a near crescendo during the song’s outro, sounding like a bad drug experience.

Listening to Village Green‘s "All of My Friends Were There," I’ve always imagined it playing at someone’s birthday party, with — of course — all their friends present. But it seems to be more of a performance with all eyes on Davies, because he’s built it in his head to be the biggest day in his life. Once again we see his sick longing to feel love, attention, and validation, this time through the power of numbers. Unfortunately, his gathering backfires to disastrous results. It’s just as well. Somehow I have a feeling that no matter how many people were present, he still feels alone and empty.

Two Village Green songs, "Picture Book" and the album-closing "People Take Pictures of Each Other," focus on how photographs are supposed to fill some sort of void, making us seem more important than we really are — as if a photograph is necessary to validate our feelings of love for one another and emotions from our past. Davies argues that we take pictures of one another to prove our existence. At the same time, he’s caught up in paranoid visions of what his own photograph will look like when he’s an old man: "Picture yourself, when you’re getting old." Finally a bit of optimism peeks through, but in an unsure way, when he sings, "People often change, but memories of people can remain." That is to say, I can remember you however I choose.

RAY DAVIES

Thurs/12, 8 p.m., $40–$57

The Warfield

982 Market, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

Hello, cello

November 11, 2009

molly@sfbg.com

There is something hauntingly beautiful — if not downright sexy — about the cello: a musician straddling the feminine curves of a human-sized instrument, bow sliding slowly and elegantly over the trembling strings, fingers plucking and vibrating in alternately gentle and assertive motions, and tones emitting from the smooth wood that range everywhere from soft whispers to deep moans.

It’s no wonder the cello has been compared to both the human voice and, in the many portraits of women’s backs painted to look like string instruments, the human body.

So perhaps it should also be no wonder that lately, particularly in the Bay Area, the cello has gained new popularity — one outside of the traditional concert hall. Cellists like Zoe Keating, formerly of Rasputina, and Sam Bass, of Loop!Station and Les Claypool, are gaining the kind of recognition formerly reserved for indie rockers. Cello Madness Congress, the monthly improv jam hosted by Joey Chang a.k.a. Cello Joe, regularly draws a crowd of musicians and enthusiasts alike. Cello Bazaar, a monthly cello concert held at Café Bazaar in the Richmond District, has become so popular it might have to expand. And Rushad Eggleston’s punk band Tornado Rider has rock ‘n’roll lovers moshing to cello music at venues like Red Devil Lounge. Not only does cello music seem to be a trend, as Cello Bazaar founder Hannah Addario-Berry says, "it’s a total scene."

Perhaps one reason for the increased visibility of cello in the Bay Area is due to recent developments in classical music. As symphonies get less funding and young musicians become more adventurous, classical musicians are finding new ways to play and new venues to play in. The most visible of these is Classical Revolution, which has taken instruments like violin, piano, and, yes, cello, out of the stuffy concert hall and into Revolution Cafe and SoCha Café for casual weekly concerts.

These gatherings are particularly advantageous for cellists. In an orchestra setting, cello tends to play a supportive roll. But there is a fabulous repertoire of music meant to be played by several cellos together, thanks mostly to the cello’s remarkable range. In a non-symphony setting, the cello can more easily take center stage.

Plus, cellists seem to like to socialize and harmonize together. Perhaps because of their role in larger symphonies, cellists tend not to be particularly competitive (unlike violinists, for example, who often compete for solos). Some musicians say people drawn to cello are naturally more easy-going than those drawn to other instruments. Others say that there is more a group of cellos can do together sonically than, say, a group of flutes. "Brass sections are incredibly social too," says Addario-Berry. "But of the string family, I’ve found cellists to be the ones who most want to hang out together."

But perhaps the largest reason for the cello’s new visibility and popularity is its versatility. The artist most famous for exploring the possibilities for cello is Yo-Yo Ma, but these days all kinds of artists are finding ways to use cello in other in the music of various cultures, in rock, and in electronic music. Indeed, it was the infinite possibilities for layering different cello sounds over each other and over the human voice that inspired the cycle of songs that composer/singer Amy X Neuburg began writing for the three-piece Cello Chixtet in 2005 — the same qualities that make Loop!Station’s sound so rich and varied, even though they’re only two people (and only one instrument).

One of the most exciting new developments, though, is not just using the cello with rock but to rock. According to Eggleston, who straps on his sticker-covered cello and plays it like an electric guitar, the progression is a natural one. With a cello you can play power chords with one finger instead of two, he says. There’s infinite sustain because there’s a bow. You don’t need a wah-wah pedal because you can get different harmonics from one string. Because there are no frets, you can bend notes various ways and get subtle details you can’t get from a guitar. Plus you have the option of sliding and jumping around on the frets. "It’s kind of like a vicious harmonica/slide guitar/ metal guitar/wild cat," he says.

But whatever direction cellists are taking, the Bay Area music community seems supportive. "So many people are intimidated by the concert hall protocol … not knowing when to clap and not to cough," says Addario-Berry. "The idea of taking cello music to people in a comfortable environment is really important."

Or as Eggleston puts it, "Yay! Cello power!"

UPCOMING CELLO EVENTS

CELLO BAZAAR

Tues/17, 7 p.m.

Bazaar Café

5927 California, SF

(415) 831-5620

www.bazaarcafe.com

JOEY CHANG AND THE SHOW

Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m.; $5

Blue Macaw

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 920-0577

thebluemacawsf.com

TORNADO RIDER

Nov. 20, 9 p.m.; $10

The Uptown

1928 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.uptownnightclub.com

CELLO MADNESS CONGRESS

Nov. 25, 8 p.m.; free

Blue Macaw

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 920-0577

thebluemacawsf.com

Ty Segall

November 4, 2009

arts@sfbg.com

"Anything can really fly in a song with me," says garage-rock savant Ty Segall. Fast cars, and ugly attitudes pasted on pretty ladies, anyone? "But I don’t like writing songs with the words girl or baby in them. It’s rock ‘n’ roll, but the bad part of rock ‘n’ roll is it’s been done too much."

Don’t get Segall wrong. He may have recently graduated from the University of San Francisco with a degree in media studies, but he’s still an avid student of an ear-popping sound. He bashes out the jams, smashes through complacency, and carries a big guitar. "There are too many love songs out there," he continues, "though there are great ones. And I’ve written songs with girl and baby in them, but I was a lot younger."

The Laguna Beach-bred Segall harks back to the time when rock ‘n’ roll was a very young man’s — not graying boomer’s — game. At the tender age of 22, the prolific musicmaker has already established a beachhead in the underground as a go-to, go-anywhere, ultra-prolific talent, whether he’s playing with SoCal’s Epsilons or his fellow Orange County pals in the SF-based Traditional Fools, going solo as a manic one-man band on vocals, guitar, and kick drum, or pinch-hitting in the Mothballs, the Fresh and Onlys, or Sic Alps.

It’s been a bustling year for Segall, speaking from his SF home on a cool, sunny autumnal weekday. In line with this spring’s collegiate graduation, he also graduated from the comforts of a band to sailing solo with his first self-titled full-length on Thee Oh Sees honcho John Dwyer’s Castle Face imprint, released late last year. The gooey, reverb-happy, echo-rific document of his one-man-band approach kept one ear on old-school garage grandpappies like the Standells and another on kindred spirits and contemporaries such as the Black Lips.

Snapping at its heels came this summer’s second solo LP, Lemons (Goner), a blast from Segall’s past consisting of old and new tunes he tracked in his bedroom, songs that cried out for a full band treatment. Wringing rockin’ poetry out of the very state of speechlessness ("Can’t Talk"), Segall synthesizes the blunt-force melodicism of Sic Alps ("Cents"), filtering it through a sensibility fostered on the skate vid soundtracks and classic pop songwriting.

www.myspace.com/tysegall

>>GOLDIES 2009: The 21st Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery awards, honoring the Bay’s best in arts

Saviours

November 4, 2009

Saviours had their backs against the wall. Their new album was languishing without a title, and their record label was threatening to banish its release date to the wilds of 2010 if they didn’t think of one — by the end of the day. Suggestions like "The Shlong Remains the Same" went nowhere. In these dire circumstances, it took a snippet of half-remembered conversation to germinate the perfect name, one that would encapsulate the band on-stage and off. On Oct. 26, Saviours released Accelerated Living (Kemado Records).

Sitting in the back booth of a Valencia Street bar, guitarist Austin Barber explains the accelerated lifestyle: "The world might view it as a negative, but it’s just fucking partying hard, fucking getting some — as much as possible." Though the band draws extensive musical inspiration from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the title speaks most directly to the way they emulate these road warrior forbearers, hewing to the life of rock ‘n’ roll kings with an almost philosophical dedication.

The music itself has also accelerated. "That’s why it was the perfect title," drummer Scott Batiste chimes in. The group’s previous full-length, Into Abaddon (Kemado, 2008) had the feel of a classic stoner metal record, with massive, reverberant riffs and hypnotic grooves. Accelerated Living introduced better songwriting, better musicianship, more complicated arrangements, and above all, faster tempos. "I like the idea of the band getting more and more aggressive, instead of wussing out like other bands do," continues Batiste. "They get weaker and weaker, and more and more accessible. I feel like the more we play together, the better we get, the more potential we have."

At this point, the potential is practically limitless. The new record captures a band resplendent in its newfound ability — even the most jaded metalheads would be hard-pressed to find a dud riff, let alone a dud song. From the propulsive downbeat attack of "Acid Hand" to the titanic opening riffs of album closer "Eternal High," all you hear is Saviours picking up speed, with the pedal to the metal.

www.myspace.com/saviours666

>>GOLDIES 2009: The 21st Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery awards, honoring the Bay’s best in arts

Honey Soundsystem

November 4, 2009

marke@sfbg.com

Believe it or not (and you better believe it), until a few years ago, gay club music was a monolith, a Spandexed, Botoxed, over-toxed Easter Island rictus of fake-techno squeals and outrageous divas. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that (except: yawn), and as far as such a thing called "gay club music" exists, the Gaga-Rihanna-Madonna industrial complex still reigns.

What’s different now is the music available in the gay clubs, from punky no-wave, old-school vogue, and bathhouse chestnuts to Berlin minimal, nu-IDM, and space disco. Nobody’s been more on the forefront of this youthful wave of change than Honey Soundsystem. The hyperactively crafty collective — currently composed of DJs Ken Vulsion, Pee Play, Josh Cheon, Robot Hustle, and Jason Kendig — hits a genre-busting musical sweet spot in its decades-spanning sets (Honey was formed in 2005 when Ken Vulsion, a veteran of the early ’90s Manhattan club kid scene, heard Pee Play, then 19, throw down an Adam and the Ants reedit at Café Flor) that could rightly be called ahistoric if it wasn’t so rooted in a conceptual sense of the gay past. Even as it plays club host to such cutting-edge talents as Stefan Goldman, C.L.A.W.S, and Disco Dromo, the collective foregrounds, in flyer art and party theme, its appreciation for AIDS-era icons like Keith Haring, Willi Ninja, Larry Levan, and Patrick Cowley, the local electronic music originator who was the subject of a brilliant art and music retrospective put on by Honey in October.

