Tax Day Random Ten


 


1. The Beatles - Her Majesty
2. Steely Dan - Third World Man
3. Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah - Uppers and Downers
4. Robin Holcomb - Waltz
5. Björk - Pagan Poetry
6. Jeremy Summerly; Oxford Camerata - Gloria in excelsis Deo [Thomas Weelkes]
7. Rzewski Aebi Lacy - Joy
8. Guillaume de Machaut - Messe De Notre Dame: Agnus Dei
9. The Kinks - Cricket
10. Hilliard Ensemble- Pulcherrima Rosa

And 11: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - La Nozze de Figaro Act 1: Se a caso madama

Yeah, I like Björk. You wanna make somethin' of it?

It may have started with falling madly in love with Kate Bush (about which my brother would shake his head and say, "There are women who come under the category of Too Weird To Go Out With, and she's in it." ), but I have a near-total weakness for mannered, off center wimmin who are either intellectually challenging or pretentiously impenetrable. Kate, Björk, Tori Amos, Joanna Newsom, Sheila Chandra, Toni Childs--and Robin Holcomb belongs on that list. She's married to Wayne Horvitz, and if mention of Horvitz and colleague Bill Frisell don't ring bells, well, you should go click some samples over at the iTunes store. They have a clarity and precision that is neither serene nor pretty, and yet doesn't thrash about, standing on the dark plain of dissonance. Robin's stuff is like that: songs clearly sung that sound like pop songs, except that their harmonic structure is all wrong, as if Sarah McLachlan had mistakenly hired Captain Beefheart to write her arrangements.
(It's less amusing than that--but it's such a wunnerful image I couldn't resist. It's one of the few real giggling pleasures of doing music reviews: great paper Frankenstein chimeras made out of inappropriate musicians. It's irresistible: "Like Brian Ferry fronting the early Pixies, accompanied by Gato Barbieri on bagpipes." "They're Hawkwind, reincarnated as a ska band, recorded in a home studio next to the interstate by a narcoleptic Steve Albini." It's fun! Try it yourself!)

But i will readily admit that stuff I won't stand for from a pale duke hunched over a microphone as samples and strings clash in the background, I find myself warming to from a gurl. I'm not alone in this: the number of bands that patch up their popular appeal by having a cooing powerless female voice up front goes on seemingly forever.

It's not just female voice good, male voice bad, though. I think my prejudice runs a level or two lower than that: Björk's and Robin's and Tori's pretensions (and they would fit in a flatbed) seem more outwardly directed--while altogether too many dark poets of the airwaves (M) seem to be atrociously self-absorbed in precisely the cringeworthy way I was when I first thought of myself as a great poet.
Now, I enjoy the wanna-Rimbaud mutterings of Kurt Cobain and Trent Reznor because they really do have the reek of the pit about them--and Alanis Morrissette turned me off from the start. (I teeter back and forth about Fiona Apple.) My prejudice lies,I think, in that I always tend to give women the benefit of the doubt while bristling at many pretentious men. (My favorite name for a musical genre--shoegazer--pretty well sums up my attitude.) I have no idea how fair or unfair I'm being in reality. I do know that I have friends whose taste I respect who can't stand Björk or Tori, while I have big dollops of both on the iPod. And I can't think of any dark, dense, jagged male musician, other than Kurt or Trent, whom I have taken into my heart and my little white box.
(Well, Jim Morrison, but he's been dead a long time. And Leonard Cohen, because he really is that good.)

Ultimately, it may be because I genuinely don't look to song lyrics for insight and reinfocement of my wobblingly-held beliefs--and that these women have more interesting musical imaginations. I dunno.

But this I maintain: Although I most assuredly will never know, Kate Bush is not too weird to go out with.

Posted: Sunday - April 15, 2007 at 01:51 PM        

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