What It Is! Soul and Me

Reviewed: What It Is! Funky Soul And Rare Grooves

Temperature in Dushanbe: 38 Celsius, 100 Fahrenheit


I'm listening to the collection What It Is! Funky Soul And Rare Grooves 1967-1977 as I write this. The collection is a massive, possibly too big to digest properly, slab of rare funk and foul. It is heavy on instrumentals, flute, and corner-turning horns. As usual, I'm getting into it a few years late -- though how that could possibly matter with a collection of 30-to-40-year-old tracks, I don't know.

It's a completely unintelligible collection for the locals here in Dushanbe, except when it begins to sound like hip-hop -- the musical form that, for better or worse, may be the musical Lingua Franca at the moment. Here in Dushanbe, there are dozens of kids starting up hip-hop groups, rapping in Tajiki and English about local pride, or just aping the foul-mouthed mainstream acts that manage to make their way this far -- unfortunately, none of hip-hop's finest in the US. I've seen the best breakdancing here in Central Asia, and they are nearly as fluent in American pop as Americans themselves are, but I don't think they would feel any connection to this particular period of Americana: for those in the more far-flung of the soviet republics, hip-hop and rap emerged via the immaculate conception of satellite-born music channels -- orphan broadcasts from a West without history.

For me, on the other hand, this music carries a charge: my earliest music memories are soul memories, of thrift-store-bought 45s played on the used portable record player. I had The Jackson 5's ABC, Diana Ross, and a few others, with or without their paper sleeves, and for contrast I had Blondie's "The Tide Is High," which I listened to incessantly. When I look back on it, it's a strange world. It was before massive amounts of storage and portability allowed people to own thousands of albums in one convenient location, and before adulthood would allow me access to money and choice. I could not have dreamed of owning 90 45s back then. Or even half that number. But the restrictions put on my record collection (whatever happened to be given to me, found in a junk box, or bought at the thrift store near where we lived in Oakland and then Hayward) has caused those first 45s, played hundreds of times, to be forever burned into my memory.

This collection of Atlantic and Warner sides won a Grammy back in 2006. It seems to have deserved it -- these are truly rare tracks, with hypnotic grooves that illustrate the enormous loss experienced by American rock after the 60's, as it became increasingly separated along color lines. I wonder, though, if the very limitlessness of our consumption opportunities these days dampens the impact of those individual tracks. There are so many of them that it's hard to pay attention to the subtleties of just one -- to make friends with that one little musical moment. Sometimes, I find that I miss the circumscription of that beat-up, tweed-clad portable record player and turning over those scratched little 45s. Sometimes, you really need to listen to the same song a hundred times to understand what music is all about.

The Black Angels Over Afghanistan

Reviewed in this post: The Black Angels: Passover, helicopters, Afghanistan and postmodernity

Temperature in Dushanbe: 95 Fahrenheit / 35 Celcius

Sometimes you come across an album that just seems purpose-made for a certain activity -- running, working out, reading by yourself, falling asleep to, driving at night -- as if the musicians had that very activity in mind when the album was recorded. A few weeks ago I found one of those perfect matches: flying in a helicopter over the border with Afghanistan and listening to The Black Angels' Passover. There is something perfect in the synchronicity between The Black Angels' deadly slow drone and the floating, motionless movement of the helicopter over mountain peaks. Jameson refers to the helicopter as a quantum leap in technological alienation: with its strange, floating movement and its panoptic vision of the world below, it is a concentration of the postmodern experience. I would argue that it may be one of postmodernity's most representative machines. Below us, the abstracted shapes of Afghan villages, little fans of green among the dry mountains, clinging to the banks of a velvety river, populated by little blobs of color drifting among their puzzlepiece fields, exude a feeling of peace. Above them tower the jagged, toothy peaks of the Pamir range while The Black Angels' "Young Men Dead" plays on my headphones:

Fire for the hills pick up your feet and lets go.
Head for the hills pick up steel on your way.
And when you find a piece of them in your sights,
fire at will, don't you waste no time.