After roaming its way through practically every alternative space in the city — and recently having its equipment impounded by police at an underground party — Honey’s found a home on Sunday nights above Paradise Lounge, where it truly lets its freaky fag flag fly. "We focus on quality, not on singularities," Ken Vulsion says. "We’re not about this one type of music, this one type of scene. We have a loyal following of fun, creative people who never know what to expect — except that it’ll be a great party."

"Plus," adds Pee Play, "there are five of us, so if some tired queen wants to complain they have no idea who to go to."

www.honeysoundsystem.com

>>GOLDIES 2009: The 21st Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery awards, honoring the Bay’s best in arts

D-Lo

November 4, 2009

"Rappin’ wasn’t my first dream," admits 20-year-old D’Angelo Porter. "It was pro basketball. I always had good grades because of basketball."

Yet fate had other plans for the man known as D-Lo. A dabbler in rap who’d only made a few tracks, D-Lo went into his friend’s studio alone one night in February 2007, determined "to find [his] swag" on the mic. He made a stomping, minimalist beat — his first — on Fruity Loops, over which he discovered his style: a hyperactive staccato with a slight rasp, a little like Keak Da Sneak in a higher register. The song, "No Hoe," undeniably slapped, prompting D-Lo and his brother, Sleepy D, also new to rap, to burn CD singles and hand them out at BART stations, schools, and so on.

Two months later, D-Lo began serving a year in the county jail for attempted robbery, ending his hoop dreams. Yet Sleepy continued pushing "No Hoe" in the Oakland streets and on MySpace, and the song went viral. On the evening of his release in 2008, D-Lo performed his first show, in Richmond.

"I wasn’t nervous," he says. "I wanted to see if people knew the song. As soon as I come on, everybody went crazy."

Throughout 2008, D-Lo kept pushing the song, which soon found its way into the clubs. A low-budget video on YouTube kept the buzz alive; meanwhile D-Lo hooked up with Clear Label/PTB, the label responsible for Beeda Weeda’s success. Before long, KMEL was getting tons of requests for a song it couldn’t play on the radio.

But D-Lo managed to make an acceptably "clean" version for airplay. He also put together a high-profile remix featuring Beeda, E-40, and the Jacka. More crucially, to prove he wasn’t a fluke, he released a new, broadcast-friendly single, "You Played Me," with a hook sung by Rico the Kid. D-Lo’s MySpace page tells the story: "No Hoe" earned an impressive 900,000 hits over the past two years, but "You Played Me" garnered 1.1 million in a matter of months. While "You Played Me" is slated for D-Lo’s upcoming SMC debut, Undeniable Talent, the original and remix of "No Hoe" are available now on his "pre-album," The Tonite Show with D-Lo (Clear Label/PTB), among the best so far in the DJ Fresh-produced series.

With his grassroots rise and radio-readiness, D-Lo has attracted the attention of companies like Interscope and Def Jam. Perhaps he could be the new Bay rapper who finally breaks through to major label glory — a prospect he greets with both impatience and resolve.

"The shit be slow," he says of major label talks. "But I wouldn’t be as popular as I am for nothing, so I keep pushin’."

www.myspace.com/mrnohoe

>>GOLDIES 2009: The 21st Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery awards, honoring the Bay’s best in arts

Do you remember?

October 28, 2009

Multicultural

hot vocals

everywhere I go

I get love from the locals — Mac Dre, "The Genie of the Lamp"

MUSIC "A mack is different from a pimp," Mac Mall tells me. "A pimp would starve without a woman. But a mack is a master of creativity. He can manipulate any situation."

As a "third-generation mack" from Vallejo’s notorious Crestside hood, Mac Mall knows whereof he speaks. "Mack" is an age-old term in the Bay, lending itself to the region’s premier blaxploitation film, The Mack (1973). Yet, Mall reveals, "There ain’t gonna be anymore rappers named ‘Mac’ out of the Crest" because the title has accrued too much tragedy. The very first rapper — in both the Crest and Vallejo itself — was the Mac, Michael Robinson, who was murdered in a case of mistaken identity in 1990. But the immediate catalyst for the name’s retirement was the murder of André Hicks, a.k.a. Mac Dre, who was gunned down Nov. 1, 2004 in Kansas City.

Five years later, Dre is more popular than ever, receiving the kind of universal love in the Bay generally reserved for 2pac. Images of Dre are so ubiquitous the lead single from Mall’s just-released Mac to the Future (Thizzlamic) is "Mac Dre T-Shirt."

"It’s the flag of the whole Bay," Mall says. "Even if you’s old, you know that face because you seen it everywhere. Dre’s part of our culture, like the Grateful Dead."

Yet Mall admits he and others among Dre’s Thizz Entertainment empire feel occasional ambivalence about Dre’s iconographic status. "I know we share him with the world," he says. "It be hard sometimes because he’s so us. He’s ours. But I opened my mind: even if they’ll never get it, there’s something like us they relate to in there, something everyone can grab onto."

Some of Dre’s appeal is, of course, obvious. Unlike many rappers, he had a gangsta authenticity, partly stemming from almost five years in prison for conspiracy to rob a bank (although he and his actual bank-robber friends — like rapper J-Diggs — insisted he was innocent). But far more important is his humor, expressed in unexpected metaphors ("get on a nigga’s head like some headphones"), goofy characters (Ronald Dregan, Thizzelle Washington), and a life-of-the-party attitude, even concocting his own dances (the Furley, the Thizzelle Dance). What other thug could rock cardigans and Burberry? With his lean, lanky frame and outrageous hairstyles, Dre was like a combination Snoop Dogg and Humpty Hump.

According to Mistah F.A.B., whose breakthrough disc Son of a Pimp (2005) came out on Thizz, Snoop himself is fan.

"Snoop was watching [Dre’s DVD] Treal TV (2003)," F.A.B. reports, "and was like, ‘That nigga’s a fool!’ When someone big as Snoop gives Dre the respect and love, that lets you know the ability he had."

"He wasn’t the average of what we produce," says Dre’s close friend and fellow Cutthroat Committee-member Dubai. "He excelled in the game like, left-wing, not how you’re used to someone doing it. The average motherfucker who do it like this is a weirdo, and this dude is cool as fuck. So it opened up motherfuckers. You can come through and be yourself."

All of Dre’s friends I spoke to brought up this same point. As Mac Mall put it, "He let people feel free. He went to the pen and could’ve been rappin about the hardest stuff, but he was more about having fun. Everyone gives you a façade, but Dre was a whole."

Mistah F.A.B. even links Dre’s wholeness to his penchant for characters. "They were all aspects of his personality," he says. "When you deal with truth, you have nothing to hide. You can keep moving forward by being yourself."

For the Jacka — who, as a member of the Mob Figaz, released the group’s Best of (2005) on Thizz — Dre’s integrity accounts for both his broad appeal and his positive influence. "He wasn’t ashamed to be who he was," Jacka recalls. "He was one way with everybody. But he knew how to talk to people of any race and showed us how to be around whites and Mexicans and be like, these dudes are cool too."

"He was like a Martin Luther King," Jacka says. "People might not understand what I mean by that, but if you were in the streets, you understand."

Whether or not Jacka’s claim seems excessive, it’s striking to see the actions taken in the name of Mac Dre. Among the labyrinthine divisions of Thizz Entertainment — such as Mall’s new Thizzlamic imprint — is Thizz Latin, an unprecedented alliance between black and Latino rappers, which, for a seemingly insular hood like Crestside, is most impressive. "I’m proud of what Thizz Latin is doing," Mac Mall says. "In L.A., the blacks and the Latins don’t get along. But in the Bay, we together."

Between that and the 2pac-like way in which his death brought a much needed fellow-feeling within the notoriously internecine environment of Bay rap, Dre has had a profound influence over the past five years. "I want the positive about Dre to be remembered," Jacka concludes. "For people to look past the hard part. He created ‘going dumb,’ but that’s not all he wanted to leave behind."

Ghostly hardware

October 28, 2009

johnny@sfbg.com

MUSIC Be aware — from new albums by Cold Cave to reissues on Minimal Wave, neo-gothic strains are in the air. Take one listen to the debut album by Demdike Stare. ‘Tis the season of the witch, but the spells cast by the 11 tracks on Symbiosis (Modern Love) will last well past Halloween to contend on Top 10 lists. Mancunian pair Miles Whitaker and Sean Canty tap into the oft-latent creep factor of dub and the vast darkness of techno, incorporating metal and film scores into those genres’ expansive space to create a distinctively present haunted sound. Neo-goths tend to have better aesthetics than their forebears, and this is the case here, as Whitaker and Canty pay homage to a classic 1922 cult film on witchcraft ("Haxan Dub"; "Haxan") and name their group after 17th-century reputed witch Elizabeth Southerns. Symbiosis is not without humor, though, particularly on "Entwistle Hall" (where moaning gives way to a climactic shriek) and "Trapped Dervish," which sounds exactly like its title.

Canty of Demdike Stare’s day job is at Andy Votel’s Finders Keepers label, the renowned crate-digging — grave-robbing? — label that recently unearthed Dracula’s Music Cabinet by the Vampires of Dartmore. A kitschy pre-krautrock oddity, that album adds quantity if not quality to the growing shelves of library music celebrated by the likes of Jonny Trunk, whose Trunk label has brought back the soundtracks of films such as Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and the original Wicker Man (1973). Connections between incidental and soundtrack music of the past and electronic musicians of the present are further — and better — underlined by Terror and Prey, the first releases by Muscovitch Music, a new label established by Joel Martin, who, along with Matt Edwards of Radioslave, is half of the neo-exotica act Quiet Village. The standout of the pair of film soundtracks by Ivor Slaney, Terror favors cold wave minimal electronic flourishes over generic rock. Made in 1978, the movie itself stars Tricia Walsh, who recently had a renewed splash of fame as the bug-eyed "YouTube lady" ranting about her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s many infidelities.

Terror‘s director Norman J. Warren aimed to create a no-budget British answer to Dario Argento’s 1976 Italo horror vision Suspiria. The influence of Argento and his pet group Goblin hangs heavy over contemporary horror-tinged electronic music, from the solemn rock-oriented efforts of Pittsburgh duo Zombi to, most recently, the comedic Horror Disco (Bear Funk) by Bottin. Bottin taps into the fact that Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti was a top creator of Italo disco, and also crafts an Italian answer to the cult games of France’s Black Devil Disco Club.

