Sometimes, when writing about a revered legend, you can reach a point where you find yourself thinking, "why do I ever listen to anything else but this?". So it was with the subject of my new piece for Tidal, the Chic Organization and its dominance of the Eighties audio Zeitgeist. Listening to non-stop Chic, Sister Sledge, the album Rodgers & Edwards wrote and produced for Diana Ross, etc, for several days, I was truly "living in ecstasy". But then the obsession focused to where I only wanted to play a single single - "Everybody Dance" over and over. Then it zoomed in further still and I was just playing Bernard Edwards's miraculous bass break again and again and again. (Some "air bass" did occur, I confess).
The famous singles everybody knows and loves - "Le Freak", "Good Times", "We Are Family", "Lost In Music", "I Want Your Love", "He's The Greatest Dancer", "My Forbidden Lover"....
But how about the ChicOrg deep cuts?
This is almost too obvious to mention, beautifully doubled as it by Robert Wyatt's version.
I also found myself fixated on these albums cuts, "Happy Man" and especially "(Funny) Bone" .
Love the singles off Diana Ross. "Upside Down" particularly - unusually for Chic Org, the fast-flecked rhythm guitar takes a very far-back back seat and the arrangement is based around some wonderful piano vamps. This somewhat overlooked beauty was the third single off the Diana Ross album and funnily enough it's called "My Old Piano".
"My Feet Keep Dancing" was a Chic single but it felt less familiar to me - it has this wonderful steadfast chugging groove with a slightly involuntary, forced-march feel to it, and then this really gorgeous glassy motif that I think is electric piano, a real ice cube sliding down the back of your neck tingle effect.
That "forced march" feel fits the lyric, which is a bit like Ian Dury's "What A Waste" crossed with The Red Shoes and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
Fly into space or maybe save the human race
All these things seem so appealing
But I'll never get the chance, 'cause all I do is dance
My mama said my brains are in my feet
Albeit with a happy ending, the affliction turned to career path:
"So I ran away from home to live all alone
And make myself a standout in the crowd
Then it hit, my ideas began to fit
I had to be what I was meant to be
Now my name is up in lights and I hoof here every night
They were right my brains are in my feet"
Always liked this Carly Simon tune with a lilting, reggae-ish feel
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
plus de pensées sur le sujet de Daft Punk
There's an irony to DP's rhetorical framing of RAM as a return to "life", feel, music that breathes, the human touch versus mechanistic, sterile, sonically uniform EDM/ Top 40 dancepop. All the references they're making are to music that in the late 70s would have been regarded, by many people (new wave- punk-postpunk people, but also quite a few funkateers and old soul fans) as
overproduced, polished, prissily arranged, slicked out to such a degree that it verged on the inhuman. And to an extent it was aspiring to a superhuman flawlessness, using session musicians so trained and professional they were virtually robots. That would be the start of the era
when musicians played to click tracks. At the time,
your typical postpunk or funkateer type would have regarded these records as "airless" and "clinical", cold and gritless. They would have located the model for sonic integrity in earlier forms of black music (just as people of similar outlook had, in the early 70s, rejected the slick sweet sumptuousness of Philly, Tom Bell, et al as "overcooked", and yearned for the raw of Wilson Pickett, Booker T, etc).
But more than that, these late period Analogue Era records, with their multitracking and overdubs, bum notes edited out and use of comping to build a perfect vocal take, are really analogue aspiring to digital: producers using all the analogue means available to them to anticipate the kind of micro-editing and rhythmic precision that would become routine through digital technology. The end-of-Seventies producers and
engineers DP venerate for their combination of human touch and supreme craftsmanship would have been the first people to embrace sequencers and MIDI and
Fairlights in the Eighties (in part because they could afford the equipment). In other words, they would have been in a hurry to abandon the human touch and gladly trade "life" for unerring precision and reliability.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
A revealing sequence of tracks, caused by fortuitous changing of radio channels in the car.
First, Zapp, "Doo Wah Ditty". Not one of their first division tunes, but typically Troutmantastic blend of lubricious and ludicrous.
Then, Diana Ross, "Upside Down". The Chic Organisation at the top of its songwriting and production game + one of the greatest vocalists of all time. An unusual groove for Rodgers & Edwards too, piano and strings driven, guitar only making a subdued appearance in the last minute.
And then Daft Punk, "Get Lucky".
Now "Get Lucky" sounds fairly feeble on the radio, juxtaposed with the audio-steroid stacked dancepop of today, with its massive drum sounds and brickwall compression and Auto-Tune sugarglaze. And that stands to reason: DP have deliberately handicapped themselves in this particular sonic race, like an athlete who nobly refuses to have recourse to all the performance enhancements available and that everybody else on the field is using.
What is harder to explain is how "Get Lucky" sounds less forceful than a 30 year old Chic production, less vigorous than even a second-division Zapp track.