The helicopter provides a feeling of total abstraction and observation, a disconnectedness not only from what is below but from life itself. The scene in Full Metal Jacket with the door gunner on a Huey picking off civilians in the rice paddies below makes perfect sense. There is no blood, just the fascinating ragdolling into the grass. The noise of the blades further cuts of the world. You are the center of the universe and inside the roar. They -- blobs of color, peaked straw hat or turbaned head -- do not truly exist in your world. It must have come as a total shock to the Soviet helicopter gunship pilots when a SAM streaked up from down there and sent them into oblivian: the helicopter lulls one into a feeling of total safety, of floating invulnerable through the ether above the unimportant, irrelevant mortal world.

It's a dangerous lesson in the increasing abstraction of waging war, and I can clearly see how civilian casualties would occur. Truly, from this height, guilt would become an abstract concept, and the ability to distance oneself from the "enemy" is increased, while the ability to identify who the "enemy" really is is decreased or even eliminated, unless they are lugging a shoulder-fired missile around.

The Black Angels make the parallels between the post-colonial wars we were fighting then and the post-colonial wars we are fighting now easy to draw in their song "The First Vietnam War:"

Sixty thousand men died
While you were here
You came into our homes
And you took our kids
And you ask for more now
For this new war
And you ask for more now
Vietnam War

And even this level of helicopter abstraction is low compared to our joystick - piloted drones punching out the bad guys in Afghanistan and Pakistan from Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas. There is something ironic in that collusion of total military abstraction and Vegas, the very symbol of postmodern consumerist glee. And how easy is it to lose touch of what you are "really" doing when you are remotely piloting a drone? To remind them of the task at hand, drone pilots in Nevada wear full flight suits -- although they never leave the ground. And a full staff of psychologists and military chaplains is on hand to help them deal with their doubts about robo-violence.

Happily, I'm on a peace mission: I've been on the ground in Afghanistan, in Kabul, Jalalabad, and Bamyan, and I want no part of determining whether someone is or is not an "enemy." But Passover with its layers of psychedelic guitar and political lyrics rarely heard in the rock of the aughts, provides a clear vision of where we are -- still fighting colonial wars against people that, increasingly, we are unable to put into human focus.

The Worst Year

Reviewed In This Post: The Walkmen, Living Color, Piedmont Middle School

Temperature in Dushanbe: 96 Fahrenheit / 36 Celsius

I woke up this morning thinking, for some reason, of the second half of my 7th grade year. After a series of conflicts with my father, I moved in with my mother, who had just relocated from Oakland to Piedmont. For those who don't know it, Piedmont is a rich little island of a city in the middle of Oakland where the police blotter in the newspaper prints such horrors as petty theft and vandalism -- all of this just blocks away from some real ghettos. The kids at Piedmont Middle School were rich and privileged, some of them with houses set so far back from the road their white columned porches could barely be seen from the road. There was a girl in my class who never wore the same outfit twice -- ever.

I was not rich, or privileged. We lived in a 2nd-floor apartment on the border with Oakland -- basically a fringe part of Piedmont that should have been in Oakland -- and my mother drove a battered Dodge van that had seen several accidents over the years. I had spent the first half of the year getting my ass kicked for wearing combat boots and military surplus jackets to school, and had slightly changed my style for my Piedmont debut: I wore a red jean jacket that I had tied in knots and thrown in a washing machine with some bleach, so that it came out with pink, peach, red and white splotches all over it. I carried a pair of drumsticks and a practice pad around with me everywhere. I cut my own hair. I was skinny, unearthly-pale, and the things I wanted more than anything in the world were:

1: Fingerless, mesh gloves

2: A drum set

3: little silver skull beads to wear in my hair

4: Dreadlocks

I was, in short, a confused, lonely kid.

I lived about 1/4 of the time in the real world, and the rest of the time in a fantasy world based mostly on the film Some Kind of Wonderful and the two tapes that I owned for my walkman: Living Colour's Vivid and Aerosmith's Permanent Vacation, which I listened to walking to and from school every day. I didn't have any musical taste, and I didn't have any friends to tell me what to like -- just MTV and my own questionable instincts.