Neo-goth and horror music is an international phenomenon, ranging from the Knife in Sweden and Bottin in Italy to the U.S., where Philadelphia’s Cold Cave resides. Cremations (Hospital Productions) compiles parched, nihilistic alienation odes from Wesley Eisold’s early EPs, such as "Sex Ads," but it’s Love Comes Close (Matador) — with ex-Xiu Xiu member Caralee McElwoy brought into the fold — that connects as Cold Cave’s crossover move, the type of recording that will bring the trend to the mainstream. Yet in invoking Sisters of Mercy, Cabaret Voltaire, and Pornography-era Cure, Love Comes Close is not alone this year: the criminally ignored Chatterton (Systematic) by American-expat-in-Germany Chelonis R. Jones did so back in the spring, while updating Goblin’s Suspiria death drums on "Rehabilitation."

Still, England may be the current ground zero for neo-goth and retro and contempo sounds of horror, thanks in part to Demdike Stare, and to Trunk, Finders Keepers, and other labels. The latest spectral proof is Broadcast and Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (Warp). The Broadcast and Focus Group collaboration is a playful cousin of Symbiosis and a 21st-century musical answer to Bryan Forbes’ 1964 film Séance on a Wet Afternoon. Here, there, and everywhere, the ghosts aren’t just in the machine, they’re running it.

Son of the source

October 28, 2009

California my way: Pacifica in all her roaring glory; "Bluebird"; Gene Clark suffering for his art at the Troubadour; Arthur Lee perched atop Laurel Canyon as dark magus of the Sunset Strip; "Free Huey!"; George Hunter and the Charlatans giving birth to the ’60s in Frisco and Virginia City; redbones holding it down at Alcatraz; Barry White’s boudoir epics vs. War’s low rider country-funk; r.i.p. Nudie Cohn; surf-and-skate as spiritual practice and Third World coalition builder at street level; "We’ll Get By"; Mary Ellen Pleasants; Sly Stone’s pop hoodoo; "¡Viva Cesar Chavez!"; the Watts Towers as organic temple and pan-African signifier; Iron Eyes Cody; the impenetrable alien secrets of Joshua Tree; Citizen Kane; Country Joe McDonald in a helmet ripping "Section 43" at Monterey; Jack London’s and Charles Manson’s erudite racism; rebellions yielding the "black Woodstock," Wattstax; Skid Row tacos; alas, poor Ishi; is Mount Shasta really an Atlantean portal?; "Snakes on Everything"; RTX; a great big wave looming to wash away Neil Young and his spindly wood home from Topanga Canyon; Chet Helms, my hero; really tall red trees — and the glossy harmonies of the Mamas & the Papas, much beloved favorites of my mother before she left upon her starship. Their masterpiece "California Dreamin’" was on my mind as Indian summer gave way to autumn and the 40th anniversaries of polarized cosmic events such as the man on the moon, Woodstock, the Manson murders, the late Michael Jackson’s pop debut unfolded apace.

Harvey Kubernik, a keenly clued-in and cosmically sensitive Pisces born in Hollywood, just dropped this season’s key entry chronicling that era and its ever-lingering aftereffects: the fine Laurel Canyon study Canyon of Dreams (Sterling, 384 pages, $29.95). Much of what made California north and south such a prime destination to escape the limits and cruel lacunae of Manifest Destiny in the 1960s went down in the postwar boomtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles and their ex-urban satellites. Kubernik focuses on the tall tales of L.A . He reveals how the creativity, social experimentation, and mystery yearning of the denizens of canyons on L.A.’s west side changed America as it was teleported on the airwaves and on the backs of freaky-deak human hosts. The elite and cult acts that largely power Kubernik’s fables — Gene Clark; Arthurly; Gram Parsons; Lowell George; John and Michelle Phillips; the magicians of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young — have left towering sonic, sartorial, and spiritual legacies. Yet Kubernik is not mired in the misty mountain-hopping of yesteryear — he’s keen enough to close Canyon of Dreams with a portrait of one of that halcyon era’s most important heirs: Jonathan Wilson.

Y’all can ken whether Wilson deserves to be the coda of Kubernik’s book when his Emerald Triangle Tour featuring Jonathan Rice, Farmer Dave Scher, and local light Andy Cabic rolls into town. Yet the evidence is there in his extant albums — 1998’s The Ballad of Hope Nicholls (by his former band, North Carolina’s Muscadine); 2007’s Frankie Ray, and 2008’s Gentle Spirit — and his myriad contributions to the projects of friends. I can hear, see, and most important, feel some measure of all that makes California utopian, the South home, and America an ideal worth fighting for, despite their respective horrors, in Wilson’s music.

New York, N.Y., with its epic filth, noise, and madding crowds, was not so kind to Wilson when he made the inevitable leap from North Cackalack. Still, he excavated a great artifact of the artist-as-young-man from the experience: Frankie Ray. With the move to California, that recording’s odes to heartbreak and alienation gave way to shimmering hymns to nature arrayed across no less than four unreleased song cycles and counting. Gentle Spirit simply displays Wilson as revelation, but it was his cover of an innocuous Madonna hit (first offered to Michael Jackson) from the mid-1980s that truly convinced me of his indelible gifts. He transfigures "La Isla Bonita" beyond recognition — it starts out as an Allman Brothers outtake and slowly, steadily evolves into a 3-D spaghetti western, then a metallic, mountain-ringing treatise of electric guitar evangelism. His forthcoming covers album, I’m Covered, OK?, should make plain the wonders of his rare gift for interpretation.

To quote the once-mighty Pointer Sisters as they backed Wilson’s fellow underrated North Carolina maverick Betty Davis: "Y’all got to believe, believe in sumthin’ … Why not believe in me?" This grandbaby of a Southern Baptist preacher from southwest Georgia would never steer your ears or asses wrong. I was once accused by a former editor of dancing around my keyboard as I wrote (and what’s wrong with that?). I don’t; I have "spells" like Harriet Tubman, like Joseph Smith in the upstate New York woods, or Edgar Cayce’s automatic writing — as with this piece. Yes, I want to convert you, get you onboard the underground smellroad to Glory. I follow the Spirit and my black ass — and the loose booty’s hollerin’: make pilgrimage with Jonathan Wilson and ‘nem up the coast if you’re magical and mystical friends of the road.

THE EMERALD TRIANGLE TOUR

Mon/2, 8 p.m. (doors at 7:30 p.m.), $15

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.independentsf.com

Serene velocity

October 28, 2009

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Blues Control is an instrumental rock band, but don’t hold that against them. The extended compositions and caterwauling guitars and keyboards may suggest post-rock bloat, but unlike many of their voiceless brethren, the duo knows that freedom is found in limits. Their crafty deployment of prerecorded loops and particularized live effects has etched a signature sound that’s at once distinct and nostalgic. They’re one of those mood ring groups that summons a whole lineage of avant-garde rock without exactly adhering to any one dominant influence. Pretty good, considering it started as a lark: needing an alter ego to protect their collaboration as Watersports from overexposure, Russ Waterhouse and Lea Cho fabricated Blues Control. Both projects were born under the sign of kosmische, but the newer songs refocused the drone zone with coaguutf8g tape loops and surprisingly friendly melodies. Hype soon followed.

If the duo’s name comes off as an unfortunate nod to the many non-black blues units over the years (whether Breakers or Brothers, a Project or an Explosion), the smirk stops there. You can find any iteration of psych-rock in their origami structures, but Blues Control is always playing itself. When I talk with Waterhouse on the phone from Ithaca, N.Y., where he and Cho are on tour, he discusses his aversion to the hollow games of genre signification that were in vogue in the 1990s — a significant disclaimer, since their most recent release, Local Flavor (Siltbreeze), is their most ranging yet.

"The basic principles and methods of working have basically remained the same since the beginning," says Waterhouse, but Local Flavor benefits from new attention to texture and sequencing. The quartet of songs traverses carefully arranged prog-rock ("Good Morning"), Coltrane-colored mystical jazz ("Rest on Water"), a prismatic dance groove ("Tangier"), and a Bitches Brew-worthy cauldron of ethereal tones, dubby sidesteps and angry guitar ("On Through the Night").

These different encounters with psychedelia are nested within disarmingly crude nuclei of borrowed rhythms and spectral melodies. Throughout, the distinct processes of jamming and collage are placed in productive conversation. It’s drug music without the inflated ego, a structuralist take on the basic rock furniture. When the core heats up, as on "Tangiers," Blues Control is close to perfect. Beginning with a breathy Casio loop, everything about the eight-minute track is percussive. A mashed, pulmonary beat hugs the centrifugal melody, while guitar and keyboard flares illuminate the elastic membrane stretching the song’s surface. Halfway through, after several exuberant plateaus, the rhythm scatters into double and triple-timed graininess, and the Michael Rother-like vapor trails spiral into their own repeating figures. Moment-to-moment, the composition seems unchanging and mantra-like; skipping around reveals a remarkable, covert movement.

Not all of Local Flavor burns so bright. The horn-laden riffage concluding "Good Morning" is particularly Phishy, but it’s a small misstep next to the dreamy gorgeousness of a track like "Paul’s Winter Solstice," from last year’s Christmas single for Sub Pop. I’ll leave it to the historiographers to explain why so many of the most interesting interpretations of rock music have come from duos over the last decade, but Blues Control undoubtedly figures into the argument for a mobile, minimalist muse.

"With this tour, we’re trying to follow through on some opportunities," Waterhouse explains. "A lot of people have told us we should come out to California because we would do well out there." The duo recently relocated from Queens, N.Y., to Virginia, but the people who recommended California were right on: with a group so equitably split between blissed-out drones and garage tactility, how could San Francisco not swoon? *

BLUES CONTROL

With Hank IV and Celine Dion

Thurs/5, 9 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF.

www.hemlocktavern.com

With Sic Alps and Jaws

Fri/6, 9 p.m., $5–$10

Continental Club

1658 12th St., Oakl.

(510) 444-9000

Anti-doofus agenda

October 28, 2009

arts@sfbg.com

LIT/MUSIC With influences ranging from the Cuban Revolution and Malcolm X to musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Sun Ra, Amiri Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetic. The movement and his published work — such as 1963’s signature study on African American music Blues People and the same year’s play Dutchman — practically seeded "the cultural corollary to black nationalism" of that revolutionary American milieu.

Baraka lives in Newark, N.J., with his wife and author Amina Baraka; they have five children and head the word-music ensemble Blue Ark: The Word Ship and co-direct Kimako’s Blues People, an art space housed in their theater basement for some 15 years. I spoke with him on the eve of an upcoming visit.

SFBG What brings you to the Bay Area this time around?

AMIRI BARAKA We’re doing two sets at Yoshi’s with Howard Wiley. Those are the kinds of musical things we have a nice time doing. I hope to bring the poetry and music to Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. And I’m giving a talk at the library.

SFBG What will you be discussing?

AB Obama and his first 10 months, based on an essay I wrote a few months ago called "We’re Already in the Future." I support Obama and I think that the people who supported him initially should keep supporting him because they are forgetting the huge difficulty he faces. This society, they don’t want any kind of change. They do not want him, first of all. Only 43 percent of the white people even voted for him, and a lot those people resent the fact that white America is now mulatto. That election proved that it’s not white America, it’s multinational America, so they’ve set up this roadblock to almost anything he does.

