True, a day as nice as today should really be spent outside. That being said, it’s hard to come up with a better “first-day-of-spring” movie than the wickedly funny, rousingly optimistic hip-hop concert flick Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, directed by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind‘s Michel Gondry. Chronicling a September 2004 shindig thrown in Bedstuy and featuring performances by Kanye West, Common, Mos Def & Talib Kweli, Dead Prez, Cody Chestnutt, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, The Roots (w/ oldschoolers Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap), and the reunited Fugees, Block Party bounces with cool, infectious verve and power-to-the-people, DIY exhilaration. In short, this movie just brings a smile to your face. (Yeah, ok, it definitely helps to have an appreciation for hip-hop, but as this movie points out, you may have one and not even know it.)
For those of you anxiously awaiting Season 3 of Chappelle’s Show, be heartened: This is Chappelle’s show. Be he ambling through his Ohio hometown doling out “Golden Tickets” to unsuspecting passers-by, tooling around Brooklyn hyping the event (“Attention, Huxtables!“), or MC’ing the Bedstuy proceedings with a deft, light-hearted touch (and a James Brown rimshot), Chappelle’s wry irreverence and broad, encompassing good humor are contagious. Often, it seems, he can’t believe his luck at becoming the jester-king of Brooklyn for a day, and he grounds and permeates the film with his antic enthusiasm and sardonic, puckish charm.
And then there are the performances. From Kanye West amping up “Jesus Walks” with the aid of the Central State University band, to Def & Kweli jamming over “Umi Says”, to Dead Prez getting PE/KRS-1-righteous with “Turn Off Your Radio,” to sirens Erykah Badu and Jill Scott dueling over The Roots’ “You Got Me,” to Lauryn Hill’s sultry, heartfelt “Killing Me Softly,” Block Party definitely delivers the goods in terms of the hip-hop. All the performances are infused with enough energy and momentum to get the whole theater audience jumping. (Slightly off-topic, when I was ten years old, I was pretty sure the coolest guy in the world was Han Solo. Now that I’m an older and wiser 31, I have to concede that, that GMC Denali ad notwithstanding, it may just be Mos Def. And, speaking of Def, his “straight-man” (a la Ed McMahon) sounds a lot like Ford Prefect.)
In the end, after all the jokes, beats, and rhymes, two hip-hop truths emerge from Dave Chappelle’s Block Party: “Life is a funny, unpredictable thing,” as Chappelle puts it at one point. And, as many others — both rap superstars and ordinary people like you and me — come to point out throughout the film, this world is what you make it, so do something good and have some fun out there, y’all.
Also in music news, the freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is in the studio working on his 31st studio album (and the follow-up to 2001’s Love and Theft.) “Work…began early this month with four days of rehearsals with his touring band at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie, New York. The crew have now moved to Manhattan to record the songs.” And, for the Springsteen fans out there, the story also reports that the Boss is currently cutting an album of Pete Seeger covers, The Seeger Sessions.
“The problem with Bob Marley in white America is one of perspective. Many of Marley’s songs are about resistance and violent revolution. The threat implicit in the lines ‘Them belly full but we hungry/ A hungry mob is an angry mob’ or the song ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’‘ isn’t too far from the surface. But lyrics about armed resistance make America’s secular-progressive middle classes — those most responsible for the cult of Marley as a cuddly ‘One Love‘ Rastafarian — uneasy.” Contending that “[l]istening to Legend to understand Marley is like reading Bridget Jones’s Diary to get Jane Austen.,” Slate‘s Field Mahoney argues the merits of Bob Marley’s back catalog, and suggests that US fans tend to overemphasize the stoner and underemphasize the revolutionary.
Happy Valentine’s Day. In keeping with a GitM tradition started last year, and since y’all out there, dear readers, are once again my Valentines for the day whether you like it or not (I long ago stopped delving into personal detail around these parts — Suffice to say that, my fellow Americans, the State of the Love Life is, um, not good. In fact, like those pesky WMD, its existence has been almost entirely theoretical for some time…Ah, well.) — I’ve thrown up more tunes for your holiday perusal. At any rate, as per the usual mp3blog rules: the files will be only up for a day or two, right-click to save them, and please don’t link to them directly. Otherwise, enjoy!
Another lonely night
Stare at the TV screen
I don’t know what to do
I need a rendezvous
For sundry reasons involving the Internet Age, Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” has taken on all kinds of ulterior meanings since it first debuted on 1981’s Computer World, when 300 baud modems (“I call this number for a data date“) and TRS-80s operating on tape decks were the order of the day. When these German electronica pioneers weren’t creating the music of the future, it seems, they were presciently anticipating our current era of Instant Messaging, online dating sites, and the like. Still, its newer resonances notwithstanding, I’ve always found something giddily innocent about this track. While the lyrics suggest a much more downbeat affair, the chirps and whistles in this song never fail to bring a big goofy grin to my face — particularly in this clubbier 1991 remix version, when those syncopated synths take off like a bird in flight. There are some songs that just make ya happy, no matter what — for me, this is one of those.
Computerlove — Kraftwerk (6.2MB, 6:37)
(song removed)
From The Mix.
[Update:]
***
And I feel your warmth
And it feels like home
And there’s someone
Calling on the telephone
Let’s stay home
It’s cold outside
And I have so much
To confide to you
As I’ve wrote in this review of Ultra years ago, Depeche Mode is a band that’s been misunderstood and misunderestimated by a lot of people here in America. Which is not to say they’re some hidden secret — obviously, they’re one of the biggest bands in the world, and have had a huge US following for decades now.
