Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts

Here are the guys

Could there be anything more worthless than a K-Pop video, probably in my mind and yours these walking song advertisements are one of the most dispensable pieces of non-art you could possibly encounter. In the eyes of most people who do not know K-Pop, K-Pop music videos are all about young boys and girls wearing gorgeous clothes, singing and dancing in colorful backgrounds, and looking sad or happy for no apparent reason. The content of the singing is always young love, without too much of a demand for emotional engagement of any kind. But, I'm going to tell you that not only are K-Pop videos complex artistic creations, but also, and this is the important point, they make political and social statements that people would be afraid to make in any other forum.

Dream Perfect Regime LIVE

the birth of Korean Hip-Hop

By Sungyun Kim

It's a dream

K-Hip hop is not just a music genre, but a culture and lifestyle. And to understand it we’re going to have to ask a much more basic question than what is hip-hop or what is Korea; instead, we’re going to have to understand the origins of Korean hip hop and how this genre ever happened in Korea. To do this, we must delve into the strange cultural interchange between American and Korean popular music. For those of you who don’t know, hip-hop is the name of an American music genre that started in the United States. It was pioneered by socially disadvantaged African-Americans in the United States, who suffered from the poverty, violence, and indemic racism of the 1970s. They wanted to depict their lives as they actually experienced the world and to express a spirit of resistance. We should also say that it started in the form of party entertainment, cheap enjoyment designed to liven up any party. In any sense, hip-hop has developed into a culture of resistance and conflict as well as huge best-selling music that is a reflection of specific American social conditions and cultural conflicts.

REASSESSING THE GREAT Yoko Ono

or the unfairness of being John Lennon's wife

by Gordon Fung

Yes, she can sing

“Yes, I'm a witch, I'm a bitch/ I don't care what you say/ My voice is real, my voice is truth / I don't fit in your ways.” In, “Yes, I’m a Witch” (1974), Yoko Ono directly confronts her outsized and complex public persona. She clearly cares about the unjust accusations of breaking up the Beatles and the sense that she’s more of a supernatural cipher than a real person. What’s clear is that what matters to her is her voice, both her actual voice and its symbolic potential, and what it can accomplish. Ono is infamous for her screaming. In Voice Piece for Soprano (1961) revived in 2010 for her New York retrospective, the MoMa staff and museum visitors were continually unnerved as people took her up on the challenge of joining in on the screaming. This torture lasted five months.

JAMAICAN SOUND SYSTEMS

when technological innovation meets economic deprivation

By Ubirani Ferreira

The Revolution Hit the Streets!

So, what exactly is someone referring to when they say ‘Sound System Music?’ Doesn’t my grandma have one in her car? In fact, yes she does, but the origins of sound system music derives much further back in time to Jamaica, where it emerges from both an economic crisis and a technological break through. Within the context of Jamaican pop culture, a sound system is the meeting of many Disc Jockeys and engineers, linking up huge speakers and generators and setting up parties in densely populated areas of Jamaica, first and foremost in Kingston. In the 1940s and 50s most of the music being played was popular Rhythm and Blues from the U.S., but eventually other local Jamaican music took form and grabbed center stage at sound system events.

IRON AND WINE AND THE DREAMS OF SAMUEL BEAM

an appreciation of seeing Beam and the gang live

By Sarah Zehr

A painting of Samuel Beam

Samuel Beam, the musical mastermind behind his sometimes band Iron and Wine, was born July 26, 1974 in South Carolina. He released his first album Creek Drank the Cradle on the Sub Pop label in 2002. Beam often records his albums alone, but will go on tour with a full band, Iron and Wine. There is some confusion about the difference between Beam’s solo work and his Iron and Wine work and that’s because there’s no clear distinction, or at least any that he or the music is going to make clear. So, band or no band Beam is Iron and Wine, even though sometimes Iron and Wine is more than Beam, at least numerically. His music is simple and direct and critics have compared him to Nick Drake, Neil Young, Fleet Foxes and Simon and Garfunkel among other folk-pop luminaries. The comparisons are apt, but when I saw Iron and Wine live for the first time in a stunning show at the Fox Theater in Oakland I got the full scope of Beam’s music and ambitions. What at first appears to be direct and easily taken in is actually allusive, complex and rousing.

