In that blog post, my proposed RIYL (recommended if you like) list of comparative artists included Vanilla Ice, Kool Keith, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Zomby, Aphex Twin. At the time, even I found that list of comparisons a bit much. But here we are, a few months later, and “Weird Al” has been added to an ATP Festival curated by the dramatic post-rock sad sacks in Godspeed! You Black Emperor. And now Aphex Twin has officially collaborated with Die Antwoord.

The evidence (via Pitchfork):

No there’s nothing groundbreaking about Die Antwoord’s contribution to the track — but still, one begins to wonder, what is the artistic world coming to. Or rather, one begins to take great joy in the open-mindedness with which visionaries of different emotional tenors are joining hands. Just goes to proove it takes some next level shit to recognize next level shit.

I had some ambivalence about the small venue tour Sufjan went on last fall — the music’s Liberace-like indulgence, the way his band consciously abandoned structure but then, perhaps, overshot that effort and abandoned good taste. Philosophically it was intriguing; the music that resulted felt a bit forced. It meandered where, before, it was compulsively engaging.

I’m only a few listens into his new release, an EP titled All Delighted People, but it excites me on a number of levels. I like way he released it: an intentionally desultory approach wherein it just kind of popped up on a wonky, semi-established internet site with a rough hewn but charming cover, the kind of image an ambitious teenage kid might cut & paste on the cover of a mix tape or CD. (Sidenote: Do people still make mixtapes?)

I like the weird heft of it — a 60 minute EP! — and the through-line it maintains from Sufjan’s recent public statements to the musical execution of the recording. In a long interview with Paste Magazine, he had expressed a lack of faith in established musical formats (via Pitchfork). i.e.

“I’m wondering, why do people make albums anymore when we just download? Why are songs like three or four minutes, and why are records 40 minutes long? They’re based on the record, vinyl, the CD, and these forms are antiquated now. So can’t an album be eternity, or can’t it be five minutes? … I no longer really have faith in the album anymore. I no longer have faith in the song.”

Most importantly I like the music in and of itself. He’s tamped down the “too much jazz” of last year’s tour, but maintains the loose intensity of the music he played and an emotional register which is even more idiosyncratic than the songs he’s released in the past. On the website for his label Asthmatic Kitty he calls it “a dramatic homage to the Apocalypse, existential ennui, and Paul Simon’s ‘Sounds of Silence,’” though it feels as much like a jazz/classical/noise version of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.

It’s loose, it’s messy, it’s redolent of the 1970s and it has soul. It sounds like a good way to spend a Sunday morning.

PS – The morning after writing this post, while actually listening to it on a Sunday morning, the influence of church music also came to the fore: the ecstasies and intimacies and oh-so-human breakdowns; the gender-neutral chorus wherein the vocal registers of the singers remains ambiguously castrati-like; the final resolution of the songs which sets a certain tone: one of hard-earned uplift and hard-won peace.

Question: What do you do when you love a cover so much that you search out the original — BUT YOU CANNOT FIND IT? That, my friends, is why YouTube was invented.

See above for the original of the song “Relief” by R. Kelly — YouTube being the only place it is easily found on the world wide web. (We searched Amazon, eMusic & iTunes to no avail.) Below is the quite excellent cover by Brassfriend Sam Amidon:

On the internets, at least, Sam Amidon’s version seems to have gained commercial dominion. What an odd world we live in where the seemingly (but not really) ironic cover becomes more popular than the sincere (but not really, it couldn’t be, could it?) original?

And lest this post sound like last week’s news, here is the latest, internets-only hit burning up the webs & wires:

PS – Next week I’m taking a short holiday in Montreal. That means I’ll either (A) be blogging a lot, or (B) completely not.

In any case, there’s no denying two of my favorite icons of ’80s music have been accused of reclusive behavior. But today I woke up, fired up the internets, and bumped into two fine examples of them speaking loud and clear. So, without further adieu:

- CRASS in VICE MAGAZINE
- MARY MARGARET O’HARA on Q TV

One of the great archival photographs that appears alongside the great Crass interview appears above. Another right below.

And here is the Mary Margaret O’Hara interview in its entirety.

If you click on the tags to this post you can find a fair bit more of my internet ramblings about these two folks. And, because I’ll always appeal to prurient interests when given the chance, there’s one last image of Crass — a nudie shot! — after the jump.

It was captioned “Penny Rimbaud with his hand in the bush, Dial House, 1983,” but it looks to me like he’s cleaning out some gutters.

…but he also gives great Twit. And he is, right here, right now, onto some next level shit.

“Great art comes from pain”

True enough.

“I forget the word but there’s people throughout history that there responsibility is to be conveyors of truth onto next generations — there’s a word for that type of person — and I feel like I’m type of person that needs to carry on the truth that needs to tell the story not his story, to tell the story. It’s like Raphael painting Jesus’s wife knowing that the pope would have his head.”

Okay now.

“It takes so much for a me or an Eminem or you know, to come back and embrace and say, you know what, but we have to deliver this on a major level to make a difference. It’s just such a shame that all your favorite artists are so underground. It’s like not cool for no one to hear shit anymore. And that’s the hipster justification of failure.”

Yes yes yes!

More importantly he is wearing some very nice suits. And I hear his forthcoming album is going to have some trippy collaborators from “the underground” which will blow our minds.

Follow him now.

(Note: I have categorized this as an Interview even though it is more of a Monologue. If you think about it long enough, you’ll realize the best Interviews are in fact just guided Monologues.)

I’m sort of afraid to know what he’s saying but sometimes you just have to say, I do not care.

(via Conrad Standish)

This summer one of the festival’s artistic directors, Marc Cardonnel — his official title is Conseiller Artistique (tres chic!) — visited my neighborhood to get some more background on a night he’d booked dedicated to the musical life of our borough. Point being his crew filmed my interpretive waxations on the subject, wherein I trace the distinctions between Dirty Projectors (representing younger Brooklyn), The National (representing bourgie Brooklyn — pronounced boo-zhee and not really French), and Sharon Jones (i.e. real Brooklyn as in, like, she lived in Rockaway for awhile which is, to be frank, actually in Queens).

St. Vincent is nice and all but she’s more or less from Texas.

Also they made my hair look terrible:


In real life, I have better hair than that. I think. (I hope.) I’m not just a big mustache. (Moustache is, by the way, a 16th century French word. Not that they made me grow it.)

Anyway, you can read more about the festival right here. There’s both a French & English language option. That’s your call.

Also, because this blog is devoted not to on-topic ramblings that are pointed & sharp but rather wildly digressive ramblings that are insightful in a probing-the-subconscious mind kind of way, let me end this post by sharing a photo of the musical duo Tuck & Patti, which features St. Vincent’s uncle. No dis to Texas, Brooklyn or Gallic peoples anywhere, but based on the evidence she may, in fact, be of French heritage:

i.e. “Art makes nothing happen”

I did not discover a symbolic reason to stop talking? And no there was no implication here:

i.e. “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably everyday/ for lack/ of what is found there”

I have not died miserably.

Just lost in a maze a bit. Of moving & obligation. Back soon, I assure you. Or myself. Whichever is most accurate. I believe in facts. Such as…

Identical twins

Identical twins?