Anytime you can, you see how doofus Americans are, to oppose their own quality of life improvement, their own health care. They’d rather mope along with little health care or none simply because the corporations have convinced them it’s bad for them — it shows you that we have a real education gap in America. Not to mention the racism, which is behind a lot of it, big time.

The people who support Obama need to stand together to fight the right wing. It’s the right wing that is the enemy. Those huge corporations including those mouthpieces they have. The media is just absurd, with [Sean] Hannity, [Bill] O’Reilly, [Glenn] Beck, Rush Limbaugh. These guys are just too much. If they’re not racist, there is no such thing as racism.

SFBG I know that you spent some time in SF. What are your impressions of our city?

AB I was a visiting professor at San Francisco State for about three or four months, that was the extent of my residency. I like San Francisco. I’m drawn to the vibe there. The last time I was in San Francisco, I was reading at Ferlinghetti’s bookstore [City Lights]. Most of my stuff is in Oakland, but whenever I’m in Oakland, I stop by San Francisco.

Seems to me that San Francisco is very expensive, like New York. I live in Newark, N.J., which is 12 miles outside of New York City — it’s got that Oakland-San Francisco relationship. When you’re dealing with New York, you have that high-rent district all the way around. San Francisco is a beautiful city, but going there and being there are two different things.

SFBG Happy birthday. I know you just turned 75. Any wisdom to impart from three-quarters of a century?

AB I’ve been 75 for about five days. I can say that you really need to take care of yourself. That’s the cliché: "If I knew I was going be this old, I would have taken better care of myself," but it’s some better wisdom than what you hear generally.

SFBG You coined the term "Afrosurreal Expressionism." Can you share your definition?

AB If you know the African tales or even African writers and African cultures, then you know they understand the concept of having relationships reversed, which exposes new concepts and dimensions. They understood the power of the conscious and unconscious mind to change the dimensions of the world. The various forces of nature that people developed, that people saw as gods, these elemental forces: the wind, the water, the sun, the moon. They understood how human beings interrelate to those forces. Henry Dumas’ work dealt with these changing dimensions, and people who do strange things in realistic situations. It was Surrealism that changed the relationship to things. Dumas influenced Toni Morrison, who was his editor at Random House. He was a strong writer and he went out of here in a tragic way, being murdered by the police. His stories and poems are Afrosurreal, with African psychology imposing these dimensions on reality.

SFBG What is the role of the artist in the current climate, and what are the tools we can use to bring about social change?

AB The way things work: cause and effect, action and reaction. The ’60s and the ’70s were a period of intense struggle. The Black Arts Movement and the antiimperialist movement laid the foundation to get Obama elected. But then you get a reaction, and it has been quite evident. Imperialist commerce has taken over the arts. Once we were struggling to get black movies made — now we see what kinds of movies are being made by black people, and they are very backward. Act, react. We have to struggle anew to do something about these backwards elements.

Black people have 27 cities: we need 27 theaters, 27 galleries, 27 periodicals. We need to have poets, rappers, painters, actors struggling to raise the consciousness of the people. That is the role of the artist. Black people still live in these ghettos and these ‘hoods. There may be more of a black middle-class, but they often are the ones helping to keep us duped and bamboozled. This is a struggle that has to be. This is reality — like they say, "Keep it real." This is a struggle that has to be.

AMIRI BARAKA WITH THE HOWARD WILEY TRIO

Nov. 9, 8 p.m., $16–$20

Yoshi’s San Francisco

1330 Fillmore, SF

www.yoshis.com

Lovecraft, baby!

October 27, 2009

More on SFBG

>>New doc explores H.P. Lovecraft’s lasting influence — and Cthulhu slippers!

>Neo-goth and retro and contempo horror music pulse forth

arts@sfbg.com

Lovecraft is a resonating wave. He’s rock and roll.

— Neil Gaiman, "Concerning Dreams and Nightmares," The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death

LIT/MUSIC Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) attributes most of his fiction’s cosmology to the apocryphal Necronomicon, an ageless sort of anti-Bible that describes a universe of unfathomable strangeness superimposed over our own. Not content with obscurity, this alternate reality tends to extend its clammy tendrils into our collective line of vision, yielding all sorts of therapy-necessitating results. Of course, the Necronomicon‘s legend overshadows its reality. Yet in the kind of self-reflexive twist the famously anti-modern writer would have probably hated, the tome’s enduring mystique acts as a summation of his own work’s post-pulp shelf life.

Lovecraft never got a chance to see it happen, but the spawn of his fevered imagination has been consistently reproduced in all sorts of geek media, from role-playing games to plush dolls. Some of the most interesting representations of the reclusive author’s output, however, come from the realm of loud-ass rock music, another modern contrivance Lovecraft would have almost certainly despised.

The first instance of Lovecraft’s legacy infiltrating rock music seems to be with the late-1960s psychedelic folk outfit known as, appropriately enough, H.P. Lovecraft. This group took after the sense of fantastic spaciousness conveyed in its namesake’s oeuvre, meandering in dreamy walls of sound that circumvent any buried unease without actually going anywhere. "At the Mountains of Madness" from 1968’s H.P. Lovecraft II (Phillips) spends five or so minutes layering organ arpeggios, vocal harmonies, and a collage of period echo effects into one of the better musical approximations of a lava lamp — a languid sonic pattern that’s fun to lose yourself in for a while, before you realize the shifting plasma is never going to do anything crazier than its mannered glass walls will allow. It was a promising start, but the essential menace of these unexplored worlds seemed to intimidate the band, like the intrusive pang of fear that could send even the most cosmic of folk-rock trips spiraling into twisted Syd Barrett territory. It would take a group with a special predilection to the macabre to help steer Lovecraft-rock towards reaching its full potential.

By the early ’70s, H.P. Lovecraft and its like were devoured by the cyclopean (to borrow H.P.’s favorite adjective) Black Sabbath, whose Black Sabbath (Warner Brothers, 1970) pays homage to the neurotic master with the typically sinister power-groove of "Beyond the Wall of Sleep." In what should come as no surprise to anybody familiar with the Birmingham, England four-piece’s career arc, the doom gods immediately honed in on the potential psychedelic allegory of Lovecraft’s work. While the "deadly petals with strange powers" are the focal point of Ozzy’s lyrics, Geezer Butler’s snakelike bass line adds a decidedly mysterious undercurrent to the track, like some implicit ghoulishness is being mercifully withheld from the listener. (Sabbath acolyte Sleep would pick up where its primary influence left off. "From Beyond," from 1992’s Sleep’s Holy Mountain [Earache] eschews Butler’s measured playing, allowing Al Cisneros’s bass tone to swell to neutron star proportions. Likewise, lyrical allusions to "planetoids soaked in rays of electric light" and the approaching "stoner caravan from deep space" have an affinity with the author’s sprawling, pulp-lyricism rather than his feel for claustrophobic menace, the norm for most other Lovecraft-inspired songs.)

Metallica puts this strategic withholding to use in Ride the Lightning‘s (Megaforce, 1984) "The Call of Ktulu," a sprawling, misspelled instrumental tribute to Lovecraft’s beloved cephalopod-head. With its hypnotically creeping guitar theme, the album’s epic closer mirrors the arch of the typical Lovecraft narrator’s psyche — a curious unease that gradually swells to a crescendo of madness — while doing justice to the cadence of Lovecraft’s baroque language. The absence of vocals is part of why the track is so effective. By stripping away the inevitably sub-Lovecraft lyrics, Metallica allows the listener to be absorbed by the brooding tone rather than any deficient attempts at reproducing content.

Like Black Sabbath and Metallica before them, countless heavy metal acts past and present have been fascinated by the worlds and creatures described in H.P. Lovecraft’s labyrinth of fiction — Morbid Angel’s prized shredder Trey Azagthoth even modifies one of the more formidable creature’s monikers for his stage name (and in another parallel, gives death metal some of its most batshit-dissonant solos.) But one notable band of Lovecraft acolytes comes from the seemingly incongruous world of British punk.

The iconoclastic (read: fucking weird) Rudimentary Peni and their 1988 LP Cacophony (Himalayan) eschew the subtlety of some of their peers in the Lovecraftian rock canon and go straight for the brainstem. While others withhold (to varying degrees of effectiveness), Rudimentary Peni overload. As a concept album, Cacophony is as much about Lovecraft’s psyche as it is his literary creations. Nick Blinko uses the senseless feedback of his guitar amp, coupled with schizophrenic, mumbled vocals, to create a supremely ugly conflation of fiction, biography, and amateur psychopathological diagnosis.

A far cry from the static kaleidoscope of sound employed by canon forefathers H.P. Lovecraft, Rudimentary Peni’s use of layered tones and effects spirals inward with single-minded intensity. Standout songs like "The Horror in the Museum" and "Zenophobia" tenuously adhere to the sing-along, pogo-conducive structure traditionally associated with British punk. Yet closer listening reveals these barely stable hooks to be composed of a vast latticework — not unlike the album’s disturbingly detailed, fractal-like cover art — of dissonant string-bends, amplifier squeaks, disjointed basslines, and a persistent, barely intelligible whisper that seems to work itself into the fiber of the guitar tone.

The result is a funhouse doppelganger of the multilayered production of the group’s unlikely 1960s ancestor. Cacophony appears to be about crafting some kind of stable impression of the man, but the Peni make a point of never letting the components fully fit together. Instead, we are left with a virtual echo chamber of Lovecraft’s imagination, wherein the scraps and fragments of his writings and real-life neuroses intermingle and inform each other without ever coalescing. In spite of the band’s unmerciful approach, there’s a feeling of being denied the full effect of some unspeakable horror. But this horror is strictly cerebral, a glimpse at the madness that looms over Lovecraft’s work like one of his own reasonless "Other Gods." Happy Halloween, big guy! Eeyagh!

Who the hell is Esinchill?

October 20, 2009

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC "Esinchill is one of the most … " Mistah F.A.B. pauses to reconsider. "No, Esinchill is the most underrated rapper in the Bay."

I agree, and "underrated" in this case means "underknown," because, once heard, Esinchill’s talents are undeniable. His is a lyrical wit based more on word choice ("I go from extremely docile to routinely hostile") than punchlines. With a million flows at his disposal, he’s equally able to freestyle or compose. Esinchill himself thematizes this: "Once you play me, then you like me, then you love me, and it’s ugly from there," he raps over the guitar-driven K-MAXX production "I Dare You," which opens Vigilante, his second solo album, released digitally (with CDs to follow) by Jake Records. Put him on a track with more famous rappers and, as F.A.B. says, "He overshines them all."