THE DREAM WORLD OF JONATHAN BATES AND BIG BLACK DELTA

a musical journey into color and space

Andreina Prado

This is a mind of Big Black Delta

Big Black Delta is a product of Jonathan Bates' out-of-this world imagination. The music feels as if the past, present and future are all taking place at the same time and in some other universe. Plagued or aided by synesthesia, Bates’ mind is bursting with colors, odd shapes and patterns, which he somehow translates into music. In interviews, he claims that he's “trying to take a picture and score it.” When he describes BBD, he sees “a purply, black goop with a twirl on top of it.” Despite the fact of being categorized as electronic music, BBD is much more than that. It's dance-y, has the propulsive energy of pop and the direct force of rock. And all of these elements are topped off by Bates’ high-pitched tenor, which he uses to create a hazy, hypnotized and fragmented aural landscape. These are qualities that would normally clash; however, in the case of BBD this curious amalgamation of styles is not only what you want, but also what you need.

PUNKS IN ASIA!!!!

the incredible spread of punk rock in Asia!!!!

By Sirat Buck

This had to be invented

You might think this an odd and stupid thing to claim, but someone actually did create, or maybe we should say dreamt up, the “Pogo” dance. It just didn't happen, but took a genius to jump up and down in one place and call it dancing. Take a bow Mr. Sid Vicious, bassist of the earthshattering punk band The Sex Pistols. In 1994, years after his infamous death at the Chelsea Hotel, Sid's pogo dance swept through Northeast Asia, and particularly Korea. Meanwhile punk has spread, slowly and powerfully, through Asia and continues to rise in popularity into the 21st century. Korea’s punk scene is fairly recent, while the Japanese punk scene is large and has been around a long time. China’s punk scene continues to thrive, though both fans and musicians alike are starting to wonder where the future of punk in China is going. Malaysian punk has been around since 1977, but didn’t begin to develop a particular Malaysian sound until 1987. Furthermore, in Indonesia, punks are fighting to keep their Mohawks and the whole of their lives from government control. I do not claim to be an expert on punk in Asia, but I will claim that punk is a way of shouting back at the world when the world doesn’t make sense. It is the raw response to injustice, when our desire for joy is denied. As we slip from country to country you can see that punk is a beacon call for political and social freedom, just as it has been in the U.S. and England and everywhere it’s raised its anarchic head.

WHY WE MUST SEARCH FOR REAL, BRUTAL ART

a consideration of the Swans' The Seer

By Zoe Brezsny

Grrrrrrrrr!

Lead singer Michael Gira is in a loincloth and bellows into a microphone as if he’s trying to perform a self-exorcism. As he’s ripping the demons out, the noise is so deafening that audience members are passing out and spontaneously defecating on themselves. You are in the world of the Swans. The Seer, the longest album the Swans have ever made, clocks in at a chippy two hours and sweeps through every sound this crazed group has ever tried to produce. The no-wave terror of their early albums, the melodic post-punk chapter and the gothic folk of their early 2000s' incarnation are all present and accounted for and more. Whatever the style The Seer is all raw sound, religious chants and phoenix rising from the ashes pop gigantism. As a Youtube commentator wrote about “The Avatar,” one of the tracks on The Seer: “Seeing Swans live leaves the body broken but the mind uplifted. It's a truly punishing experience, and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. The body is dead, but the mind alive."

HAS TOM WAITS LOST HIS VOICE

a concerned and loving review of Waits' Bad As Me

By Nathan Gale

He's listening, are you?

It’s difficult to judge the career of a living artist. Sometimes the career is going up, sometimes down, sometimes it looks like it’s going up when its going down, sometimes what seems a break is actually continuity. You never know until they’re dead. In addition, public praise or criticism are wild cards that makes it difficult to properly assess what an artist is doing, or the difference between what an artist wants to do and what an artist needs to do in order to change and grow. So, careers of the living are difficult to understand.

ELIS REGINA SINGS JUAN CARLOS JOBIM'S "THE WATERS OF MARCH"

a YouTube appreciation

By John Wilkins

Elis Regina singing in 1973

In Jean–Luc Godard’s Breathless, the director Jean-Pierre Melville, playing a famous director very much like Jean-Pierre Melville, disembarks from an airplane and is surrounded by reporters shouting a barrage of questions at him. In the distance he catches sight of Jean Seberg—who wouldn’t? We first see her selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Elysees, but here she appears to work for some culturally minded international news network. The range of her journalistic activities is quite impressive, absurdly so, but none of that matters. Whatever her actual duties, she is finally whatever Godard needs her to be, which is a beautiful way of approaching character. Continuity is an ugly virtue and Godard knows that and so he chooses feeling, flux and life every time, or at least in most of his films up to 1967, when he was both fun and important.

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This had to be invented