Every Great Song Ever

T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou: “Ecoute Ma Melodie” (Vicky & Eskill: 152 Kilos de Voix, 1980)

Sometimes I catch myself wondering if the fact that I’m interested in so many things actually means I’m not interested in anything enough to commit myself to it wholeheartedly. I love astronomy, but don’t do anything astronomy-related most nights aside from reading Bad Astronomy. I love baseball but haven’t played it since I was a kid and only occasionally watch it. I’ve studied both a lot, though.

This problem keeps rising to the top of my list of concerns as I hack my way through a forest of academic articles toward a master’s degree. I’m less than a year from finishing now, and the question that nags is, once I obtain this important piece of paper, what do I do with it?

Urban planning isn’t a narrow or even well-defined field. that’s one of the things that drew me to it (it’s also the thing that makes me a writer, I think). I know I can’t do one narrow thing for an entire professional life, and planning offers a lot of avenues, many of them eclectic in themselves. But that’s the devilish thing about it, too—it’s tough to seek a job when there are so many different directions you can see yourself exploring. 

On a level with much lower stakes, I play this out all the time when deciding what to listen to. There’s a point where variety and choice becomes paralyzing (a point that retailers have almost universally crossed and the reason shopping is not among my interests), and my amassed music, spread over four formats, tens of thousands of artists, hundreds of genres and geographies and literally hundreds of thousands of individual tracks, is getting to that point. 

It’s why I’ve dialed way back on acquisition (this was made easier by the time suck of school work). I still find it hard to resist forgotten British hard rock from the early 70s or funk from the tropics when I come across it, but I’m done questing for it for now, haunting a wide circle of blogs daily and buying compilations in bulk.

This doesn’t mean I’m not hearing new music. To the contrary, the massive aggregation I’ve built up (it feels somehow wrong to refer to the whole thing as a collection) presents me with a near bottomless seam of ore to mine, and it is studded with uncountable gems.

I spent a whole day listening to Benin’s Orchestre Poly-Rythmo the other week, and this was one of the best finds. From one of the group’s last LPs to feature drummer Leopold Yehouessi and guitarist Papillon before both died within a year of each other, “Ecoute Ma Melodie” is pulsing Afrofunk that smears the sounds this band covered over the decade of the 70s into a timeless concoction that features some beautifully slippery sax work up front, nicely subdued synthesizer, spiky organ, sharp horns, and an up-the-neck bassline from Bentho Gustave that’s freaky enough to lend a hint of psychedelia to everything.

I don’t know if this is Vicky or Eskill singing—I feel like I should, because, along with Melome Clement, they were the greatest vocalists Poly-Rythmo played with, and I’ve heard their voices hundreds of times without ever really sorting the two of them out—but I love the restraint. You get the feeling everyone involved in this track is keeping himself in check, and yet the song they combine to make burns unbelievably hot. 

And so this is now one of the songs I go to in order to reassure myself that broad interests aren’t mutually exclusive with passionate interests, because I can be head-over-heels with this and Black Sabbath and Duke Ellington’s Cotton Club Orchestra and Calexico and Debussy and a hundred other things equally and at once, and it doesn’t matter. 

I still don’t know exactly where I’ll take that degree, but I’m going to spend the next few months reminding myself that a multiplicity of options is a gift if you know how to accept it.

Bob Marley & The Wailers: “Redemption Song” (Uprising, 1980)

Yesterday, I went grocery shopping at Meijer. For those outside the upper Midwest, Meijer is a superstore, like a Wal-Mart or a Greatland Target. You can go there for your normal groceries and pick up some pillows or workout clothes or an X-Box or some other future garbage you may or may not actually need while you’re there.

When I was there on Sunday, standing in the aisle next to the macaroni and cheese when I heard a familiar acoustic guitar figure on the PA. It was Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.”

I think about the politics of music in public spaces from time to time. I think about what it means to license a piece of music to market a product, I think about how songs can connect us or create a heightened sense of reality by their use, in media or simply in a pubic or private space.

I don’t have any great problem with licensing, contextless presentation of music in public, or really anything else that keeps money flowing through the music industry and hopefully to the people who made it, or in some cases their survivors. I don’t think music can be cheapened by cheap presentation—it’s incumbent upon us as listeners to keep the value in them.

Hearing “Redemption Song” in that superstore, while filling a basket with food, seemed somehow profane to me, though. “Good Day Sunshine” is one thing, so are “Toxic,” “Stairway To Heaven,” “Take On Me,” “Sing Sing Sing,” and, hell, “Jammin.” I can hear them anywhere and think nothing of it, as I can with thousands of other songs, including many that I love to death.

But this, it felt wrong. I was filing past these rows of brightly designed packages and hear is the last new song released during the lifetime of Bob Marley, just him and his guitar, laying bare the deepest spiritual thoughts of a dying man. Marley had been diagnosed with cancer before he wrote this, and had refused the amputation that likely would have saved his life on religious grounds.

