Gamelan

One of the few things I really enjoyed in college was playing in a Javanese gamelan ensemble. One of the colleges I went to, a small college in the Midwest of all places, actually had a full gamelan (made out of metal from a decommissioned ship, no less), and every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon during the two years I was there I crammed into a tiny room in the music building along with a bunch of other hippie-ish students, stepped carefully over the instruments which were packed in about as tightly as possible, and banged on loud pieces of metal for an hour or two (you can actually see a video of us performing with dancers on YouTube — well, you can see the dancers, and hear the gamelan orchestra, in which I would have been playing.

Anyway, since we were driving by, I thought I'd take the kids in to see the instruments, especially as S is now taking drum lessons and in general, likes to bang on things. The college has since built a much larger music building, so the instruments are laid out with much more space — safe to let a couple of kids around:

My new favorite band

I was going to blog about either a) the incredibly depressing thoughts I had during another attack of insomnia last night, or b) how much (and why) I hate Borders, but I'll spare the internet my angst and spite for today and instead give props to my new favorite band, Firewater (whose latest CD I purchased at the aforementioned corporate media chain today):



(I was originally entranced by them when stumbling upon a couple of videos of them playing live at KEXP in Seattle, while browsing the "giveaways" section of the Bloodshot Records website)

Low-quality copies of high-quality music

Kids, before there was napster and illegal mp3 downloads, there was the cassette tape. This weekend, we finally installed the ultimate in home decoration, a hang-on-your-wall cassette display rack, recently acquired at a neighborhood "free sale" and apparently home-made. This prompted us to finally, after 11 years of living together, go through our 400+ cassette tapes (which for most of the last 11 years have lived in boxes in the basement). And lo and behold, we discovered numerous duplicate, and in a few cases, triplicate, copies of various albums.

Well, internet people, our dupes are your gain. These albums, having been selected for at least dubbing, if not purchase of a factory-made tape, by both of us, are clearly of the highest musical quality. If you're interested in any of these copies, give us a call or email if you know us, or if you don't, leave a comment below. If you're not in Burlington, we'll ship stuff gratis to friends; people we don't know, we'll probably want you to cover the shipping costs through paypal.

Factory Made Tapes
Red Hot Chili Peppers: The Uplift Mofo Party Plan
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Mother's Milk
Edie Brickell and New Bohemians: Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars
REM: Automatic for the People
U2: Achtung Baby
Lone Justice: Shelter
Adrian Belew: Mr. Music Head
Paul Simon: Graceland
Sting: Nothing Like the Sun
10,000 Maniacs: In My Tribe
Pixies: Come on Pilgrim
Cowboy Junkies: The Trinity Sessions
Pink Floyd: The Wall
Talking Heads: Naked
Cowboy Junkies: Whites Off Earth Now
They Might Be Giants: Flood
REM: Life's Rich Pageant
B-52's: Cosmic Thing
Bruce Springsteen: The Ghost of Tom Joad

Home Made Tapes
Kate Jacobs: The Calm Comes After/Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers Greatest Hits
Jefferson Airplane: After Bathing at Baxters/Fairport Convention: Leige and Lief
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man/U2: Zooropa
Brahms: 21 Ungarische Tanze/Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 New World
Cassandra Wilson: Blue Light Til Dawn
Gabriel Faure: Requiem/Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
Dire Straits: Making Movies/Billy Bragg: Workers' Playtime
24-7 Spyz: Harder Than You
Lou Reed: New York plus some greatest hits
Mortal Micronotz tribute/Replacements: Tim
Lyle Lovett: Joshua Judges Ruth
Laurie Anderson: Bright Red
Son Volt: Trace/Uncle Tupelo: March 16-20, 1992
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Blood Sugar Sex Magic
Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus plus Kronos Quartet
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: The Day, The Night, The Dawn, The Dusk
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: Devotional and Love Songs and Party
Kim Forehand: Going Home/Kate Jacobs: (What About Regret)
Lucious Jackson: Natural Ingredients/Poster Children: Just Like You/Bottle Rockets: The Brooklyn Side
Blue Mountain: Dog Days/Bottlerockets: The Brooklyn Side
Spearhead: Home b/w selections from Stolen Moments: Red, Hot and Cool
10,000 Maniacs: In My Tribe b/w selections from Hope Chest and The Wishing Chair
Billy Bragg: Don't Try This at Home/George Clinton: Hey Man ... Smell My Finger
Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense
The Hooters: Nervous Night/Talking Heads: Little Creatures
Volcano Lover read by Susan Sontag
Uncle Tupelo: March 16-20, 1992, Anodyne
Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks and Greatest Hits
Pink Floyd: The Wall
Paul Simon: Rhythm of the Saints b/w a Lady Smith Black Mambazo album
Luka Bloom: Riverside, the Acoustic Motorbike
Townes Van Zandt: Rain on a Conga Drum
Bruce Springsteen: The Ghost of Tom Joad
Peter Gabriel: "Melting Face", Security

Voice

The performing arts theatre where I work (as a low-wage box office peon) is calling part of its season this year "Giving Voice" — theatre pieces about food insecurity, class and culture in New England, and post-Katrina America.

But I can't stand the phrase "giving voice." In my experience, the problem isn't that (powerless) people don't have a voice, it's that no one listens to them. Nothing against the artists — they seem like good and interesting pieces, I may even try to go see some of the shows — but "giving voice" seems to me to be a marketing tool to get the theatre audience (which will be overwhelmingly white and middle-class) to buy tickets to these performances so they can feel good about themselves for having participated in "giving voice" to working-class folks, for having participated in an "initiative for diversity" (one of the institutional sponsors of one of the shows).

