Yuki will release a new single on Jan. 19, 2005, followed by a pair of videos on March 2. The new single, titled “Joy”, was written by Tsutaya Yoshimi, who also wrote “Hello Goodbye”, and arranged by Tanaka Yuusuke, who worked on “Home Sweet Home”. The single’s coupling tracks features remixes by Mutiny, Eric Kappa and Kouboku Masayoshi.
In March, the former Judy and Mary singer releases a live video, Sweet Home Rock ‘n’ Roll Tour, which features a selection of best performances from her Sept. 30 show at Zepp Tokyo. A promotional video collection, Yuki Video, covers her solo debut single, “the end of shite”, through the new single, “Joy”. The collection also includes making-of features and TV spots.
It’s no exaggeration to call “Jesus Walks” by Kanye West ingenious.
West layers no fewer than three hooks in the song — a marching rhythm with sampled bass line, a wordless background melody, and the chorus itself: “Jesus walk, Jesus walk with me”.
But the crux of the song comes toward the end, when West takes his colleagues to task for the content of their music. Conventional wisdom in the music industry — wow, I typed that with a straight face — says don’t mention God in your music.
West, on the other hand, says he’s more than willing to take the cut in spins — and “ends” — just to hear a club shout, “Jesus walk, Jesus walk with me.”
And with a hook that fucking catchy, his dream is reality.
If nothing else, “Jesus Walks” is worth the entirety of The College Dropout.
To get people to sing “Jesus walk with me”, then to confront the cultural norm that would make such an act pariah? It’s not often that pop music gets this literate.
But The College Dropout doesn’t stop with “Jesus Walks”. The first half of the album is an avalanche of hooks.
Syleena Johnson sings only two lines on “All Falls Down”, but man is it hard to get those two lines out of your head when you hear it.
The driving force of “The New Workout Plan” isn’t the jittering beats but the Middle Eastern violins by Miri-Ben-Ari.
And when the “kids sing, kids sing” on “We Don’t Care”, it’s a moment of biting humor.
After the eclectisim of “The New Workout Plan”, the album begins to drag. The wild inventiveness of the first half makes way for some really creepy, sped-up samples that’s novel on first listen, then alternately annoying and disturbing each subsequent listen.
(I’m looking at you, sample of Chaka Khan’s “Through the Fire”.)
The songs in the last half aren’t as compelling thematically either.
Throughout the album, West confronts the perception that higher education is the gateway to a successful future. He’s rather proud of his dropout status to become one of the most in-demand hitmakers in the business.
In a series of skits, he lampoons the pursuit of education. It’s not a convincing argument, dressed in exaggeration though it may be.
A lot of people get degrees in fields they eventually don’t pursue. (Because by now, I really should be getting comissions to compose for university ensembles, if that were the case.)
And yeah, the bureacracy behind getting a degree is spirit-crushing, but the pursuit of knowledge shouldn’t be.
Personally, the degree was a side effect of my years in college. I only went to hang out with people from the newspaper.
Whether you agree with West’s thesis, it doesn’t stop The College Dropout from being one of the most imaginative albums of the year. I’ll go ahead and walk with Jesus, but leave my damn degree alone.
In the early ’90s, my perception of the Japanese music scene was limited to anime soundtracks and idol pop. I was a big fan of the Bubblegum Crisis soundtracks, and I loved hearing Western music sung in a different language.
The early ’90s was also when post-punk music crossed over into the mainstream and became alternative rock. Women, in particular, were a driving force in this “new” type of music — Sinéad O’Connor, Throwing Muses, the Breeders, hell even Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies were seen as an antidote for, say, Paula Abdul.
Women in Japanese music, on the other hand, were primarily idols.
I got tired of Japanese pop pretty quickly because of its prefabrication — it became hard to tell one voice from another.
I was introduced to Cocco in 1998, on a night shift at the newspaper where I worked. A co-worker was playing the Japan Nite Sound Sampler, and most of the preceding tracks came across as bizarrely cute in a mistranslated sort of way.
