Tag / Music

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Bonnie Tyler

Bonnie Tyler appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #237. Tyler is the legendary singer behind such tracks as “Vernal Equinox of the Mind” and “Holding Out for a Supervillain.”

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Nothing he can say, a total eclipse of the Bat

Guest: Bonnie Tyler

Subjects Discussed: Tyler co-writing most of the tracks on the album, Wings, singing vs. songwriting, breaking up with managers, shyness, hairs that stand up on the back of the neck, turning down a song by Jim Steinman, songs that involve the devil, Desmond Child, James Bond, Tyler turning down the Never Say Never Again theme, Heartstrings and recording cover songs mostly from male recording artists, the song selection process, Meat Loaf, rehearsing “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” the seven minute opuses on Faster Than the Speed of Night, a group of passengers who were traumatized by Tyler singing on an Air France jet, Noel Gallagher, contending with hardcore fans, a 15-year-old Australian who claimed to be Tyler’s daughter, avoiding retirement, the number of shows Tyler performs a year, the endless onslaught of greatest hits albums, the Psion SMX and iPods, country music, Duffy, what Bonnie reads, Les Dawson, Tyler tells a bawdy joke, Botox, ageism, music videos and photo shoots, being judged on physical appearance, looks vs. voice, MTV and YouTube videos, the nightmare of making music videos, restrictions from record companies, independent labels, and music and the Internet.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Going back to Wings, I actually wanted to talk about “Crying in Berlin.” This song, out of all the songs that I’ve listened to of yours, sounds the most like a James Bond song. And I do know the Hindustan Times reported in 2006 that the only thing that could bring you out of retirement was recording a James Bond theme of some sort. I’m wondering if you’ve considered approaching the Bond producers to sing a song just as you called up and contacted [Jim] Steinman, and said, “Hey, I want you to go ahead and produce this particular album.”

Tyler: No. It just happened. They just asked me. Would I like to do a song? And they sent me the song. “Never Say Never,” right?

Correspondent: Yeah.

Tyler: And I listened to it, and I thought, “Ugh! Shit! I don’t like it.”

Correspondent: It is one of the weakest of all the Bond themes.

Tyler: I really would die to do a James Bond song, you know? But I can’t do it. My heart wouldn’t have been in it. I had to turn it down. Now how many people turn down a Bond song, I don’t know. But I turned it down because I didn’t like it. And I was proved right. Because I think out of all the songs.

Correspondent: Who remembers it?

Tyler: I can’t even remember it.

Correspondent: (sings) “Never say never again.” Yeah, I know.

Tyler: I don’t remember. It didn’t appeal to me at all. So I turned it down. And that’s the only regret that I have. But it was…

Correspondent: It wasn’t actually an official Bond movie, technically speaking. Because it was produced outside the [Albert] Broccoli camp. So I think you’re on safe ground.

Tyler: It was a Bond movie!

Correspondent: It was a Bond movie, but it wasn’t official under the Albert Broccoli camp. It was a Sean Connery once-over. Because it was also Thunderball revisited.

Tyler: Whatever. I got offered one and I turned it down.

Correspondent: Did you consider reapproaching them and saying, “Hey, I’d love to do a James Bond song. But this one doesn’t cut it. Can I bring in one of these many songwriters who are sending me songs?” Did you try that tactic?

Tyler: No, I didn’t. But you’ve just given me a good idea. (laughs)

BSS #237: Bonnie Tyler (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Daniel Levitin

Daniel Levitin appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #235. Levitin is most recently the author of The World in Six Songs.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Recalling a traumatic musical episode from his marriage.