So why isn’t Esinchill better known? Partly because his career path has been atypical. The man born Erick Campbell started out with Digital Underground. He spent five years touring with DU, playing more than 200 nights a year, with crowds ranging from a couple hundred to 60,000. He even appears with DU on DJ Quik’s classic Balance & Options (Arista, 2000). Few Bay rappers can boast these types of credentials. Yet after two local releases — his solo debut Everything to Lose! (Rceason, 2002) and a duo disc with King Beef, Choice Cuts (Rceason, 2005) — Esinchill remains East Oakland’s best-kept secret.

"People don’t know how to market me," Esinchill says by phone from Atlanta, where’s he’s writing R&B and rock songs for Outkast’s Dungeon Family. Songwriting is Esinchill’s latest industry endeavor; in 2007, he even penned a Top 20 adult contemporary hit "Tuesday" for former Tower of Power singer Lenny Williams. His remark refers to the difficulty of landing a deal, but it also summarizes the second obstacle to his reputation: in the promiscuous world of Bay rap, where the primary way to build a buzz is through collaborations with well-known artists, the hard-to-categorize Esinchill remains aloof. He comes from the same East Oakland streets as gangsta rappers like Keak Da Sneak or Beeda Weeda, but he doesn’t rap about gangsta topics.

"If an artist chooses to rap about those kinds of things, selling dope, killing people, and robbing, it boxes you in," Esinchill says. "I would say the majority of the cats who rap like that don’t live that lifestyle. But I wouldn’t talk about nothing unless I’m doing it or seen it."

On the other hand, Esinchill’s not a backpack rapper. While there’s an undeniable political dimension to his work, it invokes direct emotional response. On "Where’s the Justice?" — the most overt number on the album, invoking the Black Panthers’ "Off the Pigs" — Esinchill tells of a DUI he got "when he wasn’t drivin’," shouting "I was a passenger! I was a passenger!" Anyone who has dealt with the arbitrary injustice of the police can identify, even as he emphasizes that whites don’t realize the extent of what African Americans endure regularly.

Such stranger-than-fiction personal anecdotes underscore what makes Esinchill compelling. Only on "All the Way Live," a parodic pimp song produced by Jake-One, does E assume a character. Otherwise he raps as himself, displaying an entire, idiosyncratic personality rather than the one-dimensional gangsta persona common even among great rappers. His lyrics retain their comic flair, but his subject matter is mostly serious, even somber.

"Growth is essential," Esinchill says, inadvertently punning on his name. "I’ve matured as a person, but also as an artist. And with song topics as well. Of course, I got the miscellaneous shit. But I also got thought-provoking songs and conceptual songs."

Such songs range include "Daddy Was a Sailorman," in which he travels through time to meet his 18-year-old father; "I Feel U," where he expresses his angst about a compendium of social evils; and "The ’70s," an homage to one of the characterful decades of the 20th century, featuring vocals by Latoya London — star of American Idol and the stage musical version of Color Purple — for whom E also has been writing songs. Aside from a few vocalists like London, David Hollister, and the Bay’s premier hookstress, Naté, collaborators are scarce, limited to the few locals who can vibe with Esinchill, like Casual from Hieorglyphics, and FAB himself. Otherwise E goes it alone, and the result is a true album. Apart from the Jacka’s long-awaited triumph Tear Gas (Artist Records/SMC), Vigilante has no competition among Bay releases this year.

"My goal is to put out hot shit and not fold under pressure to veer into the normal lane," Esinchill concludes. "At my core, I’m just different. I’m incapable of being normal, as far as music goes. I gotta stay to the left — that’s just me."

Manic pop thrill

October 20, 2009

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC In Guitar Hero 5, the avatar of Kurt Cobain is wearing a tee adorned with the cover of Daniel Johnston’s 1983 album, Hi, How Are You? (High Wire). The t-shirt presents a pop-eyed frog, Jeremiah the Innocent, one of the recurring characters within Johnston’s creative world.

Cobain helped catapult many musical cult heroes, among them the Melvins and the Raincoats, to new notoriety, and his devotion to Johnston was no exception. Although it’s hard to pinpoint which moment transformed Johnston into a somebody — K Records selling his homemade cassettes? his serendipitous MTV appearance? Cobain’s adoration? Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston? — most Daniel Johnston stories are part of a narrative that defines him as an unstable artistic genius.

Johnston was born in 1961 to a Christian fundamentalist household in Sacramento. In the early 1980s, he spent most of his time in his parents’ cellar, writing songs. He recorded his seminal cassettes on a Sanyo mono boom-box. After a corndog-selling gig with a traveling circus, he eventually found himself — and went on to lose himself — in Austin, Texas. There, his popularity as a musician grew as his mental stability declined.

Johnston’s story has more twists than most — he’s been institutionalized multiple times, crashed a small plane his father was piloting, and contributed artwork to the 2006 Whitney Biennial. But in Fuerzeig’s documentary, Johnston’s odyssey ends where it began, with him making art at his parents’ home.

In the process of "growing up," most people put away the piano, the paintbrushes, and pen-and-paper in exchange for something practical. When contemputf8g the artist who never gives in to societal obligations, it isn’t uncommon to entertain the notion that creativity springs from craziness.

Some scientific evidence supports a link between creativity and bipolar disorder. Clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison’s 1993 book Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament explains that during a manic phase, there is often a "fluency, rapidity, and flexibility of thought … and the ability to combine ideas or categories of thought in order to form new and original connection." Ideas often occur during the manic phase. During the artist’s melancholic periods, there is a refinement of such thoughts, requiring a more logical perspective to put the new ideas into practice.

Jamison discusses artists’ resistance to undergoing drug therapy — who would want to give up the highs and lows for mild numbness? In The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Johnston spends 1987 in bed on meds, and it does appear dismal. But Jamison advocates that untreated bipolar disorder may lead to suicide.

"All great artists are crazy," Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black says in The Devil and Daniel Johnston. "But there is a difference between the abstract creative person being crazy and this person doing damage to you or himself." Black questions how we, as individuals and as a society, should deal with the mentally ill. If we drug or institutionalize the crazy artist, who benefits: the individual, the friends and family, the fans — or art history? And which is most important?

If there are answers or solutions to such questions, they doesn’t reside in rotely accepting a cultural myth or a scientifically provable connection between creativity and craziness. First it helps to realize that there is a continuum between the "healthy" and the "mentally ill." Indeed, the collective understanding of what is sane and what is insane needs reevaluation. Many people live with psychotic traits but no debilitating symptoms. Each of us who has found comfort or a moment of recognition in Johnston’s lyrics has probably felt a tinge of what might be deemed mental illness.

With a distinctive quavering voice, Johnston sings tormented lyrics about universal themes — unrequited love and not giving up on your dreams — over ebullient and charming pop melodies. His music possesses a combination of craft and sincerity that appeals to the most basic human emotions. He is an oddball phenomenon whose biography provides clues to how the creative mind works. Amid all the chaos and the pain, Johnston continues on — with and without drugs, and definitely with the assistance of his family. His music, art, and life reflect a dichotomy between good vs. evil, hope vs. despair, and genius vs. madman. In the end, as captured in his most recent release Is and Always Was (High Wire), the good wins.

DANIEL JOHNSTON

with Hymns

Thurs/22, 8 p.m., $22.50–$25

Regency Ballroom

1290 Sutter, SF

www.theregencyballroom.com

DJing in the digital age

October 20, 2009

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC The laptop has become the principal tool for DJ performances. At shows, you can catch a glimpse of the Apple logo glowing almost sentiently to the bass. The DJs’ eyes peer back and forth from screen to turntables as she or he manipulates equipment like a robotically engineered Vishnu. Well, unless he’s using just a laptop. Much has changed in the DJ world. Technological advances have challenged skill-based hierarchies and effectively thrown into peril the once essential roles of turntables and vinyl.

In the winter of 2001, the Dutch company N2IT released vinyl emulation software called Final Scratch. The software allowed users to physically regulate the playback of digital audio files on the turntables. In simpler terms, it allowed users to play and scratch any MP3 as if it were a record. But what really set it above other audio-mixing technology was its digital interface, which displayed visual cues, making fundamental DJing skills easier to master. No more need for a massive record collection, or an ear for beat matching, or a talent for juggling breaks.

The rapid digital evolution of DJing is strange to those with an attachment to vinyl. "I was blown away when I went to a younger DJ’s house, and he had a setup but no records," says left coast megamix master DJ King Most. "That’s almost like a painter who just illustrates on a computer and doesn’t own an easel or set of brushes." Most still takes advantage of Serato’s Final Scratch software’s undeniably helpful capabilities: for one, it allows him to play edits and remixes without pressing them to wax, so he can travel without carrying 100 pounds of plastic discs. Nonetheless, the democratization of DJing has saturated the social milieu with hobbyists and amateurs. "Anybody with a laptop now DJs; anybody with a beat making-program makes beats; anybody with a camera makes videos for YouTube," Most says.

In only a few years, completely digital DJing has not only become popular but dominant. Now all you need to blend and manipulate prerecorded sounds is a laptop and music production software, Ableton Live being the most popular program. Old school analog equipment is being abandoned. But while Ableton allows non-DJs to make up for their lack of experience and skill, it also enables a whole new range of options for the creative-minded. "The sport is not about matching beats from one record to the next, back and forth for two hours," explains experimental electronic musician Bassnectar. "In fact, now there is no sport — just an ongoing explorative relationship with the balance of shades of intensity between groups of people and waves of sound."

Bassnectar (a.k.a. Lorin Ashton) wholeheartedly embraces the inchoate freedom spawned from new audio technology. Infamous for creating compelling live laptop performances, he’s attuned to the aesthetic possibilities of mixing, moduutf8g, and transforming sonic elements. "Ableton Live makes it possible to execute real-time remixes and mashups of any sound or song, with less than five seconds of prep time," he says. "It allows for limitless combinations and recombinations." Those open-ended horizons might prove daunting for artists who prefer restraint when shaping their creative work. But Bassnectar faces the challenge head-on, affirming his commitment to innovate and improvise by channeling the power of the machine. "It’s like being a stand-up comedian, where you can seamlessly weave together every funny joke ever told. and tell it in any language, accent, or context while adding sound effects and mastering it all on the spot."

Despite exciting new approaches to laptop DJing, many DJs still choose the turntable as their primary vehicle of expression. A few musicians demonstrate that the turntable’s creative avenues are far from exhausted. San Francisco funk outfit F.A.M.E. (Fresh Analog Music Experience) christened themselves after their corporeal approach to making soulful, hypnotic music. The funksters of F.A.M.E. — Max Kane, Teeko, and Malaguti — embrace the turntablist and battling tradition of using the wheels of steel as a musical instrument to experiment with melody, rhythm, and editing. "[The turntable] is a huge sound manipulator," Teeko says. "You’re putting a record on a turntable and you can touch the sound, transpose it — you have control of the textures of time and space. It’s very intimate."