When I think of those days, what echoes in my head is the almost unbeatable opening lick from "Cult of Personality." That's the heart of my 7th-grade soundtrack.

At first, the rich children of Piedmont Middle School tried to be decent to me, but I was brought up in a family where overreaction and explosive anger were a daily routine, so after being teased by a particularly popular girl during P.E. I screamed that I wished she would die of diabetes -- a debilitating ailment which, in fact, she had.

Basically, nobody spoke to me for the rest of the year. I had to write her a letter of apology, a punishment that clearly I deserved. I was shunned by everyone. When, months later, they announced my birthday over the loudspeaker one morning and someone said "Happy Birthday" to me in the hallway out of pity, I was so happy that I cried.

My escape was my Walkman. I was a TA for a French class, and the teacher sent me every day to the high school just up the street to run errands. Up there, nobody knew who I was. The giants at the high school called me "Spike," which I though was cool -- what 12-year-old wouldn't? But the best was the long walk between schools, listening to those huge guitar hooks over and over again, hooks that sounded like my own frustration given voice.

Walking down Rudaki this morning listening to The Walkmen's Everyone Who Pretended To like Me Is Gone, and I am still undecided. Sometimes, though I feel like my musical taste has grown more sophisticated over the years, I still just yearn for that big, angry hook. I'm not done with this album -- I haven't listened to it in its entirety -- but I'm not finding that thing that draws me in. I thought I had, for a moment, when the piano came in stereo raindrops at the beginning of "Wake Up," but then the piano continued in the background of songs following that one, and pretty soon it just started to sound like someone in a studio fucking around with a piano either to cover up the dead space in a song or just because they thought it needed "atmosphere," and my disbelief was not suspended. I kept wanting to switch over to the White Rabbits' Fort Nightly, which has at least some of the punch one needs on a certain type of morning.

One Thing

Reviewed in this post: Nothing Yet . . .

Temperature in Dushanbe: 100 Fahrenheit / 38 Celcius

When I was leaving for Turkmenistan in 2003, it was advised that I take along one thing that would help me when I became homesick. Something to see me through the lean times as a Peace Corps volunteer, out in the Kara Kum desert far from home. The examples given in the brochure included family photographs and stuffed animals. Instead, I chose a pair of Pioneer SE-20A Headphones -- huge white-cupped dinosaurs with a coiled cord and their own carrying case -- and my music collection. I burned every CD I owned onto a laptop. In fact, the laptop that I traveled to Turkmenistan with contained almost nothing but music. I used it for two purposes only: to listen to my music collection, and to compose my long emails to my family and friends back home.

The headphones (which I still have with me here in Tajikistan, almost 6 years later) make it feel like you are swimming through music. They cut the world off and let you close your eyes and drop into the album. They make everything else go away. More than anything else, they are a window back into my own culture -- a window that is sorely needed, now that I have been overseas continuously for almost six years. I have used music in the last six years as an antidote to culture shock, as a teaching tool, as a security blanket, and as a way to share my own background with others. I have used music as a bridge to my own past and my own culture, as a field against which I can contrast the culture I live in, and as a filter through which I can sift my emotions.

I'm not sure, looking back, why I chose the headphones. I had lots of friends back home in SF who were audiophiles and hipsters, but I never put myself into those categories. I was the one usually guilty of discovering an album only years after it came out, or listening to an album obsessively that everyone else in the "scene" was over. I have been a musician, in a number of different forms, but none of them dedicated. I have been a fan, but not to the depth of the fans I saw around me. I never felt committed to music: only lately have I come to realize that it is a clearly visible thread winding through my life, both back home and overseas, connecting disparate events and serving as a foil for my many metamorphoses over the years.

Music, in short, is often where I turn to when I want to feel "at home." And that shifting meaning is what this blog hopes to be about: music viewed from over here, as a transmission from home and from my past.