mixtapemonday

(subtitled These Carnival Days)

Someone (okay, it was Loz) complained about the presence of Kula Shaker on this mixtape, which set me again to thinking again about the fundamental differences in the pop landscape between the UK and America that made 1990s Britpop—so epic in the scope of both conquest and backlash at home—nothing but a minor ripple here. In the States, bands like Kula Shaker and the Stone Roses are seen as footnotes, one-hit wonders, amusing but slight.

And I was thinking again about the perfect storm of culture and demography and geography that allowed this to happen. In brief:

1990s America = big country, lots of bands; localized media (radio and newspapers); one-and-a-half weekly newsstand publications devoted to pop music (Billboard is mostly read by industry professionals, and Rolling Stone is neither a true weekly nor a true music magazine); a fistful of good monthlies; no national TV shows devoted to pop.

1990s UK = smaller country, fewer bands overall; nationalized media (BBC radio, and the London papers and the Grauniad are read all over the country); at least three ubiquitous newsstand weeklies (Melody Maker R.I.P.); a double fistful of glossy monthlies; Top Of The Pops (and earlier The Old Grey Whistle Test). Add to that ubiquitous public transportation and the influence of John Peel (whose like we in the States have never seen). So the UK musical scene is smaller overall, but the apparatus surrounding it is exponentially larger. And there you have the ingredients for the rise of a musical monoculture, with an interest in self-promotion and a mighty loud voice to do it with.

The price, of course, is accelerated burnout. All those music papers have to fill the pages week in and week out. The Beast must be fed. So you get bands signed to majors who’ve never played a single gig, who reach media saturation on the strength of a couple of singles, and are already has-beens (or have broken up) by the time they release the first full-length album.

And all that remains are the songs they left behind. (Or not even that: I mean, I know who Pete Doherty is, but I’ve yet to actually hear a Libertines song, or to meet anybody who has.) And beyond that, who cares?

So, anyway: a Kula Shaker track. And not just one: all the songs on the record flow into one another, so there are snippets of the preceding and following tracks edited in there, to give me smooth fades. (That’s the voice of Sheila Chandra doing konnakol at the top, by the way.)

Jennifer Kimball was the Art Garfunkel of The Story—the non-writing, non-playing half of a folk-pop vocal duo. You’ve heard her voice in hundreds of commercials since then, but this is an early songwriting attempt from just after the group split. It’s another one from the Respond compilation.

This mix came together pretty organically from the pile of songs I had lying around. Not sure what’s up with all the ocean imagery, but I’m pleased with the way it turned out. It also seemed very important to me to put Ani DiFranco and Bob Dylan right next to each other—she the next wave of acoustic pop, he the grandfather figure—and equally important to use a Dylan song that sounds both futuristic and ancient, like a scratchy blues 78 found in a time capsule and reinterpreted by an ensemble of Andromedans, some time after the Sun goes cold. And yeah, Sting (speaking of backlash): but I still get a catch in my throat when out of that litany of words, with no chorus to speak of, his voice suddenly rises to sing, “I loved you in my fashion.” Sue me.

The mix falters a bit towards the end, I’ll admit. The Natalie MacMaster song is—well, it’s amusing but slight. It’s fun to hear her sing, and she should do it more often—she handles the massed backing vocals perfectly well—but it was probably a mistake to have her speak the verses; that Cape Breton-by-way-of-Lake Wobegon accent kills any sexiness stone dead.

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Now this, my friends, this is the sound of dadrock triumphant. Blindingly tasteful, some raucous (but not too rough-hewn) moments rubbing up against the sweet production values, all of it sounding like nothing so much as a really good afternoon playlist at a really good triple-A station. And, to be fair, that’s pretty much what I was shooting for, and what I was listening to at the time. It’s a grand listen for those long morning commutes in the early spring, when you want to sing along and maybe get a little teary-eyed.

Kick off with a little film music; I discovered film composer Zbigniew Preisner at the same time that I discovered his greatest collaborator, director Krzysztof Kieslowski, with The Double Life of Veronique. The gorgeous bolero that Preisner wrote for Three Colors: Red was later used in a British Airways commercial. The soundtrack album for Red has several variations on the piece, recurring in bits and pieces; but the two versions that bookend this mixtape actually come from the soundtrack CD for Three Colors: Blue. The films are all interconnected anyway…

I first heard “Teenage FBI” on a mixtape I got from godlike peninsular genius Grant Balfour. (That mixtape is also the source for the spoken-word snippet bridging “Orphan Girl” and “Hitchin’ A Ride”: the unmistakable voice of Harry Dean Stanton, reading the opening of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I love that you can hear the ice tinkling in Harry Dean’s glass. It’s the little things.)

I once shared a stage with Faith Soloway, at an open mic at the old Kendall Café. This would’ve been twelve years ago, I think: I was workshopping songs with Andy Nagy, early on in my association with We Saw The Wolf. Faith had just moved out from Chicago and was starting to establish herself on Boston’s singer-songwriter scene. I remember I liked her a lot, and I remembered her name, and I’d always smile when I heard one of her songs on WERS’s now defunct “Coffeehouse” show. She’s doing musical theatre now. This song came from a benefit compilation of 02134 pop-folk types, and as far as I know has never been issued elsewhere. It’s a great indie-rock tune, a real standout on the comp and in Faith’s body of work, I thought.

Gillian Welch, who wrote “Orphan Girl,” is a tough nut to crack. Her Americana, like all the best Americana, has a deep heart of weirdness; its religiosity is the flipside to its nihilism—its stories of empty people fucking themselves up in an empty land. In her own solo recordings and especially her performances, she practices a relentless and self-conscious purism, a stripping-down of songs to their most basic elements. This song is a neo-primitive variant on “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” and while on one level I imagine Welch might think Emmylou’s version is unconscionably prettified, the very spaciousness (not to say spaciness) of Lanois’s production highlights the yearning of that God-shaped hole without overstatement, making the song terribly moving.

Continuing in that vein, I will myself admit that on many levels I find “Hands” to be hammy, overblown hoo-hah, but am still capable of tears on hearing the bridge—“In the end, only kindness matters”—if only because, as I grow older, I more and more believe it to be true. Morrissey would almost certainly agree with me, having said elsewhere that “It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate / It takes guts to be gentle and kind.” Penelope Houston, who started off fronting Bay Area hardcore legends The Avengers before making a series of progressively prettier and gentler solo records, might have something to say about it, too.