Teeko and Max Kane both use the Vestax Controller One turntable, for which Teeko provided design input. The Controller One is a sleek model with MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) control, memory, and customizable keyboard buttons for moduutf8g textures and harmonies. "It’s allowed us to play with the turntable like we always dreamed," says Teeko. F.A.M.E. incorporates the turntable imaginatively, with a full-fledged electronic funk setup of MPC drum machines, synthesizers, effects modulators, and Vocoder. It’s the defining element that makes their live performance provocative, as a thick haze of warm boogie grooves is coarsely flipped by the scratching of records. "I couldn’t see myself giving up the turntable" says Max Kane. "The turntable has driven us, [it’s] our hunger for wanting more. The turntable is what you will look at and say, ‘Wow, this is something that I haven’t seen or heard before.’"

Video turntablist pioneer Mike Relm also learned the ropes of DJing on the Bay Area battle circuit. He refined his artistry doing extended opening sets for live acts, bringing a skill for party rocking and a flair for pathos to virtuoso scratch DJ techniques. But even that lost its appeal. Relm yearned to study film and direct his own narratives from scratch. Then, in 2004, Pioneer released DVJ turntables, allowing the physical playback and manipulation of DVDs. "All of a sudden, I could combine all the things I loved and make a show out of that," Relm says. "That was always science fiction to us. We would think, ‘Man, imagine if you could scratch a VHS tape or something. That would be dope … but it will never happen.’ And now it’s even better."

DJs or VJs experimenting with audiovisual performance are a fairly new species in the nightlife arena. Sometimes they’re booked only because of their novelty. Many VJs play solely music videos, train-wrecking imagery of Biggie Smalls and Lady Gaga to intoxicated gawkers rendered motionless by the phantasmagoria onslaught. But Relm doesn’t create a spectacle so much as a theatrical collage that implicates the audience. His shows make reference to a dense pop landscape peopled with TV shows, film clips, music videos, and random bits of cultural nostalgia that connect the audience. "I like the pace of a concert," explains Relm. "It stops to give the audience time to react, take a break, talk among themselves for a second, tell jokes — so you get a lot of emotions."

In Relm’s view, and in the view of every musician in this piece, technology is only as good as the expressive and artistic quality it facilitates. Eric San, a.k.a. the gifted producer and turntablist Kid Koala, frames it most succinctly. His words might as well become an aphorism in the DJ world, if not within any art form struggling to come to terms with its digital mutations. "It’s not what machines you’re using, but what you’re making with those machines." says San. "It’s never about letting the machine do the work for you, but rather that you need to master the machine and speak through it." Amen.

BASSNECTAR AT "SEA OF DREAMS"

With Ozomatli, Ghostland Observatory, and others

Dec. 31, 9 p.m., $75-$125

Concourse Center

635 Eighth St., SF

www.seaofrdreamsnye.com

Park life — and 3,000 guitars

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October 20, 2009
0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Golden Gate Park has once again become a nexus for huge music concerts. The massive scope of events such as Outside Lands can’t help but evoke the legacy of San Francisco in the 1960s, when musical gatherings were not only abundant, but a definite inspiration behind concerts elsewhere — especially Woodstock. With West Fest, organizer Boots Hughston and an extensive lineup of musicians and participants are paying tribute to Woodstock’s 40th anniversary. But they’re also bringing a sense of living history to a place where new generations of music lovers — some of whom knowingly or unknowingly admire contemporary acts influenced by the Woodstock era — regularly congregate.

Politically speaking, it’s especially important to bridge a sense of then and now. One person who will be doing exactly that is David Hilliard, former chief of staff in the Black Panther Party, author of many books, and current-day teacher. "Our purpose was always to ensure that art was part of our revolutionary political process," says Hilliard. "I dispatched members of our chapter to Woodstock ’69 as a gesture of solidarity to the counterculture movement. We were the comrades of the hippies and yippies and Peace and Freedom Party. We had the support of people like John Lennon — that was our constituency. It makes sense that we should be included in a celebration of this momentous event."

Hilliard has no problem connecting his message to the present — especially because the present includes some tell-tale problems. "I have to talk about the contemporary issue of millions of people who have lost their homes to foreclosure," he says, when asked about the subjects of his West Fest speech. "And isn’t it ironic that universal health care is the chief issue of the day, because we were devoted to free health care — it was central to our program."

Hilliard isn’t especially inspired by contemporary hip-hop, aside from Talib Kweli and a few other conscious artists. When asked whether the music of the moment approaches the political intensity of hip-hop’s Public Enemy era, he answers with a "hell no" that is as strong as it is quick, adding, "The whole industry has been reduced to a few artists who make it because they come up with songs about the latest dance."

This doesn’t mean that Hilliard and his contemporaries don’t have a hand in politicizing popular culture and youth culture in ways big and small. Black Panther Minister of Culture Emory Douglas currently has a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Hilliard takes part in projects like the South L.A. Road to College, which teaches South Central L.A. youth about the Panthers and their history while preparing them for college. HBO is developing a six-hour series on the Panthers based on Hilliard’s 1993 book This Side of Glory and Elaine Brown’s 1992 autobiography A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. "We are proud to be working with Carl Franklin," Hilliard says, referring to the series’ director, whose undersung 1992 classic One False Move renders in truly disturbing human terms the kind of drug violence that 1994’s Pulp Fiction treats as entertainment. "We need a year to tell this story [in a series], but we’ll take six hours and hope that it will inspire people to tell the story more often."

West Fest’s wildest musical element has to be an attempt to outdo the Guinness World Book of Records‘ current entry for Largest Guitar Ensemble via a 3,000-or-more-guitar rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s "Purple Haze." A chief force leading this effort, the producer and musician Narada Michael Walden, is also performing a set in honor of Hendrix later in the day. "Jimi Hendrix was the highest-paid performer at Woodstock, the most sought-after at the time," Walden points out from his base at Tarpan Studios in San Rafael. "A lot of the music he played at the festival — "Jam Back at the House," "Villanova Junction," "Isabella," "Fire" — is in obscurity because we only hear "Purple Haze" and "Foxy Lady." I wanted a chance to play some of the songs Jimi played at Woodstock that we don’t get to hear."

Moreover, working with musicians such as Vernon Ice Black, Hendrix’s bassist Billy Cox, and some special guests, Walden hopes to tap into the political subtext of Hendrix’s music at West Fest. "He didn’t just want white fans or black fans, he wanted to reach everybody," Walden says. "He tried his hardest by doing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in a way in which you heard the bombs exploding. He’d been a paratrooper jumping out of airplanes, and he wanted our nation to wake up to what we were doing, all the needless killing in Vietnam."

If anyone can corral 3,000-plus guitarists into making something musical, it’s the energetic Walden. He’s the producer behind the hits that made Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey into stars, and before that, the gorgeous pop R&B songs by teenage Stacey Lattisaw ("Let Me Be Your Angel," "My Love") that no doubt inspired those divas-to-be to work with him. "My first solo album [Garden of Love Light] in 1976 was produced with Tommy [Tom] Dowd," he remembers, when another legendary musical force who turned away from the U.S. military is mentioned. "I spent months and months recording with him and learned first-hand from him. He was really here to do what he did — only a few people understood how to compress music for radio in a way that it could still live and breathe. He knew how to take the queen of soul, Aretha, and give her a Southern sound with a vibrancy that allowed all people everywhere to feel it. That’s the genius — not just the musical side but the scientific side — of Tom Dowd."

The life stories of men such as Hendrix and Dowd — who abandoned atomic work on the Manhattan Project for the studios of Atlantic Records — are still applicable today. After all, this is an era in which Barack Obama calls for more troops in Afghanistan and wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Amid the potential and contradictions invoked by such a circumstance, Walden’s Hendrix-inspired endeavors and Hilliard’s speech at West Fest are worth hearing.

WEST FEST, 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF WOODSTOCK

Sun/25, 9 a.m.–6 p.m., free

Golden Gate Park, SF

www.2b1records.com/woodstock40sf

Collective growth

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October 13, 2009
0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Last December, Anticon celebrated its 10th anniversary with a concert at the Knitting Factory in New York. It was an emotional reunion. Many fans flew from around the world to see a hip-hop collective that hadn’t performed together since a 2002 concert at Slim’s in San Francisco. Peter Agoston, the event’s promoter, says it took a year to pull it together.

This was a far cry from 1999, when most of the original Anticon seven (along with more than a few couch-surfers) lived communally in an East Oakland warehouse. Tim "Sole" Holland, Adam "Dose One" Drucker, Yoni "WHY?" Wolf, Brendon "Alias" Whitney, Jeffrey "Jel" Logan, David "Odd Nosdam" Madson and James Brandon "the Pedestrian" Best sought to revolutionize hip-hop, injecting the art form with absurdist humor and beatnik poetry. Every month, they held court at Rico’s Loft in San Francisco, performing college radio hits like "It’s Them" and "Rainmen" as throngs of Bay Area backpackers shouted along. Doseone, Anticon’s madcap poet, says, "We were crew, posse, label, brotherhood, and boys-club."

A decade later, Anticon has become a brand and a myth. Baillie Parker, who faithfully attended those Rico’s Loft showcases, became an eighth member, label manager, and co-owner in 2001. Slowly (and sometimes painfully), he steered the label toward solvency, streamlining the collective’s unpredictable adventures into a small business. Then he ceded day-to-day responsibilities to his former intern Shaun Koplow, a student at UC Berkeley. After Koplow graduated, he moved back to his native Los Angeles, and now runs the label there.

Today, Anticon Records is surprisingly durable and stylistically varied. Recent albums include melancholy rock (Anathallo’s Canopy Glow, 2008), wintry indietronica (Son Lux’s At War With Walls and Mazes, 2008) and punchy, synthesized instrumental beats (Tobacco’s Fucked Up Friends, 2008).

Meanwhile, the collective that founded the label has splintered and scattered across the country. Some remained in the Bay Area (Dose One, Jel, Odd Nosdam, and Parker) while others moved elsewhere (Sole in Denver, Colorado; Alias in Portland, Maine; and the Pedestrian in Los Angeles; Yoni Wolf is currently "homeless" while he embarks on a months-long tour). They still own the label and make major decisions together. However, each pursues his individual career. Some collaborate, others do not.

What does it all mean? It doesn’t take a Rashomon-like investigation to figure it out. "We all send each other friendly [e-mail] messages every few months, but we’re not like this cult. And I think that’s good," says Sole. "When we tried to be a cult, we realized that none of us made very good cult members."

ORIGINS OF AN ICON

Anticon’s symbol is an ant, designed by Aaron Horkey of Burlesque Design. Ant-icon. The name comes from the Pedestrian, a Los Angeles native, and Sole, who grew up in Portland, Maine. The two met in 1992 on a Prodigy message board for cassette trading. Both were avid tape collectors, the lingua franca for music dispersion before the Napster era. They bonded over a love for the Los Angeles scene, where Freestyle Fellowship and the Shapeshifters pioneered speed-rapping and obtuse, free-associative rhymes; early Midwest battle-rap crews like Atmosphere and 1200 Hobos; and obscure Canadian groups like the Sebutones.