Author: Daniel Levitin

Subjects Discussed: Songs that straddle multiple categories within Levitin’s taxonomy, neurological response vs. societal perception of a song, the original eight categories, oxytocin, “I Walk the Line,” Nine Inch Nails, hypothetical subspecies of comfort songs, angst and emo, Janis Ian, social comparison theory, joy songs and advertising jingles, chemical levels rising in relation to specific musical genres, serotonin levels and music, cortisol, responding to Steven Pinker’s “auditory cheesecake” controversy, Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals, the evolution of language and music, David Huron’s “honest signal” hypothesis, attempts to predict hit music, advertising and music, insincere pop music, smart audiences, the pernicious use of music, the use of Van Halen’s “Panama” to get Manuel Noriega out of his bunker, music used to torture people in Abu Ghraib, and using music in ways that it wasn’t originally intended.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: We have six categories. Can you name a single song that can be applied for all six categories? Have you considered examples along these lines?

Levitin: I’m sure if you gave me enough time, I could.

Correspondent: You have thirty seconds. (laughs)

Levitin: (laughs) Well, I’m going to go with “I Walk the Line.” Because I think it’s a very rich song. In the book, I make the case that it crosses two categories.

Correspondent: It really walks the line here.

Levitin: Right. At the surface level, I believe that it looks like a love song. A guy singing to the woman he loves, “Because you’re mine.” There’s a “you” in it. “Because you’re mine / I walk the line.” I’m not cheating on you. But the point I make in the book is that really I think at a deeper level, he’s not really singing it to her. He’s singing it to himself. It’s like a musical string around his finger reminding me of all he has at stake here. “I find it very, very easy to be true / I’m alone when each day is through.” I don’t think so. I don’t think you’ve been alone every night. And I don’t think that you find it that easy to be true. I mean, I think it’s a struggle. And he’s reminding himself of all that he has at stake. That’s a knowledge song. Self-knowledge.

Now at the same time, I think that you can argue that there’s an element of comfort here. People who have been in a similar situation take comfort in hearing it expressed this way. I listen to music often because the songwriter helps me to understand feelings that I haven’t been able to articulate. The right song comes on. Aha! That’s how I feel. And I find that comforting.

Correspondent: I’m wondering also if identifying song by the six categories is a matter of identifying perhaps a dominant and a recessive category for each particular song. Perhaps a stronger song is more likely to have at least two categories attached to it. Or maybe some songs are utterly simple and just intended to serve one purpose. I mean, it all depends on any number of factors. Maybe you can talk about this a little bit.

Levitin: Well, I think the other aspect of it is that it’s not that the songs themselves fit into six categories. It’s that these are the six ways that people use music. The six ways that people have had music in their lives. The six ways that they use to communicate with one other.

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about comfort songs. You cite specific personal examples. But I wanted to give you a personal example that I had as a teenager. I had a tendency to blast Nine Inch Nails quite loud. It was a comfort song to me largely because I would listen to this man who was utterly depressed. And I’d say to myself in a sad state, “Oh, you know, there is someone who is worse off than me.” And it was a way for me to corral my emotions with reason. However, the examples that you use in the comfort chapter tend to be people who are looking just for emotional comfort, but not this association between reason and emotion. And I was wondering if it’s very possible that we could be talking about two subspecies of comfort songs.

Levitin: What do you mean? The connection between reason and emotion?

Correspondent: Well, by listening to Trent Reznor, I would be able to immediately understand that my own particular emotions were somewhat folly in some sense. And the rational part of my teenage brain would kick in. And I’d say, “I’m beating myself up here for no reason.”

Levitin: Kind of like listening to Morrissey.

Correspondent: Yeah, exactly!

Levitin: “I want to kill myself.”

Correspondent: Any of the emo.

Levitin: “Everything’s bad tonight.” (laughs)

Correspondent: Yeah, exactly. I mean, should we draw two types of distinctions in comfort songs along these lines? I mean, we have to factor in emo. We just do.