And then “Count Down” started up, and the two worlds that divided my musical loyalties eight years earlier had merged.
Here was a singer with a beautiful voice who could have gone the easy route and sang what was given to her. Instead, she wrote her own music, and it raged harder than anything prancing about the Lilith Fair tour at the time.
I missed her performance at SXSW by one day.
But I found a copy of Bougainvillia at an Austin record store and bought it. And for the next two years after that, I couldn’t stop playing it.
American press at the time compared Cocco to Fiona Apple and (not as a compliment) Tori Amos. Cocco’s own fragile live persona puts her closer to Apple in temperament, but musically, she mopped the floor with both of them.
The production work of Tailor Tereda and Dr.StrangeLove’s Takamune Negishi showed a heavy influence of grunge, which was reaching its waning days in 1997.
The unison two-guitar attack on “Hashiru Karada” and “Nemuru Mori no Oojisama” made those riffs darker than they already were. The distortion on all the instruments on “Baby Bed” gives the song an ominous feel.
Cocco’s lyric booklet also established the unprecedent move of translating her lyrics into English, revealing a poetic but unsettling mind.
“Count Down”, a song that brings the Nirvana loud-soft aesthetic to an extreme, goes further than Alanis Morrissette’s paen to an ex-boyfriend, “You Oughta Know”.
Morrissette merely asked if the new woman in the man’s life would go down on him in a theater. Cocco threatens to shoot him if he doesn’t return to her.
In “Isho”, a song that serves as a last will and testament, Cocco asks her executor to kill her if she becomes incapacitated.
Not all is doom and gloom on Bougainvillia. “Gajumaru” is a children’s song misplaced among the rest of the album. “Sing a Song ~No Music, No Life~” questions the societal norm of restraint.
Bougainvillia was not a successful album for Cocco. It barely cracked the Top 30 in Japan. Her second single, “Tsuyoku Hakanai Monotachi” (“The Strong and Ephemeral”), would establish her success and demonstrate to Japanese audiences their best singers don’t all need to be idols.
But on Bougainvillia, Cocco already proved she had a strong voice, in both a literal and ideological sense.
Drummer Ahito Inazawa is leaving Zazen Boys, the band’s official web site announced. Tension between Inazawa and the band led to his departure, according to a statement by band leader Mukai Shuutoku. Inazawa will still perform with Zazen Boys in Kyoto Park on Dec. 4 and at Countdown Japan 04/05 on Dec. 31.
Grunge died in 1997. The major labels knew it, and they didn’t see anything on the rock ‘n’ roll horizon to replace it.
About the only thing happening in the so-called “underground” at the time was a bunch of splintered electronic music genres, seemingly homogenous but branded with unique names — techno, ambient, garage, two-step, hardcore, electronica.
Thinking it could use brute force and money power to push this underground music to the mainstream, labels signed up the likes of the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers, trumpeting them as rock’s next evolutionary step.
Thing is, the kids had already moved onto Spice Girls and Britney Spears. And young rock fans turned to … Creed.
Madonna gave electronica a huge blip when she released Ray of Light in 1998, and U2 had already been hanging out with the likes of Flood since 1993’s Zooropa.
But electronica refused to cross over, and in time, even the club kids that catapulted the genre to its underground hip status had moved back to rock music around the time Jack White became cool.
Duran Duran learned this lesson nine years before everyone else.
The band released Big Thing in 1988, a time when its status as teen idols receded into distant memory. Line-up changes from three years previous made people lose interest in the band, and the optmistically-titled Big Thing set out to prove Duran Duran had the mettle to produce challenging work.
For the most part, the band succeeded.
Inspired by acid house, the songs on Big Thing are dark and ominous. Nick Rhodes employed rougher timbres on his keyboard work, and the drum machines used rhythms far more processed and complex than what incredible ex-drummer Roger Taylor could imagine.
Eschewing the bright energy of the band’s early ’80s hits, Big Thing oftentimes went for introspection. “Land” achieves a bittersweetness “Save a Prayer” never aspired and predates the poignancy of “Ordinary World” by a good five years.