Anticon coalesced around a series of fortuitous happenings. Alias and Sole met when both lived in Portland; there was the 1997 Scribble Jam, famous in rap circles for its battle between Dose One and a pre-Slim Shady Eminem; Doseone’s frenzied networking skills brought him in touch with Jel, and then Sole; and Dose One made fast friends with WHY? and Odd Nosdam when he lived in Cincinnati in the late 1990s.

After Sole and the Pedestrian came up with the Anticon concept in 1998, Sole moved to Oakland to work for Listen.com. The rest of the crew eventually followed him there. "I was making $50,000 a year during the dot-com rush," he says. "I didn’t have any expenses, so I just put all the money into starting the label."

Anticon’s first release, 1999’s Music for the Advanced Hip Hop Listener EP was an invitation and a challenge, with Alias’ "Divine Disappointment," which imagines an argument between father and son, and "Holy Shit," a posse track marked by precociously off-kilter rap flows. A compilation, Music for the Advancement of Hip-Hop, followed later that year. "For me, it was about representing these underground aesthetic movements," says the Pedestrian.

But the only song anyone remembers from those records was Sole’s missive "Dear Elpee." On the surface, it was a battle record directed at El Producto, the incredibly talented rapper/producer whose group Company Flow recorded the 1997 opus Funcrusher Plus. El-P memorably coined the term "independent as fuck" to distance himself from mainstream rap, then lost in the throes of Puff Daddy’s hyper-commercial "jiggy" era. But Sole saw hypocrisy in East Coast tastemakers such as Rawkus Records, which distributed Company Flow’s records. He felt they excluded anyone who didn’t live in New York City, and was disgusted at how they extolled "independent" virtues while launching sophisticated marketing campaigns to promote themselves.

"Dear Elpee" wasn’t just a dis against a popular rapper, it was a distillation of Anticon’s scrappy, outsider stance. "Underground hip-hop is a mentality. It’s not supposed to be commercial. You’re supposed to spit an 80-bar verse and people are going to love it," says Sole. "I felt like [hip-hop] needed a little chin check."

On his subsequent two solo albums, 1999’s Bottle of Humans and 2001’s Selling Live Water, Sole honed his sarcastic and brutally honest persona. He criticized himself and attacked his unnamed enemies, exposing thoughts of paranoia and depression. With songs like the brilliantly melancholy title track, he sowed the seeds of what would later become known as "emo rap."

Meanwhile, Jel and Odd Nosdam (along with other producers such as Alias and DJ Mayonnaise) drew from a wide breadth of influences, from orchestral rock like Radiohead and Flying Saucer Attack to electronic acts like Boards of Canada. They made tracks using rudimentary equipment, including 4-track and 8-track recorders and SP-1200 sampling keyboards, resulting in songs that expounded a murky and intimate low-fi aesthetic.

Anticon’s recordings were imbued with a childlike playfulness. In 1998, Sole, Doseone, and Alias collaborated with Minneapolis rapper Slug [from Rhymesayers group Atmosphere] under the name Deep Puddle Dynamics. Alias explains the concept: "[The group name is] in reference to puddles … because of how they form, you sometimes can’t tell how deep they are until you stand in them or observe them really closely."

Deep Puddle Dynamics’ 1999 album, The Taste of Rain … Why Kneel (a title inspired by Jack Kerouac’s poem "Some Western Haiku"), mixed wide-eyed abstraction with introspective thoughts. On the yearning "June 26, 1998," they trade lines until their voices became a kind of Greek chorus. "What is the meaning of life?" they chant. "Fortune, health, knowledge, success / Woman, man, trust, progress / Culture, faith, healing, destiny / Endurance, family, science, society."

"It was so inspiring to be around those cats and see how they operate," says Alias of those recording sessions. His shy New England demeanor contrasted sharply with Doseone and Sole’s bravado. "It’s weird to go back and listen to it now. … It shows its age, and it shows its awkwardness."

However, Anticon’s precocious search for deeper truths through hip-hop, a genre often maligned for its lack of intellectual discourse, endeared them to listeners around the world. The collective helped spark a cottage industry of aspiring rappers, a sensibility built around tweaked flows and five-minute soliloquies, and nourished a brief, exhilarating moment of hip-hop experimentalism in the early 2000s.

Alias says, "I’ve been at shows and had kids come up and tell me how much my music has meant to them. They’ll tell me stories like when their father passed away, all they did was listen to ‘Watching Water’ [from The Other Side of the Looking Glass, 2002] for a week. Then they’ll show me that they have these Anticon-related tattoos or something. It’s crazy. It makes me feel embarrassed."

OFFBEAT STREET

If Sole is the blustery visionary who led Anticon into war, then Doseone is the eccentric who personifies its unfettered creativity. His catalog, issued via several record labels, ranges from the bleak tone poems of Circle, his 2000 album with producer Boom Bip; to Subtle, a band formed with Jel and keyboardist Dax Pierson. Over the course of three albums (including 2008’s Exiting Arm), Subtle molded rap, electronics, rock, jazz-fusion and whatever else they could find into a searing and dense whirlwind of word and sound.

"We were artists’ artists without a doubt. Still are," says Doseone. "It was DIY … and you could hear the flaws, the sensitivities, the trying-something-new, even when it was over the top or egregious."

Doseone’s strangely disembodied, half-sung raps epitomized Anticon’s greatness as an offbeat take on hip-hop culture. It should have made a bigger impact on the rap industry, and there are several reasons why it didn’t. First, Sole’s battle with the iconic El-P, whose music was just as experimental and groundbreaking as anything Anticon made, turned many people against him. And yes, Anticon was undoubtedly too weird for a generation raised on 2Pac and Jay-Z.

Most damaging were assumptions that Anticon was full of rich, ego-driven art-school snobs who made hip-hop for white people.

Those accusations struck Jel as funny. The Midwest native has been devoted to hip-hop for most of his life, and his placid, straightforward demeanor results from a staunchly lower-middle-class background. "All the shit that came out of nowhere about us not paying dues all comes from the racism that was involved," he says.

The Pedestrian admits that part of the problem was attitude. "When we were doing that whole pretentious ‘Music for the Advancement of Hip-Hop’ shit, for me it was about representing these underground aesthetic movements," he says. "I didn’t imagine we would look as white as we did. It really surprised the shit out of me. And in retrospect, we should have done things differently.

"In those early years, the crowd was pretty fucking white," he continued. "I know there was definitely a consciousness about it — we were thinking about it. But we were fucking kids. We didn’t know how to deal with these really difficult situations."

By the summer of 2002, when Anticon held a series of come-to-Jesus meetings to determine the label’s future, all of its members realized they weren’t a hive-mind group of crazy MCs à la Wu-Tang Clan (with Sole as the RZA), but eight very different people. Wolf, whose esoteric music masks a highly disciplined songwriting approach, felt those aspirations were "unrealistic." "There was almost a utopian idea about record-making, that it could almost be a socialist affair," he says.

As Anticon evolved from a movement into a traditional company, it meandered creatively and financially. Some released material that paled in comparison to past efforts (Sole’s Live from Rome, 2005). New signings, such as indie-pop multi-instrumentalist Dosh (self-titled, 2003) struggled to gain recognition for music that had nothing to do with hip-hop. Eventually, though, Anticon Records learned how to promote releases by its onetime collective as well as its growing indie-rock and electronic roster.

"The way it’s perceived by artists, particularly rock artists, I think they see it as a natural progression," says Sole of Anticon Records’ development. "All the outside-of-hip-hop-world friends we’ve made over the years see it as a natural evolution because what we’ve done has always been pretty melodic and rock and musical anyway."

Some of the onetime "cult" members who felt overshadowed during those early years forged individual identities. Alias, who always felt "awkward" when he rapped, moved back to Maine with his wife and focused on production instead. His efforts yielded 2007’s Brooklyn/Oaklyn, an evocative collaboration with Brooklyn singer Rona "Tarsier" Rapadas.

After a somewhat uneven solo debut (2003’s Oaklandazulasylum), Wolf formed a trio under his old WHY? moniker. Their next two albums (Elephant Eyelash, 2005; Alopecia, 2008) impressively blended Wolf’s prior talent for harmonies, loquacious wordplay, and poetic imagery with the band’s newly-minted melodic rock arrangements. By scoring rapturous national press, he epitomized Anticon Records’ new status as a fast-rising independent label.

WHY? just released its fourth album, Eskimo Snow, which consists of unused material from the Alopecia sessions. Wolf still does a fair amount of rapping, or rhyming in rhythm, even if the results can no longer be classified as strictly hip-hop. "I’ve incorporated it into my pantheon of musical styles," he says, adding that "the next record could be a disco record, for all I know."

BRAND OF OUTSIDERS

Anticon hasn’t abandoned hip-hop. Doseone and Jel just released their third album as the cryptically-named Themselves; their 2000 debut was notable for producing the indie-rap classic "It’s Them." With CrownsDown, Doseone returns to the arena he once flourished in. "There’s purity to the construction and presentation of this record that is derived from Guru and Premier," Doseone says, referring to the classic rap duo Gang Starr.

This year has also brought Chicago duo Serengeti & Polyphonic’s Terradactyl; and Bike for Three!, a collaboration between Buck 65 (formerly of Sebutones) and Belgian electronic musician Greetings from Tuskan. The difference between now and 10 years ago is that these albums aren’t the latest missives from Anticon the collective. They just enhance the label’s reputation for honest, lyrically-driven, complex music.

Amid all this activity, Anticon’s original theorists seem like the odd men out. Back in the day, the Pedestrian was the crew’s sardonic (and sometimes arrogant) prankster, sending out eloquent and confrontational press releases inspired by Dadaism and Situational Ethics. By 2002, however, the former high-school dropout went back to school, enrolling in Laney College. He transferred to UC Berkeley, earned a degree in literature, then enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he’s working on a PhD in ethnic studies.

"There was once an aesthetic collective. And now we’re a record label whose brand name has some lingering connection to that aesthetic," says the Pedestrian, who still treats hip-hop as a hobby and elaborate game theory. "But what we decide to put out and the music we all make is infused with those early years of collaboration. Those were important, foundational years for all of us."

Sole lives in Denver with his wife, and works as an IT technician for Denver Open Media, a public-access station. "It’s not my label anymore. I’m just one voice in it, and I try to contribute as meaningfully as I can to it," he says, adding that he wishes Anticon had a traditional rap profile. So for his new album, Plastique, he decided to work with Fake Four Inc., home to underground artists like Awol One and Mikah 9 (from Freestyle Fellowship).

With Plastique, he focuses on a wide-ranging critique of political injustice, capitalism, and Western hegemony, fed by radical works like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. Sometimes, Sole fits the American lone wolf profile, railing about the world’s troubles.
"Do I wish it was still a crew? Yeah. I miss that. To me, that’s what it’s all about," he says. "But when you’re married, you don’t want to be hanging out all the time. You want to be home, making a stew and watching Heroes."

