iPod morning commute music: Prince, Purple Rain (1984)
Actually, I'm cheating here. Today, I didn't listen to music, just slept on the ride in. But I did listen to Purple Rain at the end of last week, on my evening commute, without realizing that Prince was going to play the half-time show at the Super Bowl (here in Japan, I'm lucky to know when the Super Bowl is on...extra details like who provides the half-time entertainment sometimes passes me by). Anyway, he opened the show with Let's Go Crazy, the first track from the CD, and closed with Purple Rain (fitting, given the weather). It was a great show, and Purple Rain remains his finest album.
I watched yesterday's Super Bowl in school, missing the opening kickoff return for a touchdown (I was taking care of a class during our morning service) and the third quarter (teaching my one class of the day). It was a sloppy game, but I enjoyed it. Still, nothing like the Fiesta Bowl over New Years between Boise State and Oklahoma. THAT was a game!
Our senior high entrance exam is being held on this Friday and Saturday. We had to take in too many students after the junior high entrance exam, six full classes instead of the usual five, and I'm hoping that doesn't happen at the senior high level as well. It would be hard to cover the extra class with the part-time foreign staff that we have, and it's pretty late to be looking for someone new. Friday will be a busy day, Saturday not so much but it could be long due to the teachers' meeting concerning who we invite to become students.
I found out last Friday that I'll be one of three escort teachers going to the UK this spring with our students. I'm actually excited about it. Last year I really got to know the British students when they came to visit our school, and am looking forward to seeing them again. Also, it will be my second time to visit the UK with this program (or should I write programme?), so I have the schemata down pat. It will also be great to see my mentor, Evelyn (the missionary who hired me all those years ago) when we visit York, where she's now living.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
A Spring trip to the UK? Its hard at the top Craig. Im listening to Clear Spot by the good Captain at the time of writing this, Captain Beefheart remains a constant from the time when my friend Simon Butler who used to walk home with me from school would quote entire songs from Trout Mask Replica (incidently the Simpson's creator Matt whatsisface's favourite album of all time). Anyway Clear Spot contains the immortal crazy little thing and big eyed beans from venus. music doesnt get any better than that. By the way I would hold that Parade ranks equal with Purple Rain but thats just me. Entrance Exam marking now, joy of joys.
Clear Spot? incredible album and Trout Mask is as far out there as its possible to be without being from Mars as I believe Jimi Hendrix was. A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous got me? Its the blimp Frank its the blimp! Its the thing thats going to make Captain Beefheart and his magic band great, Fast and Bulbus, bulbus slightly tapered, also a tinned teardrop (cue Rocket Morten saying 'oh Christ') references I believe that refer to a Harley Davidson fact fans. Heres Lester Bangs
This piece, written by Lester Bangs, was taken from the 26th July 1969 edition of Rolling Stone.
Trout Mask Replica, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (Straight Sm 1053)
Captain Beefheart, the only true dadaist in rock, has been victimized repeatedly by public incomprehension and critical authoritarianism. The tendency has been to chide C.B. and his Band as a potentially acceptable blues band who were misled onto the paths of greedy trendy commercialism. What the critics failed to see was that this was a band with a vision, that their music, difficult raucous and rough as it is, proceeded from a unique and original consciousness.
This became dramatically apparent with their last album. Since their music derived as much from the new free jazz and African chant rhythms as from Delta blues, the songs tended to he rattly and wayward. clattering along on weirdly jabbering high-pitched guitars and sprung rhythms. But the total conception and its execution was more in the nature of a tribal Pharaoh Sanders Archie Shepp fire-exorcism than the ranting noise of the Blue Cheer strain of groups.
Thus it's very gratifying to say that Captain Beefheart's new album is a total success; a brilliant, stunning enlargeme and clarification of his art. Which is not to say that it's in any sense slick, "artistic" or easy. This is one of the few bands whose sound has actually gotten rawer as they've matured - a brilliant and refreshing strategy. Again the rhythms and melodic textures jump all over the place (in the same way that Cecil Taylor's do). Beefheart singing like a lonesome werewolf screaming and growling in the night. The songs clatter about - given a superficial listening they seem boring and repetitious. It's perhaps the addition of saxophones (all played by the five men in the band) that first suggests what's really happening here and always has been happening in this group's music.
On "Hair Pie Bake One," for instance, the whole group gets into a raucous wrangling horn dialog that reveals a strong Albert Ayler influence. The music truly meshes, flows, and excites in a way that almost none of the self-conscious, carefully crafted jazz-rock bullshit of the past year has done. And the reason for this is that while many other groups have picked up on the trappings of the new jazz, Cap and the Magic Band are into its essence, the white-hot stream of un-"cultured" energy, getting there with a minimum of strain to boot. This is the key to their whole instrumental approach, from the drummer's whirling poly- and even a- rhythmic patterns (compare them to Sonny Murray's on Ayler's Spiritual Unity or Ed Blackwell's on Don Cherry's Symphony For Improvisers), to the explosive, diffuse guitar lines, which (like Lou Reed's for the Velvet Underground or Gary Peacock's bass playing on Spiritual Unity) stretch, tear, and distend the electric guitar's usual vocabulary with the aim of extending that vocabulary past its present strictly patterned limitations - limitations that are as tyrannically stultifying for the rock musician today as Charlie Parker's influence was for the jazzmen of the late Fifties.
l mustn't forget the lyrics. You certainly won't; the album on a purely verbal level is an explosion of maniacal free-association incantations, eschewing (with the authentic taste that assassinates standards of Taste) solemn 'poetic’ pretensions and mundane, obvious mono-syllabic mindlessness. Where, for in stance, have you heard lyrics like these; "Tits tits the blimp the blimp / The mother ship the mother ship / The brothers hid under the hood / From the blimp the blimp…. all the people stir / ‘n the girls' knees tremble / 'n run 'n wave their hands / 'n run their hands over the blimp the blimp…".
The double record set costs as much as two regular albums, hut unlike most of these superlong superexpensive items it's really sustained, and worth the money, which is perhaps not so much to pay for 27 songs and what may well be the most unusual and challenging musical experience you'll have this year.
and just for fun the immortal Ella Guru
Now here she comes walkin'
Lookin' like uh zoo
Hello Moon Hello Moon
Hi Ella high Ella Guru
She know all the colors that nature do
High Ella high Ella Guru
High yella high red high blue she blew
High Ella high Ella Guru
She do what she mean
'n she do what she do
Got sumptin' fo' me sumptin' fo' you
She sho' sumptin'
She's young too
Ella Guru Ella Guru
Ella Guru Ella Guru
Ha ha right right
Just dig it
That's right "The Mascara Snake"
Fast 'n bulbous
Tight also
Ella Guru Ella Guru
Ella Guru Ella Guru
Ella Guru
The reply deleted was just a duplication of the second comment.
I haven't listened to the good Captain for some time, mainly because I have most of his music on MD, a medium I no longer play (the lone MD player in my house that still works is an ugly boom box affair that sits under a pile of my sweaters in my bedroom). I do have the double CD anthology on disc, though not on my iPod. Actually, my iPod is in dire need of updating. Look for more on the good Captain in a later post! Craig
Post a Comment