“Edge of America” is perhaps the sparsest song Duran Duran has ever written, while the dischordant bells on “Too Late Marlene” give the song an uneasy tonality.
Big Thing has its dead spots. “Palomino” is the band’s clumsiest song ever, while “Do You Believe in Shame?” really does sound like “Suzy Q”.
But when Duran Duran thinks big on this album, it doesn’t hold back. Rather than fade the album’s conclusion, the instrumental “Lake Shore Driving” cuts off suddenly. On “Drug”, the band finally learns how to integrate horns comfortably in its writing, while the opening title track is the grimiest song in the Duran Duran oeveur.
Big Thing scored a fast-rising No. 2 single with “I Don’t Want Your Love”, but subsequent follow-up singles — “All She Wants Is”, “Do You Belive in Shame?” — tanked. Quite frankly, “I Don’t Want You Love” was the only single-worthy track on the album.
Duran Duran has shown a habit of coming up with ideas before technology could support them. In the first half of its career, the band recorded 12-inch singles from scratch, before sampling technology made remixing easy.
Big Thing is another example. Had Duran Duran waited nine years for technology to catchy up, the band could have actually recorded an “acid house” album.
Instead, it drew inspiration from the clubs and worked in the way it knew how, and Duran Duran produced an album ahead of its time.
Can’t deep link it from here, but the new release page of Nonesuch Records lists Jan. 11 as a release date for the next album by Kronos Quartet, titled Mugam Sayagi: The Music of Franghiz Ali-Zade. Kronos originally recorded the title track of this upcoming album for its 1994 album, Night Prayers. It’s hands-down the most thrilling piece on the album, which says a lot since the album is packed with a lot of incredible works. (Night Prayers by Giya Kancheli is the very definition of “intense”.)
On a recent visit to Wayne Horvitz’s official site, I discovered news of the release of Solos, an album of piano works with his wife Robin Holcomb. “With” is a sketchy term, because each plays their own work solo. The pair originally recorded each other’s pieces, but when putting together the album, they felt performances of their own works flowed better. (An e-mail interview with the pair says as much.) Solos is available from the Songlines label.
Probably Zorn’s most popular and most controversial musical project, the music of Naked City has been debated, analyzed, adored and reviled by fans, critics and academics alike, but nothing can replace the experience of hearing it in all its frightening glory. Most people know this music from the single domestic release on Nonesuch, but the major portion of their studio recordings were issued from 1989 – 1993 on the hard to find Japanese labels Avant and Toy’s Factory. This long awaited set pulls together all of their recorded output – seven studio albums ( including five released only in Japan ) – on 5 CDs in beautiful new packaging, with a special 100 page scrapbook of Naked City ephemera, including photos, posters, designs, scores, musical sketches, written tributes by members of the Naked City family and pages from Zorn’s original notebooks showing the development of the music that drove so many people out of their minds. Zorn’s music at its most brutal and uncompromising best.
So Death Cab for Cutie signs to Atlantic. I’m all for career advancement, but the cynic in me can imagine all sorts of ways a major label can mess this up.
Between Franz Ferdinand, Modest Mouse, the Postal Service, the Shins and all other manner of SXSW buzz darlings, it feels like the late ’80s all over again, with bands from all over the creative map on the brink of something … not so much big as signficiant.
Back then, I hoped major label backing would bring the cool stuff front and center. Instead, the early ’90s brought nothing but a bunch of grunge clones. The atmosphere now seems ripe with the same kind of promise, but I’m keeping a healthy skepticism.
I must be the only person in the world who can’t stand Siamese Dream.
I picked up Gish on a whim, after seeing a 30-second interview of Smashing Pumpkins on MTV way back in 1991. It was a Sunday, and I was at my library circulation job. Freshman year of college.