Still, even today, in the reviews of DM’s recent Playing the Angel, rock critics trod out the doom-and-gloom “Depressed Mode” copy that’s been circulating since at least 1986’s Black Celebration. But they miss the point. Very few DM songs — Ok, “Satellite,” from A Broken Frame is one — are out-and-out depressing in the way, say, most Nine Inch Nails songs are. Rather, almost all of the songs on Black Celebration, one of my Desert Island discs, work in the same groove, including this one, “Here is the House.” As one review of “Enjoy the Silence” summed it up, it’s “me and you against the world.”
Yes, Celebration argues, this earth can be a cruel, unrelenting place, filled with misfortune and disappointment. But, maybe, just maybe, you and I can rise above all that, and together light a candle that’ll warm us both through another unforgiving night. In sum, DM’s best romantic ballads aren’t depressing so much as poignant and ever-so-slightly hopeful. I’ll be the first to admit that the band has come close to over-mining this particular mode after 25 years, but still, when they do it right, it’s a thing of beauty. (Also, since I’m sure a lot of people out there already have this song in their collection, I’ve also posted Martin’s early demo version, which actually fits the song really well in a lo-fi Magnetic Fields kinda way.)
Here is the House — Depeche Mode (4.1MB, 4:19)
Bonus Track: Here is the House (Demo) — Martin Gore (4.3MB, 4:35)
The blood of eden keeps running through me
running through my veins
the blood of eden keeps rushing through me
when I’m sure there’s none that remains
I had a hard time figuring out which song I wanted to post from Peter Gabriel’s sublime rumination on romance, Us (1992), ’cause almost every song — particularly on the A-side — is a certifiable classic. (A younger friend of mine once musically conflated Gabriel’s oeuvre with that of his Genesis bandmate Phil Collins, which almost drove me to apoplexy. I mean, I don’t hate Phil Collins or anything, but, c’mon now — Gabriel is a lot more than just “Sledgehammer,” and even “Sledgehammer” isn’t “Susudio.”)
In the end, I opted for this cut of “Blood of Eden” from Wim Wender’s Until the End of the World (which for some odd reason was left off that otherwise great soundtrack.) The Us version is disarmingly beautiful, but the lack of Sinead O’Connor’s backing vocals here lend the track a different resonance.
On the album, you can actually hear “the union of the woman and the man” in O’Connor and Gabriel’s lush harmony, but here, with Gabriel plaintive and alone, it’s just a fading memory, the echo of happier times. And yet, at certain moments (such as in the bridge), the memories come flooding back. “The blood of eden keeps rushing through me, when I’m sure there’s none that remains.” With love in the rear-view mirror, disappearing over the horizon, Pete still has the echoes of the past to keep him keepin’ on.
Blood of Eden (Wim Wenders Version) — Peter Gabriel (6.2MB, 6:40)
(song removed)
From Blood of Eden (Single).
[Update: The Wim Wenders version is hard to find on the tubes, but below is the original version with Sinead O’Connor.]
***
Most of the time
It’s well understood,
Most of the time
I wouldn’t change it if I could,
I can’t make it all match up, I can hold my own,
I can deal with the situation right down to the bone,
I can survive, I can endure
And I don’t even think about her
Most of the time.
Speaking of which, nobody does keep-on-keepin’-on like its coiner, the inimitable Bob Dylan. From “Don’t Think Twice” to “Like a Rolling Stone” and Blood on the Tracks to Time out of Mind, one of Bob’s career trademarks has been the post-mortem relationship song. Some are angryandvindictive, some are haunted, some are jauntyandcouldcare less, some are resignedandreflective, some are (love)sickwithremorseandregret. There are so many great songs that could have gone here, but I ended up choosing “Most of the Time,” from the somewhat underappreciated Oh Mercy (1989), the forerunner to Dylan’s recent revival. In this song, Bob’s basically got his act together and has moved on from an old love…most of the time. In direct contrast to Gabriel in “Eden,” the past here is treacherous. (“Most of the time, I can’t even be sure, if she was ever with me or if I was ever with her.“) Dylan’s learned to live with his scars, but at any moment — a passing haircut, a fleeting remembrance, a scent of perfume in the air — and he is undone once again, as if it were yesterday. After all, even for a guy like Bob Dylan, who once seemed to carry the weight of the world as if it were nothing, you don’t get very far in life without some ghosts in the machine.
Most of the Time — Bob Dylan (4.5MB, 5:03)
(song removed)
From Oh Mercy.
[Update:]
Ok, hopefully five tunes won’t kill my bandwidth…Have a safe and happy Valentine’s Day out there, y’all. (And, as a side note, if you’re looking for more quality music, be sure to check out the splendiferous Fluxblog almost-daily, and don’t miss out on the Max Music Mixes every month at Lots of Co.)
“Extraordinary! On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse – bassoons and basset horns – like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly – high above it – an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God.” A very happy 250th birthday to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (And, just to be fair to that patron saint of mediocrity, Salieri turns 256 in August.)
Wonder upon wonders, SNL actually had a decently funny sketch the other night (at least if you’re both fanboy and Beastie-inclined): Lazy Sunday (a.k.a. The Chronic!-les of Narnia)…cause Mr. Pibb & Red Vines = crazy delicious. Update: It’s aphenomenon.
Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine, and Bob’s in…the DJ booth? Apparently Dylan will host his own show on XM Radio beginning in March. “Dylan will offer regular commentary on music and other topics, host and interview special guests including other artists and will take emails from XM subscribers.”