BSS #235: Daniel Levitin

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by Edward Champion

The Siren Festival

None of the acts at this year’s Siren Festival convinced me that they were rock ‘n roll’s second coming, but I certainly had a lot of fun. The festival went down Saturday within the calefactory confines of Coney Island. I think it’s safe to say that Islands — the Montreal band made up of ex-Unicorns members known for their dual violin players and lengthy, transition-laden songs — certainly came away the winner. Islands started thirty minutes late, with vocalist Nicholas Thorburn emerging onto the stage with a trash can over his head and suggesting that the crowd should take their pants off to beat the heat. He complained of bad luck, perhaps a reference to the constant arguments I observed between the bands and the sound guys. While Islands isn’t quite as good as it was during the Jamie Thompson days and the guitarist (Patrick Gregoire?) mangled many notes on the otherwise fine performance of “Swans (Life After Death)” that closed out the set, Islands nevertheless played a strong show, mostly composed of tunes from their uneven second album.

I’m sorry that I caught Parts & Labor midway through its set. The Brooklyn band, like many acts these days, drew upon The Replacements as their main inspiration, but with some geeky keyboarding thrown in for good measure. They reminded me of some music geeks I used to know in Sacramento, and I may have to check them out in the future.

I now have a soft spot for Jaguar Love and, in particular, Johnny Whitney — a vocalist with an uncombable shock of flaxen hair and a flamboyant swagger. The band offered a somewhat formulaic Glasgow art rock sound, but, unlike some of the bands who played and took their gigs for granted, Jaguar Love knew how to have fun on stage. Whitney screeched out songs like some campy amalgam of Zack de la Rocha and Mick Jagger: his left arm frequently a-kimbo, his thumb and forefinger often squeezing inches of the air as if to offer some belated response to Bill Clinton’s presidential channel-changing gesture. If a set can be judged by how long a beach ball remains in the air batted around by a crowd, Jaguar Love certainly won on this point. There was even a bit of crowd surfing.

I’ve been on the fence about The Dodos for a while, not really caring for or against the music. But now that I’ve seen them live, I’m convinced that the band should rename itself The Three Douchebags. They truly give San Francisco a bad name. Meric Long isn’t much of a slide guitarist and he doesn’t seem to know how to tune a guitar (although perhaps this was the heat warping his instrument or the spliffs warping his mind). Long’s the kind of self-entitled solipsist who really needs to be bruised up in a dive bar brawl to learn the meaning of humility. The band was terrified of appearing naked and imperfect before the crowd, openly bitching about the sound, with Long relying on two mikes — one with mild reverb, the other with heavy reverb; you can guess which mike he used more frequently — to belt out his humorless songs. Despite the promising possibility of a trash can used as percussion, the band seemed to view their set as a live reproduction of their studio recordings. Long performed almost entirely sitting in a folding chair. The Dodos were perfunctory and soulless. I could have had more fun reading a few chapters of a mediocre novel. But morbid curiosity kept me there until the end.

I’m at a point in my life where I’ve grown tired of arrogant 23-year-old musicians who go up on stage and have nothing to justify their hubris. I suppose some arrogance is excusable if the musician has the chops or the personality to back it up. But there isn’t anything within The Dodos’s sound to suggest even the metaphorical residue of a prominent extinct species. Johnny Whitney may have been a bit preposterous, but let’s again consider the beach balls. At the beginning of The Dodos’s set, there were three beach balls being tossed around in the air. Two songs in, the audience stopped batting the balls. The audience took in their joints. Some sang along. But on the whole, The Dodos demonstrated that they were not a band worth standing in the summer heat for. Thankfully, there were plenty of other bands willing to pick up the slack.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Grandmaster Flash & Karen Abbott

Grandmaster Flash and Karen Abbott appeared most recently on The Bat Segundo Show #221.

Grandmaster Flash is most recently the author of The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash (with David Ritz).

Karen Abbott is most recently the author of Sin in the Second City.

Condition of the Show: Marinating in urban culture.