That the same spirituality he is calling on in this song is central to his cause of death has always been one of the hard things about listening to the song for me. But more than that, the words were so dissonant to the experience I was having in this giant, overlit store that I couldn’t reconcile them. Atomic energy is what powers that store, along with coal—it comes from Fermi 1, down in Frenchtown Charter Township. It had a partial meltdown in 1966.

Marley sings about freedom in this song, paraphrasing Marcus Garvey when he talks about emancipation from mental slavery. Ostensibly, these huge stores that go on and on forever are about offering a type of surface-level freedom of choice. You have options, all laid before you on neat shelves. Too many options sometimes, sometimes a paralyzing number.

I think the way we live is essentially our choice at a certain level. But I also think there are certain social realities beyond our control that necessarily dictate or at least channel aspects of our lives. The superstore is part of that.

I don’t have a problem with presenting music in public without context. It’s part of our environment, one we built for ourselves. But some songs really should be left out of it.

Super Mama Djombo: “Julia” (Festival, Vol. 2, 1980)

Guinea-Bissau is a tiny country wedged between Senegal and Guinea on the West African coast. It’s a little bigger than Maryland, with about one and a half million people. It was once a Portuguese colony, and fought a tough war for its independence from 1956 to 1974, when Portugal’s Marcelo Caetano, the last ruler of the long, authoritarian Estado Novo period, was overthrown in a bloodless coup, and all of Portugal’s colonial holdings were put on the path to independence.

During the war, two major bands, Cobiana Djazz and Super Mama Djombo, had been formed, and most of their music was based on modernizing the traditional gumbe dance music of the country. In the hands of bands with electric bass players, gumbe became a quick, slippery rhythm that lended itself extremely well to supporting catchy melodies.

Super Mama Djombo was the longer-lived of the two big bands, primarily due to the death of Cobiana leader Jose Carlos Schwarz in 1977. In the band’s early days, Super Mama Djombo, which was named in honor of a local spirit widely respected among the country’s animist population, operated in a clandestine manner, in rebel-held territory. The milieu they became a band in informed their lyrics, many of which are songs of praise for the revolution and its leader, Amilcar Cabral. 

“Julia” is an exception to their usual lyrical focus, though, and also is an exception to their usual use of gumbe-based rhythms. Instead, it’s a crystalline ballad, with scorching lead guitar by Adriano “Tundu” Fonseca, and a pained vocal—the “Julia” of the title is a deceased lover, and the song is written from the perspective of a man who has been heartbroken twice, once by her death, and again by a new lover who has left him. He is literally asking the band for help getting through the pain.

It’s haunting, and quite unlike most of the band’s other music. It was recorded at the same time the band made all its other recordings: in one marathon 1980 session in Lisbon that produced six full hours of tape, from which all of the albums released by the group during its original run were drawn. The drummer on those recordings is Ze Manel, who later became one of Guinea-Bissau’s most prominent solo artists.

Super Mama Djombo’s excellence was hard-earned. The members all voted on who was allowed to remain in the band, and if it was felt you weren’t keeping up with the rest of the musicians, you were out, no matter how much they liked you personally. Their relatively low profile owes more to their place of origin, a tiny country with little international profile, than to their music, which is on a par with Bembeya Jazz, Super Rail Band, Orchestra Baobab and the other great West African orchestras.

Super Mama Djombo have reunited and released some new albums in recent years.

Paul McCartney: “One Of These Days” (McCartney II, 1980)

Today, Pitchfork is running a review I wrote of Paul McCartney’s McCartney and McCartney II, a weird pair if there ever was one. It’s funny, I was thinking of posting the lead song from McCartney II, “Coming Up,” but Rob/Ley Lines coincidentally posted the hilarious video earlier this week, so I’m going to go with this instead. (Do check out that video, though—it’s a whole band of Pauls, with a couple Lindas on backing vocals—I wonder what John Lennon thought of it, or if he even saw it. I’m aware that the song drove him crazy, and he found it impossible to get it out of his head).

This is the least typical song on McCartney II. Not many people are familiar with this album today, but to summarize, it’s basically McCartney’s synth-pop album, for better or worse (and there is quite a bit of both on the album). It’s a contradictory album, somehow ambitious and lazy at the same time, and there’s music on it that totally sounds like it was made in Brooklyn a year ago.

“One Of These Days,” though is the only song on the album that sounds as thought it maybe could have been included on McCartney in 1970. It’s the sort of super-simple song McCartney didn’t allow himself to do often enough, maybe the closest thing he did to “Yesterday” in his post-Beatles career. As a closer for McCartney II, it has the effect of a palate cleanser, almost McCartney’s way of saying “it was all a dream.”

McCartney recorded the whole album by himself on new equipment (the outtake “Check My Machine” is literally him checking his equipment with a not-bad reggae tune), and I wonder if his inexperience with the gear if audible on this song. It certainly sounds, especially near the end, as though the tape is a little fast (as mastered anyway—it would have been slow during the recording). His voice doesn’t typically sound so pinched and high.

Still, it’s a lovely song, a rare instance of McCartney, on his own, just putting himself out there for us.