When, of course, the most useful thing white middle-class people can do is to shut up and get some humility and find ways to listen directly to voices from the grassroots.

* * *

I loved music as a youngster, learned the guitar and piano starting in junior high, wrote songs, played in bands, picked up other instruments, spent endless hours making home recordings on a 4-track tape recorder. But I never could sing; I'd always have to find singers and teach them the songs I wrote (which often had interesting lyrics, chord changes and rhythms, but were kinda weak on melody).

In my early 20s I finally taught myself to sing a little — I figured out I could pick out (simple) vocal melodies on the guitar or piano, then play the melodies back and sing along and slowly learn how to match the pitch with my voice. I started playing solo acoustic shows, with a repertoire of songs whose vocal melodies didn't go below C or above G. In general only close friends, and a few people who really liked the songs, were willing to endure my more or less on-key but not particularly musical singing.

Over the years I expanded my range a bit, even found a few singers with whom I could successfully harmonize, but it wasn't until I had kids and had to sing lullabyes a capella (and, incidentally, no longer had time to play the guitar) that I finally learned to sing consistently on-key. Instead of using my ears to match the pitch of my voice to the pitches of instruments I heard around me, I learned to find the pitch in the vibration of my own body.

Underground: the power chords of freedom

We have a small house, and under the pressure of a recent, holiday-related increase in the amount of children's stuff, I have agreed to move my boxes filled with hundreds of cassette tapes out of the living room, where the stereo is. Because I have retained a small space, adequate for a small box of 30 tapes, in the living room, and also because I am a bit of a compulsive sorter, I spent much of yesterday evening going through all of those tapes, sorting the mix tapes from the full albums, the albums which we now own on CD from those we don't, and so forth.

In this era when the record companies are buying legislation to allow them to snoop into private computers to see if anyone's been "sharing" audio files, my collection of cassette tapes seems like an archive of samizdat mimeographed leaflets — not a completely inappropriate analogy, as much of my politicization was triggered by rock and roll. In 1985, the music available to a 12-year-old on the radio in the Midwest was pop-rock ear candy, the final absorbtion of new wave into the mainstream. Although I later discovered the more overtly political music of rap, punk, and world music, it was casette tapes dubbed from old scratchy vinyl records of 60s psychedelic music that first put the idea in my head that there was something beyond Reagan-era Middle America, that there had been eras of massive change and radicalism in the past and would be again, that another world was possible.

One of the tapes I came across last night and put on was a copy of the 1969 Jefferson Airplane album Volunteers. It is far from their best work (their psychedelic masterpiece After Bathing At Baxter's was one of the first CDs I purchased when I finally got a CD player in the mid-90s), and I hadn't listened to it in years. I vaguely remembered the title track, that it also contained their version of "Wooden Ships," and that the opening song "We Can Be Together" contained the infamous line "Up against the wall, mother****er," but I was unprepared for how much the opening chords of "We Can Be Together" reminded me of the storm-the-barricades strum-and-drang of the Clash.

This shouldn't be surprising, as this song was the closest thing to an anthem for the current of 60s radicalism that found expression in the Weather Underground. "We are forces of chaos and anarchy / everything you say we are, we are / and we are very proud of ourselves." One the one hand, this seems like a perfect, snotty musical tone for the mostly well-to-do young people who came to believe that domestic terrorism was the most effective way to strike against empire. On the other hand, as a recent article about the Clash in the New Yorker pointed out, one of Joe Strummer's central lyrical themes was that there are some points that can only be made by smashing things. In fact, "White Riot" explicitly makes the point that white working-class kids will always be under the thumb of the rich until they take some direct action — "Black people gotta lot a problems / But they don't mind throwing a brick / White people go to school / Where they teach you how to be thick."

Most people find the turn towards violence of a small group of upper-middle-class Americans in the late 60s more appalling than urban riots, either because they're vaguely on the left and more sympathetic to the difficulties faced by people of color and the working class, or because they're vaguely on the right and somewhere in their hearts think that people of color and the working class are somehow less civilized than middle class whites. While I certainly think the Weather Undergound approach (and to some degree that of the Black Bloc and other contemporary window-smashers) was misguided and counterproductive, I have to admit to a certain understanding of the emotional impulse behind it.

These radicals came of age in an America which had amputated the left side of its body politic. The repression of communists, socialists and other radicals in the 1950s wasn't just a witch-hunt for subversive individuals, it was an attempt to wipe out a certain way of thinking. Unfortunately, capitalism continued to produce economic deprivation, racism, war and alienation — with limited access to a coherent intellectual tradition to help explain the situation and older, seasoned activists to help provide a guide to action, it is hardly surprising that some currents of the radicalism that blossomed in the 60s should flow into deadly dead-ends.

And it is hardly surprising that they should take their political direction from rock and roll. George Lipsitz's excellent book, Rainbow at Midnight, examines the waves of wildcat and general strikes, and other working-class direct action, in the late 1940s. This was far more threatening to the status quo than supposed communists in Hollywood, and Lipsitz convincingly argues that much of the repression associated with "McCarthyism" was in fact directed at working class activists. He further argues that the utopian aspirations which underpinned this radicalism, the sense that acting together can change your workplace, your neighborhood, your world for the better, once it could no longer be safely expressed politically, went "underground" into popular culture. The birth of rock and roll.