Authors: Grandmaster Flash and Karen Abbott

SUBJECTS DISCUSSED: Using “adventures” in a book title, cutting, rubbing and scratching, finding obscure records in a digital age, turntables vs. mashups, time-coded vinyl, illicit methods of obtaining equipment, Sylvia Robinson, the risks of entering into a deal without an attorney, Flash’s problems with “The Message,” Ray Chandler, “Getting Everleighed,” bawdy verbs in desuetude, research and literary associations, the swank decor of the Everleigh Club, the legendary attorney Colonel MacDuff, determining reliable sources a century later, Clifford Roe and Ernest Bell, the danger of writing a history with clear-cut protagonists and antagonists, the white slavery scare, maintaining high standards in prostitution, balancing the pursuit of the facts with the writing an entertaining book, the reformist tendency to slum in the Red Light District, Ike Bloom and graft money, filling in the missing pieces of the narrative constructed by the Everleigh sisters, the Everleigh sisters’s idiosyncratic grammar, whether Abbott portrayed Vic Shaw in a fair light during her final days, Bathhouse John Coughlin — the buffoon and poet laureate of the Levee District, Clement Moore, the early days of Al Capone, the rush of reformist regulation before the 1920s, Jack Johnson, needless persecution under the Mann Act, the lack of coordination between federal and local authorities, the early days of the FBI, the 1908 bombing of the Coliseum, speculation on why the wondrous debauchery of the First Ward Ball were stopped, the downside of advertising a brothel, insular zoning, and prognosticating on the motivations of reformers going after the Everleigh Club.

EXCERPTS FROM SHOW:

Corresponent: If you listen to “The Wheels of Steel” today, as I have actually a couple of times, you can actually hear your hands on the turntables, whereas you can’t always hear someone who is just doing a mashup. You don’t hear that analog quality. So I’m wondering how things have adjusted for you in light of this. How do you keep the analog part of things legitimate? Real? How do digital tools help you as well?

Flash: Okay, first of all, I’m a scientist before I’m a DJ. So pushing the envelope for new technology, I’m always with that. Because I was ahead of my time thirty-three years ago. So now that it’s become things like Serato, Torq, FinalScratch — Traktor Scratch, which is what I use — you still have to drive it in the same fashion. Meaning that if you were a great mixer, a great DJ, in the analog world with vinyl, you still have to drive it the same way in digital. So if you was wack in the analog world, you will be wack in the digital world. So the real fact of the matter is follow through how you play your songs and what songs you play. That still separates the boys from the men, and the ladies from the women. So the modern technology has brought in convenience. You can put 15,000, 20,000 songs on a hard drive, and carry those. Where at one point, we as DJs used to have three or four guys who used to lift our boxes. That isn’t the case anymore. I carry less vinyl and I have more in my laptop.

* * *

Correspondent: It’s interesting that something like “Everleighed,” as well as “decentized,” which you point to later in the book — these are verbs that didn’t quite make it in the 21st century.

Abbott: “Decentize.” I’m surprised. You’d think that some reformers today would have latched onto it.

Correspondent: You’d think in light of the fundamentalist furor that is going on as we speak. But how much of your research is oriented around these associations? Because obviously, this is a very literary approach in a certain way to the facts that exist. There’s a lot of fanciful language that you use that really gets us into this atmospheric context. I’m wondering. Does something like this originate from the facts? Or does it originate from a phrase? Or does it originate from a verb as we sort of suggested here?

Abbott: You know, I think a lot of the phrases that exist in the book were already in existence. The characters sort of latched onto them. I’m kind of ashamed to admit that I spent two days researching the etymology of Susie Poontang.

Correspondent: Really?

Abbott: Of where “poontang” might have come from.

Correspondent: Well, did you come up with any conclusions here?

Abbott: It was a Chinese phrase that had to do with prostitutes. And I think she had to latch onto that for herself. It’s sort of a chicken and the egg question. But I’m sure that she probably appropriated it for herself to get to America.

(Please note: Due to current incompatibility between PodPress and WP 2.6, I have had to institute a workaround. If the player button does not work, then try the direct link to the MP3 below.)

BSS #221: Grandmaster Flash & Karen Abbott

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