I listened to the album every morning on my 45-minute bus commute to school. Jimmy Chamberlain’s drumming, the dual guitar attack of James Iha and Billy Corgan, the rumbling bass of D’Arcy — there was a chemistry on that magnetic strip, and it telegraphed through the earphones into my head. (This was back when a Walkman was a portable cassette player.)
And the songwriting was damn smart — decrescendos, texture changes, time signature changes, accelerandos. These techniques weren’t just thrown into a song just to show off (hello, Sting.) They were carefully planned, almost painstakingly composed.
The bass solo on “I Am One”, the quiet breaks on “Siva”, the meter shift on “Suffer”, the build up on “Window Pane” — it felt organic but deliberate.
Here was a debut album that seemed to portend great things for Smashing Pumpkins.
And great things did happen for the band. And Billy Corgan got full of himself.
For the band’s stature at the time — which was a blip compared to the early rumblings of Soundgarden and pre-Nevermind Nirvana — Gish was an incredibly accomplished album made on what was obviously a budget.
Corgan had to work his way to the opulence that could afford Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and Adore. But even on this most earliest of works, the band’s ambitions were brimming.
And I like it better than anything the Pumpkins did after. Those early constraints forced Corgan to keep the ambition in check and to focus on making the songs as strong as they could be without the expanse they couldn’t afford.
Then Smashing Pumpkins became the beacon of rock music for most of the ’90s, and Corgan could afford to think bigger than the last thing he produced. Bigger, though, isn’t necessarily smarter.
By the time Smashing Pumpkins came full circle with Machina/The machines of God — returning to the leaner writing of Gish — it was too late. Smashing Pumpkins’ music got crushed under the weight of its own overdubs.
Which is why Siamese Dream was a let-down for me after years of listening to Gish. It was bloated and sluggish, one mid-tempo song after another, lacking the drive or fire of its predecessor.
I have a mental list of artists who recorded terrific debuts, only to find success with subsequent, lesser albums. Sinéad O’Connor and Sarah McLachlan are on that list.
So too are Smashing Pumpkins, a band that set a high bar for itself at the outset, except no one was around to know it at the time.
When a recording of Gregorian chant by the Benedectine Monks of Santo Domingo went multi-platinum in the early ’90s, nobody could figure out what spurred the public to buy the disc in droves.
Press pundits wanted to pin the success of the monks on some sort of spirituality resurgence, although others mumbled something or other about the influence of Michael Cretu, who mixed Gregorian chant with hip-hop beats on his first album as Enigma.
It was the second most interesting classical music story of that era.
Although not given as much scrutiny, a Nonesuch recording of Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 managed to peak at no. 6 on the UK charts in 1993.
Not only was it a classical recording — with no overtures for crossover gimmickry — it was a recording of a modern work. That’s like seeing the Sun City Girls lodged on the Hot 100 Singles Chart alongside Britney Spears.
But Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 doesn’t sound like (what’s often perceived as) a 20th Century classical work. It’s tonal, not at all thorny and inscrutible like, say, Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.
In fact, the framing canons which makes up most of the symphony’s 26-minute first movement is reminiscent of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, a piece made famous in the film Platoon.
Then there’s soprano Dawn Upshaw, a singer whose strong, clear voice elevates just about everything it tackles. On this work, Upshaw’s performance telegraphs the work’s subtitle — “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”.
The thick texture of the symphony, with its slow, pulsing rhythm, feels timeless. There’s a tonal root to the work but also a sense of dischord, as if Gorecki has reached into the distant past while keeping firmly planted in the present. Much like Arvo Part.
Scored only for strings, prepared piano and voice, Gorecki’s third symphony uses a minimal amount of material, but it’s not a minimalist work. Economic, yes, but minimalistic, no.
It’s that economy which gives the work such directness. Non-classical listeners would find the symphony easy to digest, but it’s by no means simplistic.
Gorecki has moved on stylistically since composing his third symphony in 1976. His more recent works incorporate more Polish folk references, juxtaposed with far more thornier textures.
But it’s this recording that put Gorecki, a late-comer to the field of composition, on the map, and it’s a work that deserves the success it earned.