right so i told wordtruncheon.blogspot.com to write on the radio dept. song 'why wont you talk about it?' should be interesting read it there,etc. he has told me to write on otis taylor, any song. not what i was hoping for, i gotta say. this is going to be painful.
what is otis taylor. otis taylor is at least two things. otis taylor is the arts and entertainment reporter for the state newspaper who i run into everytime i go out in columbia. every.time. hes an interesting guy, congenial. knows his stuff. smokes a lot of cigarettes. a lot. the other otis taylor, and the otis taylor im going to write about, though i suppose i could have gotten away with the other one, is an iconoclastic bluesman. might be tempted to call him avant-blues, based on his lyrics. really does what he wants, which is perhaps anti-blues.
the song '10 million slaves' showed up on micheal mann's 'public enemies'. which was at times great, generally pretty good. though they did skew the chronology a bit. great duality between dillinger and purvis.
gonna talk about 3 things here, if i dont fall asleep first. try to get at least one in. might try to relate them later on into a monstermetanarrative, might not and probably wont.
1)lyrically, taylor attempts to create a metanarrative for the slave trade, specifically for those recently arrived in america. and some other stuff.
2)instrumentally, taylor offers an interpretation of walter benjamin's viewing of klee's 'angelus novulus/ angel of history' painting. i posted more on that specific subject sometime back in 2008. http://howtoliveinaglasshouse.blogspot.com/2008/02/benjamin.html I thought i wrote more on it, i think i did on another post, but this is all i can find. at least thats the painting.
3) the appearance of the song in a scene in 'public enemies' is used to create an argument for that lovely and very very nasty postpartisianship, and a few other things.
gonna talk about instruments first. pretty simple one here. if i was a good man id break this song down into its four composite parts on protools or garageband. cant do that at this hour though, or at least i wont tonight. should be able to get something meaningful out of this easily enough though.
so the start of the song, you get a junior kimbrough-esque delta blues motif. very iconic. so you start out with this reckoning buried within the music. the delta paradox of extremely fertile soil but rampant poverty and destitution. so youre getting the 'kimbrough track' at about an 80% fade in your right ear, and about 20% to the left. this is effectively full to the right, because if you do go 100% to the right then attempt to add anything in at a high level in the left, youre ears hurt like shit and they often pop. so basically you gotta always have some sound coming out of both ears. even if its negligible, youre brain will still register it as coming full in from the right. theres a crash course in mixing. anyway. the next motif to come in is the banjo line. too many think that the banjo is a cracker instrument. its actually not. really developed by slaves based on their 'remembrance' of west african instruments like the kora. so after about 4 bars with the banjo in, you realise that the song is a round. guitar->banjo, around and around,etc etc.
pretty revealing stuff for us. youve got the modern on one hand, the embodiment of the angel- the twangy guitar line-the guitar born out the civil rights act and the supposed creation of equality, but struck with the reality that these aims remain totally unfulfilled, economic inequality increases, as services increase for the haves, the have nots still are unable to attain the most basic standard of living. the kimbrough line's history is intrinsically tied to that of the banjo. the banjo line-the past, the history-with its late entrance, from the left-the past, signifies the angel peering backwards yet propelled forwards in time, never able to address/redress/remediate the problems of the past.
in benjamin's own words because he said it best:
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
its a shitty world people, and i'll shamelessly plug for healthcare reform.
now it would be great to end the song after one guitar-> banjo cycle, but that doesnt adhere to the paradigms of music, and since we adhere to the paradigms of music, unless we are say, saul williams, we can/have to take it as it is. the theme remains the same. and i am going to bed.
pretty revealing stuff for us. youve got the modern on one hand, the embodiment of the angel- the twangy guitar line-the guitar born out the civil rights act and the supposed creation of equality, but struck with the reality that these aims remain totally unfulfilled, economic inequality increases, as services increase for the haves, the have nots still are unable to attain the most basic standard of living. the kimbrough line's history is intrinsically tied to that of the banjo. the banjo line-the past, the history-with its late entrance, from the left-the past, signifies the angel peering backwards yet propelled forwards in time, never able to address/redress/remediate the problems of the past.
in benjamin's own words because he said it best:
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
its a shitty world people, and i'll shamelessly plug for healthcare reform.
now it would be great to end the song after one guitar-> banjo cycle, but that doesnt adhere to the paradigms of music, and since we adhere to the paradigms of music, unless we are say, saul williams, we can/have to take it as it is. the theme remains the same. and i am going to bed.
parts 1 and 3 might come tomorrow, or they might not.