WHY?
With Mount Eerie, Au, Serengetti and Polyphonic
Sat/17, 9 p.m. (doors 8 p.m.), $16
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750
www.gamh.com

SOLE
With Astronautalis, Sahib
Sat/17, 10 p.m. (doors 9 p.m.), $10-12
Uptown Nightclub
1928 Telegraph, Oakl
(510) 451-8100
www.uptownnightclub.com

Off-duty trip

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October 6, 2009
0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Gina Birch, discussing a Raincoats gig earlier this month at the National Portrait Gallery in London, pauses for a moment over the phone from home in England. Although the resurgence of interest in her band’s music began well over a decade ago, she still sounds a bit surprised at the Raincoats’ esteemed status in the rock lexicon today.

"We’re being more embraced by the cultural elite, which is quite funny, really, " Birch explains, humbly. "It’s just at that point where the people who liked us when they were young are in positions to offer us this kind of thing." The Raincoats, it should be said, just plain deserve acclaim anew. Birch started the band with Ana da Silva in 1977 while they were art students in London — a daring lark that still resonates deeply with sounds you hear today, as evidenced by the line-up they’re headlining at the Part Time Punks Mini-Fest.

It’s an admittedly nerdy delight to hear Birch talk about punk’s early days in London. In addition to bands like the Buzzcocks and Subway Sect, she says that she and guitarist-singer da Silva were inspired by the Slits, whose original guitarist, Viv Albertine, will be joining the Raincoats at the Part Time Punks show. "It was definitely seeing other girls doing it that made me feel like I could give it a go," she explains. Seeing such bands, she says, "gave me the courage to wear the clothes I wanted to wear, chop up my hair … feeling like I could let rip a little bit!" The Slits’ drummer, Palmolive, would join da Silva and Birch — who sang and learned bass as she went along — in the Raincoats’ original lineup, along with violinist Vicky Aspinall. The band put out a few albums with Rough Trade before initially dissolving in 1984.

Since the Raincoats’ original break-up, they’ve reunited sporadically, recording an album (1996’s Looking in the Shadows, on DGC) and playing the occasional show, all the while being sure to "leave a little room for mistakes," because, says Birch, "it’s much more manageable!" Their current live lineup features violinist Anne Wood, who’s been with them for 15 years, and local drummer Vice Cooler, known to many in the Bay Area for Hawnay Troof and his work in xbxrx and KIT.

The Raincoats are playing here in support of a stateside LP reissue of their 1979 self-titled debut, out Oct. 13 on Kill Rock Stars. Although the group is perhaps best known for its debut single, "Fairytale in the Supermarket" and their cover of the Kinks’ "Lola," every one of the Raincoats’ recordings sounds fresh — inviting but often dark, alternately vulnerable and indignant, hopeful and deeply human. The pastel pink, green, and yellow sleeve of their "No One’s Little Girl" b/w "Running Away" 7-inch (Rough Trade, 1982) caught my eye at a record fair in England a few years ago, and it’s easily one of the best records I own, especially because of its B-side: a sweet, trumpet-punctuated cover of Sly Stone — totally unreal, and just one side of their multifarious brilliance.

Both da Silva and Birch have solo projects these days, and Birch, a longtime filmmaker, is working on a feature-length Raincoats documentary due out next year, featuring loads of old footage and a look at their more recent endeavors. More reissues are on the way as well, Birch assures, as they continue to forge ahead on "the fringes."

"I find it much more inspiring and interesting and heartwarming in the world where it’s more human and strange," Birch says. "There’ll always be the fringes, and long live the fringes! That’s where interesting stuff happens."

This brings us to Grass Widow, local openers on the Part Time Punks bill, who embody much of what makes the Raincoats so extraordinary: rooted in raw punk and peculiar, intricate harmonies, they produce songs vivid enough to summon a visual counterpart. "Our music crosses over into the subject matter I end up making films about," says bassist Hannah Lew. During a recent meet-up, Lew articulated the group’s excitement about playing with the Raincoats by stating that even if they weren’t playing the show, "we would go anyway." This year, Grass Widow released a self-titled LP (Make a Mess) and a 12-inch EP (Captured Tracks/Cape Shok). In January, they’re headed to Portland, Ore., to record another album. Get there early to see them.

PART TIME PUNKS PRESENTS THE RAINCOATS

With Grass Widow, Section 25, Gang of Four DJ set, and more

Fri/9, 8 p.m., $20–$25

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

Lemmy caution

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September 30, 2009
0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC At an age when most rock ‘n’ roll veterans are content to retire from performing live or trade in their electric guitars for acoustics and change the way they approach their material, Lemmy Kilmister continues to tour the world, bringing his blistering blend of hard rock to fans. The 63-year old leader of Motorhead has been playing music for nearly five decades and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. He and the band have hit the road for another tour.

Getting his start in a series of local bands in his native England in the early 1960s, Kilmister eventually moved to London, served a stint as a roadie for Jimi Hendrix, and performed with Hawkwind before founding his own, now legendary band in 1975. Boasting the slogan "Everything Louder Than Everything Else," Motorhead has gained the reputation for being one of the most thunderous groups ever measured in concert.

"We never planned to be the loudest band in the world, we just liked playing that way — I wasn’t trying for any titles," Kilmister explains by phone after a recent sound check in Orlando, Fla.

Though Motorhead has always revolved around Kilmister, the current lineup has been together for some time now; guitarist Phil Campbell joined in 1984 and drummer Mikkey Dee came on board in 1992. But Matt Sorum — who has played with Guns N’ Roses, the Cult, and Velvet Revolver — is filling in on drums for the band’s current tour. Dee is on a hiatus while filming a reality TV show, the Swedish version of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.

"We saw Mikkey on it last night, he was riding a bike on a rope bridge 30 feet up. Unfortunately, they had a safety harness on him," Kilmister chuckles.

A documentary about the iconic frontman, simply titled Lemmy, is set for release later this year. It explores the history of a singer whose penchant for uncompromising rock ‘n’ roll and passions for drugs and women have become the stuff of legend. The film includes live performances, and interviews with various people who have played and worked with Kilmister, who is known for being affable and laid-back when offstage.

"They’ve got a lot of interviews with different people saying what a nice guy I was. It was very flattering. I had no idea I was held in such high esteem," Kilmister laughs.

Following the San Francisco show, Motorhead will be on tour until around Christmas. The group heads back into the studio to record its next album — the follow up to last year’s ferocious Motorizer (Steamhammer/CPV) — in February. That release undoubtedly will be followed by yet another whirlwind trek across the globe to play in front of faithful fans. The elder statesman of hard rock takes on a serious tone when asked if he ever tires of the relentless rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.

"This is where I belong, I’m supposed to do this," Kilmister says emphatically. "I’m lucky I’ve found my place — a lot of people don’t ever find theirs. This is mine."

MOTORHEAD

With Reveren Horton Heat, Nashville Pussy

Mon/5, 8 p.m., $36–$38

Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 775-7722

www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

The Kajagoogoo of Jacques Attali

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September 30, 2009
0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC For those of you who missed the memo, it all hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for the good people of the ol’ U.S. of A over the last year or so. You don’t have to be Noam Chomsky to realize that if the national unemployment rate is hovering right around 10 percent, that’s not good. If you toss in a confusing war that we are still involved in, the polar icecaps melting faster than Joan Rivers’ face in a boiling torrential downpour, and the small matter of a monster flu pandemic, it’s quite clear: Americans have a right to feel a trifle downcast at the moment.

Yet while we face some strains of a musical slump (screamo, ringtone rap etc.) that is just as woeful as our current financial state, 20th century American history tells us that there may be hope for the future. If you look back through the 1900s, there is a constant byproduct of periods of American crisis. We get some pretty damn awesome music.

Financially speaking, the past year or two has been dominated by scary words like recession and downturn, yet you and I have largely avoided the most bone-chilling term of all. To encounter it, you need to set your DeLorean to the 1930s, where you will find our country in the midst of the most terrifying 10 letters in our economic lexicon — depression.

Beginning with some dramatic leaps in 1929, the Great Depression is the benchmark for what happens when things go horribly wrong. In the U.S., unemployment rates reached an unprecedented 25 percent, and the country, not to mention the rest of the planet, was wallowing in the unpleasant waters of the River Styx.

But something curious happened. As folks were dealing with the decade’s bleakest times, Americans were also writing, recording, and performing some of the finest music in the nation’s history. Legendary jazz artists like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday released some of the best material of their careers, while the roots of country music were sowed by musicians like Jimmie Rodgers, Lead Belly, the Carter Family, and Woody Guthrie. Much of the Depression-era work of these artists combines palpable, affecting melancholy with surprising overtones of faith, hope, and celebration. Music served as a window into the pain of the average American, and also as an escape from the real-life problems people were facing.

This phenomenon returned in many ways during the late 1960s. While thousands of Americans were fighting a war that nobody seemed to understand, those left behind faced widespread inflation and high interest rates. America again turned to its musicians to air frustrations and fears. Taking cues from artists like Pete Seeger and Doc Watson (who were still active during the generation), a new generation of protest music exploded. The new folk of singers-songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez gripped the nation. So did the socially-conscious soul of troubadours like Marvin Gaye, Gil-Scott Heron, and Sam Cooke.

Though these are perhaps the two most obvious instances of great music being created during hard times in America, they aren’t the only ones. Deep in the 1980s, as white suburbanites were loving Reaganomics and rocking out to Kajagoogoo and Huey Lewis, residents of inner cities across America were stuck smack-dab in GOP-perpetrated trickle-down hell. Groundbreaking artists such as NWA, Ice-T, and KRS-One sprang out of the cities, further igniting the massive cultural and commercial force that is hip-hop.

Which brings us to the big question — can we do it again? While you may call it naiveté, I’m optimistic about the chances of history repeating itself. In just the last year, folk has made quite a resurgence, with Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, the Avett Brothers and others gaining massive followings and selling out venues wherever they play. Also, due to file-sharing, the rise of easily-streamable digital music, and well-run independent labels, artists are able to get their music out to larger audiences without interference from conservative and controlling corporate entities. The rise of independent music is apparent in the lineup of the upcoming Treasure Island Music Festival, widely expected to be one of San Francisco’s biggest concert events this year. Though tickets aren’t cheap, people haven’t minded shelling out for a bill that features only five bands currently signed to a major label.

Not so long ago, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the economy was booming. Things were great for everyone — except the American pop music fan, who was subjected to overproduced boy bands, toothless pop rock (Sugar Ray, Smashmouth), nu-metal, and countless other forms of forgettable garbage. So while your pockets may be empty now, it might be a good thing. Hold out a hope that maybe, just maybe, in 30 years, the music of the next decade will be lauded much like the tunes of the 1930s and the 1960s.

Until then, just sit tight and keep praying for the death of auto-tune.

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